Here is a slightly awkward fact about crypto, the industry that spent a decade promising to disrupt finance: most of the serious trading still happens on centralized exchanges. Order flow, market makers, the fast money - they cluster where the matching engine is quick and the latency is low, which is to say, not onchain. Blockchains are trustless, transparent, and, for a professional trader, often too slow to bother with.
N1 is a company built around noticing this problem out loud. Founded in 2023 by DeFi veterans Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz, it started life as Layer N, an Ethereum Layer-2 with an unusually aggressive appetite for throughput. It became, by its own account, the first L2 to clock a 100,000-transactions-per-second benchmark on testnet. Then it did something that is either brave or reckless depending on your risk tolerance: it kept the fast execution layer, threw out the Ethereum settlement layer it had been borrowing, and rebuilt as its own sovereign Layer-1. Layer N grew up and became N1.
The pitch, stripped of adjectives, is this. If you want finance to move onchain, you cannot ask traders to accept a tax - slower fills, higher fees, worse execution than the exchange they just left. You have to remove the tax. So N1 bakes the machinery of a trading venue directly into the protocol: a fully onchain central limit orderbook with price-time priority, atomic transaction bundles that execute all-or-nothing, a unified margining engine, and a request-for-quote system that wires traders to professional market makers. These are not apps sitting on top of the chain. They are native modules, part of the base layer.
The bet is simple to state and hard to pull off: make onchain as fast as offchain, and there is no longer a reason to stay offchain.
