Despite receiving investment from Tether and endorsement from the Central Bank of Brazil, why is Rayls, an enterprise-grade blockchain, more praised than commercially successful?

Author: Frank, PANews

Amidst the recent market lull, the relatively unknown project Rayls officially launched its TGE on December 1st. This project, which previously received almost no attention, secured support from two leading overseas exchanges known for their stringent compliance and risk control measures, Coinbase and Kraken, during its initial launch phase. It also simultaneously listed on multiple exchanges including Binance Alpha, Gate, and Bitget.

This has drawn curious glances from the market towards Rayls. What kind of background and resources could attract the attention of compliant exchanges? Is this project, which attempts to bridge the gap between "permissioned blockchains" and "public blockchains" and holds the entry ticket to the Brazilian Central Bank's DREX pilot program, truly ushering in a new era for RWA, or is it just "new wine in old bottles"?

Backed by the Central Bank of Brazil, Latin American resources attract investment from Tether.

Rayls is targeting the enterprise-compliant blockchain market, which is not a new concept. As early as a decade ago, consortium blockchains or private blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric or R3 Corda emerged and began operating. However, due to the sacrifice of global liquidity, most of these private or consortium blockchains became data silos.

Rayls' re-entry into the market has attracted the attention of major players, with its developer, Parfin, providing it with extensive industry resources and technological expertise. Founded in 2019, Parfin is headquartered in London, UK, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Prior to Rayls, Parfin had been operating as a Web3 infrastructure provider for many years, offering custody, trade execution, and asset management solutions to banks, fintech companies, and cryptocurrency exchanges. This "business first, public chain later" development path has allowed Rayls to have an existing clientele from its inception, including top financial institutions such as Santander and Itaú.

In addition, Tether recently announced an investment in Parfin, the company that develops Rayls, to promote USDT adoption among institutions in Latin America. Meanwhile, Rayls has been launched on Núclea, Brazil's largest financial market infrastructure provider, which was also one of the investors in Rayls' Series A funding round.

Rayls's ability to attract the attention of institutions and companies like Tether is largely due to its extensive experience in Latin America. Rayls's biggest backer is the Central Bank of Brazil. In 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil launched a test project for a central bank digital currency called DREX. Rayls successfully participated in two rounds of testing, providing its privacy solutions. Furthermore, Rayls was selected for JPMorgan Chase's Project EPIC's Kinexys program in 2024, again highlighting its strengths in privacy and identity solutions.

This resource-driven model makes Rayls more practically applicable compared to previous enterprise-grade blockchain networks. Rayls' operational strategy focuses on using privacy solutions as a breakthrough to deeply participate in the issuance of central bank digital currencies in various countries, thereby building its own competitive advantage. In November, Rayls announced its participation in the Bank of England and Bank for International Settlements London Central DLT Innovation Challenge. Previously, it also won second place in the 2023 G20 TechSprint hosted by the BIS (Bank for International Settlements).

However, this focus on institutional investors also means that Rayls is unlikely to gain much visibility among ordinary investors.

Public blockchain + private blockchain: a technological breakthrough or just old wine in new bottles?

Rayls' solution doesn't seem new; it's similar to Avalanche's master-slave network concept.

Rayls' overall architecture can be summarized as an Ethereum L2+EVM compatible private chain model. It mainly consists of three parts: Rayls Public Chain (RPC), Rayls Private Networks (VENs), and Rayls Privacy Node.

Rayls Public Chain (RPC) is the public blockchain component of Rayls, an Ethereum L2 blockchain. However, while it's a permissionless public chain, any wallet address wishing to interact with the Rayls public chain must first undergo decentralized identity (DID) verification to prove it is not a sanctioned entity. From a certain perspective, this might limit the participation of some users. However, for Rayls, their ultimate goal is to achieve a completely "clean" DeFi environment, and this restriction seems necessary—both a drawback and a competitive advantage.

Rayls Private Networks (VENs) is the primary component involving banks and other institutions. It's a private blockchain with fully privacy-preserving mechanisms. Each financial institution can establish its own private subnet and run its own privacy ledger on it. On one hand, because it operates on a single node, it achieves optimal performance. On the other hand, VENs incorporates the Enygma privacy protocol, combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies, meeting the privacy requirements of these institutions.

