With Tether's investment and the endorsement of the Central Bank of Brazil, why is the enterprise-level Blockchain Rayls well-received but not popular?

Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, amidst the silence in the entire market, the under-the-radar project Rayls officially launched its TGE on December 1. This project, which had almost no prior attention, received support from the two leading overseas exchanges known for their compliance and strict risk control, Coinbase and Kraken, during its initial phase, while also simultaneously listing on multiple exchanges including Binance Alpha, Gate, and Bitget.

This inevitably draws the market's curious gaze towards Rayls. What kind of background and resources could attract the favor of a compliant exchange? This project, which attempts to bridge the gap between “permissioned chains” and “public chains,” and holds the entry ticket for the Brazilian Central Bank's DREX pilot, is it truly opening a new era for RWA, or is it just “new wine in an old bottle”?

Brazil's central bank endorsement attracts Tether investment in Latin American resources.

The track that Rayls is aiming for is enterprise-level compliant blockchain, which is not a new narrative in itself. As early as ten years ago, concepts like Hyperledger Fabric or R3 Corda emerged and began operating as consortium or private chains. However, the sacrifice of global liquidity has led most of these private or consortium chains to become data islands.

Rayls has once again entered this market, attracting the attention of major players, with its developer company Parfin providing strong industry resources and technical accumulation. Parfin was founded in 2019, with headquarters in London, UK and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Before launching Rayls, Parfin operated for many years as a Web3 infrastructure provider, offering custody, trade execution, and asset management solutions for banks, fintech companies, and cryptocurrency exchanges. This “business first, public chain later” development path has allowed Rayls to have an existing customer base from the very beginning, including top financial institutions like Santander and Itaú.

In addition, Tether recently announced its investment in Parfin, the development company of Rayls, to promote the adoption of USDT in Latin America and among institutions. At the same time, Rayls has been launched on Núclea, the largest financial market infrastructure provider in Brazil, which is also one of the co-investors in Rayls' Series A funding.

Rayls has attracted the attention of institutions and companies like Tether largely due to its extensive operational experience in the Latin American region. Notably, Rayls has the strongest endorsement from the Central Bank of Brazil. In 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil launched a test project for central bank digital currency called DREX. Rayls successfully participated in two rounds of testing and provided privacy solutions for the project. Additionally, in 2024, Rayls was selected for JPMorgan's Project EPIC's Kinexys project, again leveraging privacy and identity solutions as its main advantages.

This resource-driven model makes Rayls more practical compared to previous enterprise-level blockchain networks. From the operational route of Rayls, its main goal is to use privacy solutions as a breakthrough to deeply participate in the central bank digital currency issuance process of various countries, to establish its own moat. In November, Rayls announced its participation in the DLT Innovation Challenge hosted by the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements London Centre. Prior to this, it won second place in the 2023 G20 TechSprint organized by the BIS (Bank for International Settlements).

However, this operational approach focused on the institutional side inevitably makes Rayls lack presence in the eyes of ordinary investors.

Public chain + private chain, technological breakthrough or old wine in a new bottle

The solution proposed by Rayls does not seem new, similar to the concept of subnets in Avalanche.

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

Among them, the Rayls Public Chain (RPC) is the public chain part of Rayls, an Ethereum L2. However, although this is a permissionless public chain, any wallet address that wishes to interact with the Rayls public chain must first undergo decentralized identity (DID) verification to prove that it is not a sanctioned entity. From a certain perspective, this may limit some users' thoughts about participation. However, for Rayls, the ultimate effect they want to achieve is to realize a completely “clean” DeFi environment, and this restriction seems necessary, both as a disadvantage and as a moat.

Rayls Private Networks (VENs) is the part mainly participated by banks and other institutions, which is a private chain equipped with a complete privacy protection mechanism. Various financial institutions can establish their own private subnet and run their own privacy ledger on this subnet. On one hand, due to the single-node operation, optimal performance can be achieved. On the other hand, the Enygma privacy protocol is introduced on VENs, combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies, meeting the privacy needs of institutions.

