Rayls

Rayls is the EVM Layer 1 network connecting institutions to blockchain liquidity, with built in privacy and compliance. It is not a single chain and not a single product, but a coordinated set of EVM environments, a privacy framework that runs across them, and the tokens that keep the ecosystem moving. Together they let regulated capital move onchain without giving up the privacy, controls and auditability institutions are required to maintain.

Rayls is designed to bridge Traditional Finance and Decentralised Finance, bringing the roughly $100 trillion of TradFi liquidity into reach of onchain markets, and bringing onchain markets into reach of the institutions that hold it.

Rayls is not a CBDC, not a stablecoin in itself, and not a single-purpose tokenisation network. It is general-purpose infrastructure, EVM-compatible end to end, and built around three environments with distinct permission models.

Three layers, three permission models

Rayls Sovereign, private. A sovereign, EVM-compatible blockchain operated by a single institution. Each institution that uses Rayls runs its own Rayls Sovereign ledger. It is high-performance infrastructure that handles the institution's internal activity and produces the cryptographic material (proofs, commitments, encrypted payloads) that allows it to transact privately with others.

Rayls Private Network, permissioned. A governance layer that connects two or more Rayls Sovereign ledgers into a shared EVM Layer 1. Membership is permissioned and the rules are set by the participating institutions, which makes Private Networks the natural place to model jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks. Every transaction inside a Private Network is private by default.

Rayls Public Chain, permissionless. An Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 open to anyone. This is where assets are distributed, where DeFi protocols are deployed, and where institutional and public liquidity meet.

The three layers are interoperable, and Rayls Sovereign is what connects them. A Rayls Sovereign ledger can participate in one or more Private Networks and can also reach the Public Chain, so an institution can issue a tokenised asset privately inside a Private Network and then move it to the Public Chain for distribution, while a protocol deployed on the Public Chain (a vault, a swap pool, a DvP contract) can be consumed from inside a Private Network.

How privacy works across the layers

Privacy on Rayls is delivered by Enygma, which comes in two editions:

• Enygma Sovereign, for institutions, runs across the Rayls Sovereign ledgers of a Private Network.
• Enygma Public, open to anyone, runs on the Rayls Public Chain. It is live on testnet at enygma-testnet.rayls.com.

Both use zero-knowledge proofs (Groth16), so a chain can check that a transaction is valid without seeing what it contains, and both encrypt with ML-KEM-768, the post-quantum key encapsulation standard from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In both, one designated party can read every transaction: the Private Network operator in Enygma Sovereign, and the deployment's auditor in Enygma Public.

Enygma Sovereign

Enygma Sovereign lives in two places at once.

The cryptographic work happens in the Rayls Sovereign ledger, covering zero-knowledge proof generation, Pedersen commitment storage, key handling, encryption and decryption. The settlement state lives in a pool of smart contracts on the Private Network Hub, and those contracts record that the transaction occurred and that it was valid without revealing the contents.

This is what allows institutions to transact privately on a shared, auditable chain, since the proofs are visible to every member of the network and the contents are not. The Private Network operator, the network's supervisor, can read every transfer but can't spend anyone's funds. See Rayls Enygma for the details.

Enygma Public

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Enygma Public is live on testnet

Try shielded payments on the Rayls Public Chain testnet at enygma-testnet.rayls.com. Sign up with a passkey, get test tokens from the faucet, then shield, send and unshield.

Enygma Public brings shielded payments to the Rayls Public Chain, for people, businesses and regulated platforms, without a Rayls Sovereign ledger or a Private Network. See Enygma Public for the details.

Here the cryptography runs in the user's browser, and the settlement state lives in smart contracts on the Public Chain:

