Kana Labs

Kana Labs began in 2021 as a straightforward answer to a specific problem: Solana's DeFi ecosystem was growing fast, but accessing competitive swap rates across its scattered liquidity pools required constant tab-switching and manual price comparison. The team launched KanaSwap, a DEX aggregator on Solana that sourced routes across AMMs on the network — including early integration with Jupiter Aggregator — and paired it with a mobile-based wallet supporting Solana and Neon EVM. The goal was to consolidate DeFi actions into one place rather than forcing users to hunt across fragmented venues.

That starting point on Solana positioned Kana Labs to see a bigger pattern: the same fragmentation problem existed everywhere. As Aptos and Sui launched with high-throughput architectures that attracted fresh capital, and as EVM chains proliferated, liquidity scattered further. Kana Labs responded by expanding aggressively, eventually unifying nine blockchains — both EVM and non-EVM — under a single aggregation layer. Solana, Aptos, Sui, Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and Avalanche all fell within the platform's routing scope, connected by cross-chain bridge aggregation that sourced the best path and rate across each leg of a swap.

Two Products, One Infrastructure

By the time of its seed funding round in October 2023, Kana Labs had organized its offering into two distinct product lines that shared a common infrastructure backbone.

The first, branded Kana Labs, was the consumer-facing DeFi trading suite: a platform where traders could execute cross-chain swaps, monitor positions across chains, and access yield products — all within a unified interface. The second, Kana Labs Build, was a developer toolkit comprising SDKs for cross-chain bridging, liquidity aggregation, and account abstraction-based smart wallets. These tools let other projects embed Kana's routing and wallet infrastructure into their own products without rebuilding the plumbing themselves.

Backing for the seed round came from MarbleX (a subsidiary of South Korean game giant NetMarble), Nexus One, Klaytn, and Gate.io, alongside a grant from the Aptos Foundation. The round valued the company at approximately $21 million on a pre-seed basis and was designed to fund international expansion — particularly into Asia-Pacific — alongside product development.

Gas Station: Removing Friction at Scale

Among Kana Labs' most consequential technical decisions was the development of Kana Paymaster, a Gas Station infrastructure that allows the platform to sponsor on-chain transaction fees on behalf of users. Rather than forcing traders to hold native gas tokens for every chain they interact with, Kana Paymaster absorbs those costs, presenting the user with a gasless experience.

The scale at which this operates became one of the company's clearest proof points: by the time of the rebrand in late 2025, Kana Paymaster had processed over 340 million transactions and was sponsoring close to one million daily transactions for more than 100,000 users. This infrastructure does not just underpin the consumer trading product — it is also exposed through the developer SDK, meaning partner applications can offer gasless experiences to their own users by plugging into Kana's Paymaster layer.

Kana Perps: The Perpetuals Push on Aptos

In mid-2025, Kana Labs launched what it described as the first fully on-chain, Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) perpetuals DEX on Aptos mainnet. Kana Perps opened on June 11, 2025, following a public beta testnet phase.

The technical design separated this from the pool-based perpetuals model common on other chains. Rather than trading against an AMM liquidity pool, Kana Perps matches orders through an on-chain orderbook built on Econia's infrastructure, with settlement executed inside Aptos's Block-STM parallel execution engine. This approach allows price discovery to happen transparently on-chain rather than relying on off-chain matching engines that publish results as final.

Supported pairs at launch included APT, BTC, and ETH with isolated margin and a 2.5 percent maintenance margin requirement. The fee structure came in at zero for maker orders and 0.05 percent for takers, with VIP tiers reducing taker fees further. The platform included advanced order types — market, limit, take-profit, and stop-loss — and a Hedge Mode allowing simultaneous long and short positions on the same asset. Gas fees were eliminated for traders through the Paymaster infrastructure.

Performance in the first three quarters following launch was meaningful for a new venue: Kana Perps crossed $2 billion in total volume, with approximately 800 to 1,000 active traders at any given time, over 12,000 unique users, roughly 175,000 trades executed daily, and around one million transactions processed weekly.

Volume Milestones

Taken together across the DEX aggregator and perpetuals products, Kana Labs surpassed $10 billion in cumulative trading volume ahead of its rebrand — with the DEX aggregator responsible for more than $8 billion of that figure. The platform had accumulated close to 60,000 active users across its consumer products by the same point.

These numbers placed Kana Labs among the more substantive cross-chain DeFi operations to emerge from the Solana-and-Aptos builder cohort of 2021-2022, even as its primary perpetuals venue ultimately anchored on Aptos rather than Solana specifically.

Rebrand to Xyra Labs

In October 2025, the company rebranded from Kana Labs to Xyra Labs. The name was drawn from the Greek root Xyroz, meaning sharp, precise, and clear — with an additional resonance with Kyrios, meaning authority and brightness. The rebrand accompanied a repositioning toward what the team described as a high-performance decentralized trading platform, with Xyra Perps as the flagship offering and the cross-chain aggregation and developer infrastructure continuing to operate underneath.

The Twitter handle changed to @xyralabs_ and the primary trading interface migrated toward xyra.trade, while the existing documentation and developer tooling at kanalabs.io and docs.kanalabs.io remained active references for builders using the SDK stack.

What It Is Today

Xyra Labs operates at the intersection of cross-chain liquidity aggregation and on-chain derivatives trading. Its Solana roots remain in the DEX aggregation layer, which still routes through Solana DEXs as part of its multi-chain sweep. The Paymaster infrastructure is the less-visible but arguably most operationally significant part of the stack — the mechanism that makes the platform's gasless user experience sustainable at scale. The Aptos perpetuals venue has emerged as the highest-growth product by recent volume figures.

For the DeFi builder community, Kana Labs Build (now the Xyra developer toolkit) represents a deployment-ready set of SDKs for embedding cross-chain swaps, bridge aggregation, and gasless transaction sponsorship into third-party applications. The company's backing from both GameFi-adjacent investors (NetMarble's MarbleX) and chain-native foundations (Aptos) reflects the multi-ecosystem position it occupies: one foot in the Solana DeFi aggregator space where it started, and another in the Aptos high-performance derivatives market where its most recent growth has been concentrated.