YZi Labs, the venture investment firm of Binance co-founders Changpeng Zhao and Yi He, has announced a major investment in Genius, a trading platform aimed at professional traders.
The YZi Labs announcement on January 13, 2026, noted that, other than the investment, Binance founder Zhao has joined as an advisor.
YZi Labs’ backing of Genius, which seeks a private interface for on-chain execution, said the move aligns with its vision for an ecosystem that brings key elements of speed, liquidity, and privacy to the decentralized finance market.
“The funding is about alignment more than anything else,” said Armaan Kalsi, the co-founder and chief executive of Genius.
Aligning with YZi Labs means we have the industry’s most thorough and well-resourced backer taking a meaningful swing at creating an ‘on-chain’ Binance, while focusing on what makes CEXs better than DEXs right now: privacy.
What are Genius Trading’s plans?
Genius eyes the growing market across cryptocurrency’s leading blockchain networks, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana.
The trading terminal brings the best of centralized exchanges to DeFi users via a single venue, with privacy and execution speed at the core of its offering.
What gives Genius the competitive edge is the project’s ‘Ghost Order’ type, which taps into multi-party computation (MPC) to allow for wallet clusters that support simultaneous orchestration.
In this case, high-value players can seamlessly execute complex strategies with multiple addresses.
All this happens with the user’s funding links remaining confidential but still cryptographically auditable. Users also remain in control of their assets’ private keys.
Genius will use the capital injection to fuel further growth, with eyes on a privacy protocol ahead of its open-access launch later in the year.
The team also plans to leverage the funding to scale access across more than 10 supported networks.
“As the decentralized economy matures, the market is moving beyond basic tools toward a true execution layer with the sophistication of traditional financial terminals,” said Alex Odagiu, investment partner at YZi Labs.
DeFi has long been fragmented and complex. By unifying liquidity and prioritizing privacy and high-velocity execution, Genius is well positioned to become a powerful ‘command center’ for the next generation of institutional and power users.
YZi Labs’s growing portfolio
YZi Labs currently manages more than $10 billion in assets and has aggressively backed projects across web3, artificial intelligence, and biotech.
Binance founder and former chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao took charge as it rebranded from Binance Labs.
Last October, YZi Labs led a $50 million financing round for Better Payment Network, a programmable payment network targeted for traction within the burgeoning stablecoin ecosystem.
The company’s portfolio cuts across 300 projects, with more than 65 of these going through its incubation programs.
Meanwhile, Genius provides for on-chain trading, with users able to swap, ape, copy, and trade leveraged positions across over 10 chains.
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