YZi Labs invests eight figures in privacy trading platform Genius

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Yaroslav Dmytrenko

13.01.2026

YZi Labs invests eight figures in privacy trading platform Genius — Genius Trading raises major funding as CZ joins advisor role

YZi Labs has invested a “high eight-figure amount,” “significantly above $10 million,” in Genius Trading, a startup aiming to one day rival Binance. Changpeng Zhao has joined the company as an advisor.

YZi Labs, the venture firm founded by Binance co-founders Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Yi He and spun out from the crypto exchange, invested a substantial eight-figure sum well above $10 million into Genius Trading — a privacy-focused decentralized trading platform offering spot trading, perpetual futures, and copy trading through a self-custodial cross-chain terminal.

Genius positions itself as a unified trading terminal that allows users to access liquidity across more than 10 blockchains — including BNB Chain, Solana, Ethereum, Hyperliquid, Base, Avalanche, and Sui — without bridging assets, switching wallets, or publicly revealing trading strategies on-chain.

“We are building a specialized privacy-focused trading stack that is still in beta,” Genius Trading co-founder Armaan Kalsi told The Block.

According to Kalsi, the platform’s interface is built on a proprietary multi-party computation wallet, custom cross-chain routing logic, and direct integrations with decentralized exchanges. Genius does not plan to launch its own blockchain and instead intends to integrate exclusively with existing blockchains and DeFi protocols.

At the core of Genius’s technical roadmap is a privacy layer designed to protect large on-chain trading strategies. The system, currently in beta, allows users to split large trades across “hundreds of wallets” to reduce traceability while keeping transactions fully on-chain. This approach avoids reliance on off-chain components or zero-knowledge systems that can introduce execution delays.

A bet on privacy

Since its “soft” launch in October last year, Genius has processed more than $60 million in trading volume, with usage concentrated among large blockchain participants managing multi-million-dollar trading operations each month. A public beta of the privacy protocol is scheduled for the second quarter of 2026.

“We’re not rushing. We believe the current downturn in crypto markets is a great way to attract users through speculation, but once they realize the power of the underlying technology, they will want to stay,” Kalsi told The Block. “At that point, privacy will become an incredibly important feature for crypto’s growth and for retaining users who truly want to build their financial lives on-chain.”

Genius, created by Shuttle Labs, was founded in 2022 while the core team was still studying at Yale University. The project initially began as a tool for block data readability and market analysis before evolving into a trading platform.

Prior to the YZi Labs investment, Genius had raised a total of $7 million in earlier funding rounds, including a $6 million round in 2024 and an additional $1 million round. The round was led by CMCC with participation from Balaji Srinivasan, Anthony Scaramucci, Flow Traders, and other investors.

As we wrote, YZi Labs launches $1B Builder Fund to expand BNB ecosystem

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