Why Rayls Built an L1

The Rayls goal is a unified infrastructure that connects traditional finance (TradFi) with decentralised finance (DeFi), enabling the tokenisation of up to $100 trillion in assets and bringing 6 billion users onchain. Rayls holds the work done by projects across the blockchain space in high regard, including Ethereum's foundational L1 and the L2 solutions built upon it, and those technologies have driven real progress in scalability, security, and accessibility. After a thorough evaluation of the available options, however, Rayls identified gaps that were particularly relevant to institutional-grade requirements such as privacy, compliance, and deterministic performance. That led to the development of a sovereign L1 as the most effective way to meet those needs without compromising on interoperability or future collaboration.

To illustrate the decision, the following comparison sets out key features across major blockchain architectures, drawn from the Rayls analysis:

Ethereum's L1 provides strong censorship resistance, permissionless validators, and a durable foundation for the ecosystem, and it has enabled a thriving DeFi landscape with global accessibility. For institutional applications, though, challenges such as the lack of sub-second deterministic finality, volatile gas fees, and limited native privacy can hinder real-time settlement and confidential operations, both of which are essential for TradFi workflows such as credit tokenisation and cross-border payments.

L2 rollups, whether optimistic (OP) or zero-knowledge (ZK), build on Ethereum's security while improving throughput and reducing costs in many scenarios. They inherit Ethereum's strengths and have been instrumental in scaling DeFi. Achieving sub-second deterministic finality remains difficult, however, because of the reliance on L1 settlement processes, and features such as stable gas fees, comprehensive privacy, and built-in MEV protection are not inherently optimised for high-stakes financial environments. Those limitations can introduce unpredictability in costs and expose sensitive data, which institutions prioritise avoiding.

Private L1s offer strong performance, including high TPS, fast finality, and potential privacy, which makes them suitable for controlled settings, and their contribution to enterprise blockchain adoption is real. That said, they often lack censorship resistance and permissionless validators, which can limit global interoperability and create silos, running counter to the Rayls aim of bridging TradFi's private liquidity with DeFi's open markets.

The cause and effect here is straightforward. While existing solutions excel in many areas, no single architecture fully aligned with the Rayls requirement to combine institutional privacy and control (through Rayls Sovereign and Rayls Private Networks) with public DeFi accessibility, all while ensuring compliance, low risk, and scalability to 15,000+ TPS. That gap prompted the building of the Rayls L1 Public Chain, which runs on Axyl, the DAG-based Byzantine fault tolerant consensus derived from Narwhal and Bullshark and running on Reth. Axyl achieves sub-second finality in a permissionless setting, and the chain incorporates USD-pegged gas fees for stability and uses the Rayls Enygma protocol for privacy-preserving transactions with zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum cryptography.

Looking ahead, Ethereum's ongoing developments in privacy and scalability align closely with the direction Rayls has taken. Initiatives such as the Ethereum Foundation's dedicated Privacy Cluster and the Kohaku roadmap for wallet privacy and security are promising steps toward confidential transactions and reduced reliance on centralised services. On the scalability front, advances such as ZK-EVM integration and efforts to support privacy-first dApp ecosystems by 2026 could further widen global adoption. Rayls sees real potential for collaboration and intends to explore how these evolutions can complement the Rayls ecosystem.