Layer N was founded in 2022 by Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz in New York City. Originally focused on building a scaling solution for Solana, the company shifted its attention to Ethereum following the collapse of FTX, which had backed several of its early efforts. This pivot led to the creation of N1, a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain optimized for speed, scale, and performance.

Layer N’s mission is to solve blockchain scalability and latency problems, making it possible to build high-performance financial applications on-chain. The platform offers 100,000+ transactions per second (TPS) and sub-millisecond latency, rivaling the performance of traditional centralized systems. With a modular and developer-first approach, Layer N’s ecosystem includes NordVM (a Rust-based exchange framework for high-speed order books), NTS (a TypeScript-based smart contract environment), and NX (a VM-agnostic framework for building in any language).

In September 2023, Layer N raised a $5 million seed round led by Founders Fund and dao5, with participation from Kraken Ventures, Amber Group, Mirana Ventures, and others. The company operates with a lean team of 11–50 employees, including around 10 engineers, and continues to push the boundaries of blockchain infrastructure.

Layer N positions itself as the foundation for modern on-chain applications such as decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, prediction markets, and even AI agents—aiming to eliminate the traditional trade-offs between decentralization, performance, and developer experience.