YZi Labs secures tens of millions of dollars in funding for Genius Trading, CZ appointed as advisor: The "Privacy Revolution" in Web3 trading terminals

“If you were to rebuild Binance today, you wouldn’t build it as a centralized exchange; you would build it on-chain.” This is how Ryan Myher, co-founder and COO of Genius Trading, describes their vision. This startup, led by YZi Labs (the family office of Binance co-founders Zhao Changpeng and Yi He), is attempting to redefine decentralized trading using privacy and cross-chain technologies.

Strategic Investment

The crypto world is once again focusing on a project endorsed by a legendary figure. YZi Labs, an independent family office spun out from Binance Labs, announced a “eight-figure” (tens of millions of dollars) strategic investment in Genius Trading. The core appeal of this investment is not just capital but also people. Binance co-founder Zhao Changpeng (CZ) has confirmed his role as an advisor to the project.

This is not the first time YZi Labs and CZ have supported emerging projects with an “investment + advisory” model. As early as the beginning of 2025, they invested in Vana, a startup focused on AI and data ownership, in a similar manner. This approach demonstrates CZ’s continued strategic involvement in shaping the future of crypto through capital and industry insights, even after stepping back from Binance’s daily operations.

Genius Trading co-founder and CEO Armaan Kalsi confirmed to the media that the investment took place last December, with an amount “far exceeding $10 million.” Prior to this round, the company had raised a total of $7 million through two funding rounds.

Privacy-First Trading Terminal

What exactly is Genius Trading building? It positions itself as a “privacy-first unified on-chain trading terminal.” Its goal is to provide spot, perpetual contracts, and copy trading functionalities through a non-custodial, cross-chain integrated terminal, aiming to become Binance’s on-chain alternative. The core of this vision is to address two main pain points of current on-chain trading: privacy leaks and the complexity of cross-chain operations. In traditional on-chain trading, large wallet addresses and trading strategies are easily tracked and analyzed, leading to risks like front-running.

Genius is developing a core privacy layer, currently in testing. It allows users to split large transactions into “hundreds of wallets,” significantly reducing traceability while keeping transactions on-chain. The platform plans to launch a public beta of its privacy protocol in Q2 2026.

Cross-Chain: Bridge-Free Experience

Beyond privacy, another major technological pillar of Genius is seamless cross-chain trading. The platform enables users to access liquidity across more than 10 blockchains, including BNB Chain, Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and others, without asset bridging, wallet switching, or publicly revealing their trading intent on-chain.

This directly addresses another critical aspect of current DeFi user experience. Traditional cross-chain bridging is cumbersome, time-consuming, and risky. Historically, bridges like Ronin Bridge have suffered attacks resulting in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. Genius’s solution involves proprietary cross-chain routing logic and direct integration with decentralized exchanges, handling complexity in the background to provide users with a smooth “one-click” cross-chain trading experience similar to centralized exchanges.

Early Testing Ground for On-Chain Whales

Since its “soft” launch in October 2025, Genius Trading has quietly processed over $60 million in trading volume. Its early users mainly consist of on-chain whales—seasoned traders managing millions of dollars monthly. This is no coincidence. For these high-net-worth users, privacy in trading strategies and efficient management of capital across multiple chains are far more important than chasing some high-yield “meme coins.” Genius addresses this underserved professional need.

Kalsi believes that the current “terminal war” in crypto trading is a fierce competition among platforms like Axiom, GMGN, and others in customer acquisition costs and feature density. Genius’s bet is that when the speculative frenzy subsides and users start building their financial lives on-chain, privacy and sovereignty will become crucial.

Market Trends and Outlook

The rise of Genius Trading aligns with the broader trend of the crypto market evolving toward more mature infrastructure.

As of January 14, 2026, the market leader Bitcoin (BTC) is priced at $95,540.2, with a market cap of $1.9 trillion, accounting for 55.99% of the market share, up 4.60% in the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, GateToken (GT), representing exchange ecosystem value, is priced at $10.79, up 4.76% in the same period. This indicates a generally positive market sentiment and growing attention to innovative trading infrastructure.

Cross-chain interoperability has become an undisputed industry focus. From PancakeSwap and Across Protocol’s “one-click cross-chain swaps” to various bridge protocols vying for market share, simplifying cross-chain experience is key to attracting the next wave of large-scale users. Genius Trading combines cross-chain liquidity aggregation with trading privacy, entering a more differentiated and technically deep track.

With its privacy protocol public test version scheduled for Q2 2026 and CZ’s strategic guidance as an advisor, this project, founded by a Yale team in 2022, may play an important role in the future “on-chain exchange” landscape. Its development path also reminds the industry: after pursuing speed and profit, security, privacy, and user sovereignty are the foundations for DeFi to reach mainstream adoption.