About

Native is a CLOB DEX for onchain spot liquidity. It is the first vertically integrated liquidity stack that decouples pricing logic from asset settlement: a sovereign, on-chain matching engine provides high-performance price discovery and order matching, while permissionless vaults host assets for settlement across different chains.

History

Native was founded in November 2022 by Meina Zhou, who previously led data science teams and holds a master's degree in data science from New York University, and Diane Dai, a co-founder of the DODO decentralized exchange, and is based in New York. It launched publicly in January 2023 as a "project-owned DEX layer": white-label swap infrastructure that let any application run its own exchange, source quotes from professional market makers via RFQ, and keep its own trading fees. The founding thesis was to decouple pricing from inventory, with market makers quoting and settlement handled onchain rather than through passive AMM liquidity. Nomad Capital led a $2 million seed round in April 2023, and Cypher Capital made a strategic investment that July.

The second iteration, Aqua (later Native Credit Pool), introduced credit-based settlement: market makers post collateral and borrow from a shared pool to settle trades, so they can quote without holding full inventory, while liquidity providers earn borrowing fees instead of bearing impermanent loss. The current architecture adds Native Core, a sovereign onchain FIFO order book with 50ms block finality where price discovery and matching are finalized, plus three integration modules: Native Relay for wallets and aggregators, Native Pro for direct institutional access, and Native Pool for LP yield that funds settlement. Routing partners include UniswapX, 0x, 1inch, CoW Swap, KyberSwap, Binance Wallet, OKX Wallet, Trust Wallet, and Coinbase Wallet. Since mid-2026 Native has concentrated on tokenized equities, providing day-one spot liquidity for Binance's bStocks, Backed's xStocks, and Ondo's tokenized stocks.

• November 2022: Native founded in New York
• January 2023: Public launch of the project-owned DEX layer with RFQ pricing from professional market makers, alongside partnerships with Ankr and Galxe
• April 2023: $2 million seed round led by Nomad Capital
• July 2023: Beta launch of NativeX, a retail DEX built on Native with PMM-RFQ pricing, and a strategic investment from Cypher Capital
• March 2024: Aqua launched in closed beta on zkLink Nova, bringing credit-based settlement to market makers
• 2025: Native Relay adopted as a liquidity source by wallets and aggregators including Binance Wallet, OKX Wallet, Trust Wallet, 0x, and 1inch
• 2026: Launch of Native Core, the sovereign onchain order book
• June 2026: Day-one liquidity for Binance's bStocks on BNB Chain and for xStocks and Ondo tokenized stocks across Ethereum, BNB Chain, and X Layer
• July 2026: Deployed on Robinhood Chain at its mainnet launch
• September 2026: Listed OpenStocks tokenized private-company shares on BNB Chain and added day-one liquidity for Reality tokenized stocks