• Keys from a passkey. A passkey derives the account's keys in the browser: a spend key, a view key, and an EVM address for its public tokens. The keys never leave the browser, and every transaction asks for the passkey again. An existing EVM wallet can be used instead of a passkey.
• Proofs in the browser. The wallet runs the Enygma cryptography compiled to WebAssembly and makes each zero-knowledge proof in the browser, in a few seconds.
• Notes in a vault. Shielded balances are held as notes: commitments in a Merkle tree, kept by a vault contract. Shielding moves public tokens into the vault as a note. A send spends notes and creates new ones for the recipient and for the change, each encrypted to its owner's view key. Spending a note publishes its nullifier, so no note can be spent twice. Unshielding pays tokens out to any address.
• A registry with an auditor. Each account registers its public keys and a username in a registry contract. At registration, the account's view key is encrypted to the deployment's auditor key and stored there, so the auditor can read every shielded transaction. The auditor can read but can't freeze or move funds: spending needs the spend key, which never leaves the account. Each deployment has its own auditor, for example one per country.
• A relayer, and gas in RLS. A relayer submits every Enygma Public transaction, pays the chain's gas and charges the account in RLS, either from its public RLS through a gas forwarder contract (ERC-2771) or from its shielded RLS. A shielded send is submitted from the relayer's own account, with its gas paid from a shielded RLS note, so no address of the sender's appears in the transaction.

Shielding and unshielding are public: the chain shows the address, the token and the amount moving in or out. A send between shielded balances shows only that a send happened, the relayer that submitted it and its gas fee. The sender, the recipient and the amount are shielded from the public, but not from the auditor.

The notes and the escrowed view keys are encrypted with ML-KEM-768, which makes them quantum-private: the encryption is designed to resist future quantum computers. The zero-knowledge proofs, passkeys and signatures are not post-quantum.

Enygma Public transactions settle on the Rayls Public Chain, which is their source of truth.

The two editions at a glance

Settlement and finality

Where a transaction settles depends on where it travels.

• Inside a single Rayls Sovereign ledger, the institution's own chain is the source of truth.
• Between Rayls Sovereign ledgers inside a Private Network, the Private Network is the source of truth.
• Between Rayls Sovereign ledgers via the Public Chain, the Public Chain is the source of truth.

Performance follows from Axyl, the Rayls consensus mechanism. Axyl has been live on the Public Chain since mainnet launch on 30 April 2026, and it was adopted on Rayls Sovereign in July 2026, superseding Clique proof of authority and running alongside the move of the execution client from Geth to Reth. The Private Network Hub continues to run Besu proof of authority for now. Axyl is built for institutional throughput, at 15,000+ transactions per second with sub-second finality.

Validators are separate from Rayls Sovereign

A Rayls Sovereign ledger is not a validator. It is the institution's cryptographic and execution layer, and validation is a separate role. Any institution can choose to run validators on the Private Networks it participates in and on the Public Chain, in addition to operating its own Rayls Sovereign ledger.

Tokens and gas

• RLS is the Rayls native token, and the gas token of Enygma Public.
• USDr is the gas token of the Public Chain, a stablecoin issued by Rayls, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and backed by USDC bridged from Ethereum (USDC.e, via LayerZero). Pricing transactions in a stable unit lets institutions budget onchain activity without exposure to gas-price volatility. Reserves and circulation are published on the Rayls transparency portal, alongside the existing disclosures for RLS.

Rayls Sovereign and Rayls Private Networks are gasless. Institutions running their own Rayls Sovereign ledger, or transacting inside a Private Network they participate in, do not pay gas on those transactions. Gas applies on the permissionless Public Chain, denominated in USDr. The exception is Enygma Public: its transactions pay gas in RLS through a relayer, and each fee includes a 15% commission to the Rayls Foundation.

What this enables in practice

Inside a Rayls Private Network, an institution can:

• onboard clients and operate accounts privately,
• issue and hold tokenised assets in standard ERC formats (ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155),
• transact with other institutions on the network with confidentiality and anonymity preserved,
• run the protocols institutions actually need, including payments, DvP settlement, vaults, swap pools, and any other EVM-compatible contract.

EVM compatibility means existing developer tooling, standards and audited contract patterns carry over, so teams do not need to learn a bespoke stack to build on Rayls.

In production

Rayls is backed by financial institutions in Brazil and is in active production deployment with institutions including:

• XP Inc. - USDXP stablecoin
• Núclea - Brazil's largest payment FMI, supporting 150+ financial institutions
• AmFi - tokenised over $500M in credit and debt instruments

The ecosystem, at a glance

Where to go from here

• If you're evaluating Rayls for an institution, start with Rayls Sovereign and Enygma Sovereign.
• If you're building on Rayls, start with the Rayls Public Chain and how to get USDr.
• If you want to try shielded payments, use Enygma Public, live on testnet at enygma-testnet.rayls.com.