Rayls Privacy Node is the node software that connects the two. As a blockchain specifically designed for banks and financial institutions, performance is a particularly critical factor. According to Rayls' white paper, its public chain can achieve sub-second speeds, while the private chain's single-node throughput can exceed 10,000 TPS.

However, in a 2025 speech, Renato Diaz de Brito Gomez, Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Brazil, revealed that in Rayls' technical solution, "the Total Settlement System (RTGS) can process 300 transactions per second, the Drex system without privacy features processes 150 transactions per second, and with privacy features enabled, the Drex system's processing speed drops to less than 10 transactions per second." From this perspective, Rayls still faces challenges in balancing privacy and performance.

According to Messari's report, Rayls' mainnet version V1 will not be launched until the first quarter of 2026. In the second quarter of 2026, they plan to release version V3 of their privacy nodes, supporting multiple network connections, and deploy Enygma to the public blockchain in the third quarter of 2026. Before the mainnet launch, Rayls will prioritize deploying privacy nodes in financial institutions, integrating with private networks, and optimizing the onboarding process for institutional clients.

Retail investors aren't buying in? Community accuses airdrop rules of being rigged.

On November 19, the well-known research institution Messari released a research report on Rayls, which marked the beginning of public attention to Rayls.

Currently, the most discussed topics about Rayls are related to the attention garnered by the TGE and Messari reports. Regarding token economics, Rayls' token, RLS, has a total issuance of 10 billion, with an initial supply of 1.5 billion after launch. Whales Market's pre-market data shows that the pre-market price reached a high of $0.084, but the price declined steadily after launch. As of December 1st, it had fallen from $0.068 at the opening to $0.017, a drop of approximately 75%. As of December 2nd, RLS's circulating market capitalization was approximately $38 million, and its total circulating market capitalization was approximately $250 million. Based on FDV, its market capitalization is close to that of Sonic; however, based on circulating market capitalization, it ranks near the bottom of the L1 tier.

There are likely two reasons for this opening price collapse. Firstly, Rayls previously had a low profile in the crypto space, and retail investors lacked understanding of him. Secondly, the relatively low total airdrop amount and unfair rules disappointed the community.

On November 10th, Rayls announced that 200,000 people had built projects on the Rayls testnet and completed 1.6 million transactions. As of December 1st, data from its testnet showed a total of 5.04 million transactions completed, with over 2.025 million addresses participating.

Prior to its launch, Rayls initiated a verification experiment called "Proof of Humanity," which involved conducting KYC (Know Your Customer) verification on-chain. Upon successful verification, users received a Rayls-certified NFT. According to official data, over 150,000 identity verifications were completed. Based on these figures, Rayls' performance can be considered average.

Meanwhile, community feedback indicates the airdrop was pitifully small. Some users reported that despite investing significant time in completing tasks and increasing participation, they received less than Binance Alpha users, receiving only around 700 tokens. One user bluntly stated, "Rayls needs to answer one question: what value has it actually provided to users who have supported this project from the beginning?"

According to PANews' analysis of on-chain data, the Rayls on-chain airdrop contract account received a total of 110 million tokens. Based on a price of 0.0186, the total value of this airdrop is estimated to be approximately $2.04 million.

Rayls Authentication Task List

Overall, Rayls' core strength lies in its precise targeting of the pain point where traditional financial institutions are eager to embrace DeFi but fear compliance risks. However, as a public chain primarily serving institutional clients, its appeal to ordinary users or retail investors is not particularly high. Especially when every user logging into the network needs to undergo KYC, its "permissionless" concept is indeed questionable, which will significantly dampen the enthusiasm of ordinary users. Furthermore, whether Rayls' proposed privacy-compliant technical solution can operate stably under the pressure of hundreds of millions of daily transactions in banks remains to be seen.

Rayls presents an ambitious blueprint: bringing banks onto the blockchain. But before that, it must prove itself not only to gain regulatory approval but also to withstand the challenges and technological pressures of the decentralized market. Until the mainnet V1 is officially launched and performance bottlenecks are resolved, RLS may still be seen as an expensive entry ticket for institutions, rather than an Alpha for retail investors.