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

However, the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Brazil, Renato Dias de Brito Gomes, revealed in a speech in 2025 that in the technical solution of Rayls, “the full settlement system ( RTGS ) can process 300 transactions per second, while the Drex system without the privacy scheme processes 150 transactions per second, and the processing speed of the Drex system with the privacy scheme enabled drops to less than 10 transactions per second.” From this perspective, Rayls still faces challenges in balancing privacy and performance.

According to a report by Messari, the mainnet V1 version of Rayls will not be launched until the first quarter of 2026. In the second quarter of 2026, they plan to release the privacy node V3 version that supports multi-network connections, and in the third quarter of 2026, they will deploy Enygma to the public chain. Before the mainnet goes live, Rayls will prioritize deploying privacy nodes in financial institutions, achieving integration with private networks, and optimizing the access process for institutional clients.

Retail investors not buying in? The community accuses airdrop rules of foul play.

On November 19, the well-known research organization Messari published a research report on Rayls, which also marked the beginning of the public's attention on Rayls.

Currently, the most discussed topic in the market regarding Rayls is the attention brought by the TGE and the Messari report. In terms of token economics, the total issuance of the token RLS launched by Rayls is 10 billion, with an initial supply of 1.5 billion after going live. Pre-market data from Whales Market indicated that the pre-market price had previously reached a high of $0.084, but the price of RSL has been declining since its launch. As of December 1, it dropped from an opening price of $0.068 to $0.017, with a maximum decline of about 75%. As of December 2, the circulating market value of RLS was approximately $38 million, and the fully diluted market value was about $250 million. Based on FDV, its market value level is close to Sonic, and in terms of circulating market value, its ranking is near the bottom of L1.

The reasons for the collapse of the opening price may stem from two aspects: on one hand, Rayls had a lower presence in the crypto space previously, leading to a lack of understanding among retail investors. On the other hand, the relatively low total airdrop amount and the somewhat unfair rules disappointed the community.

On November 10th, Rayls announced that 200,000 people have built projects on the Rayls testnet, completing 1.6 million transactions. As of December 1st, its testnet data shows a total of 5.04 million transactions and over 2.025 million total addresses.

Before its launch, Rayls initiated a verification experiment called “Proof of Humanity,” which involved KYC through on-chain identity verification. After completing the verification, users could receive a Rayls certified NFT. According to official data, over 150,000 identity verifications were completed in total, indicating that Rayls' performance is considered average.

At the same time, community feedback on airdrops is pitifully low. Some users have stated that they invested a lot of time completing tasks and increasing their participation, yet the final number of airdropped tokens is less than that of Binance Alpha users, with only over 700 tokens. One user bluntly stated: “Rayls needs to answer a question: what is the actual value given to those users who have supported this project from the very beginning?”

According to PANews' analysis of on-chain data, the airdrop contract account on the Rayls chain has received a total of 110 million tokens, which, at an estimated price of 0.0186, gives this portion of the airdrop a total value of approximately $2.04 million.

Rayls's certification task list

Overall, the core of Rayls lies in its precise targeting of the pain point of traditional financial institutions that desire to embrace DeFi but fear compliance risks. However, as a public chain that primarily serves institutional clients, its appeal from the perspective of ordinary users or retail investors is not particularly high. Especially when every user logging into the network needs to undergo KYC, the concept of “permissionless” does indeed raise questions, which could greatly hinder the enthusiasm of ordinary users to enter the market. Whether the privacy-compliant technical solutions proposed by Rayls can operate stably under the pressure of billions of daily transactions in banks is also an unknown.

Rayls presents a grand blueprint: bringing banking on-chain. But before that, it must first prove that it can not only gain the compliance endorsement of regulators but also withstand the challenges of the decentralized market and the pressures of technology. Before the mainnet V1 is officially launched and performance bottlenecks are resolved, RLS may still be seen as an expensive ticket for institutional entry, rather than an Alpha for retail investors.