TxnLab's three-person studio spans Algorand's naming, staking, DeFi, and AI layers
A studio built on Algorand's friction points
Algorand settles transactions in a single block and charges fees measured in fractions of a cent, but using the network has historically meant coping with long wallet addresses, accounts that must each opt in to a token before holding it, staking setups that favor technically equipped operators, and liquidity scattered across many exchanges. TxnLab, a three-person studio shipping since 2021, has built a product against each of those frictions. The team now operates the ecosystem's .algo naming registry, an open staking-pool protocol, a mobile DeFi app, and a private AI service that pays its operators per request on-chain.
Four products, one studio
| Product | What it is | What it changes for a user |
|---|---|---|
| NFDomains | Registry and marketplace for .algo domain names | Sending ALGO to a readable name like alice.algo instead of a long public key |
| Réti Pooling | Open protocol for pooling ALGO into consensus participation | Earning staking rewards without running a node, by delegating into a pool |
| Haystack | Web and mobile app for swapping, earning, and dropping tokens | One interface for trading, staking, and prediction markets |
| ZeroSignal | Peer-to-peer private AI protocol | Asking a model questions with no account, no subscription, and no central log |
All four products sit on a common base: open-source libraries the studio publishes and maintains. TxnLab's own description of that base is that the infrastructure under its products is public and reusable.
NFDomains: readable identity for an address-based network
NFDomains replaces Algorand's long public addresses with short names ending in .algo — a payment to alice.algo instead of a string of characters that invites copy-paste errors. According to the company's site, the registry has 69,000 names minted and 8.2 million ALGO in cumulative volume. The cofounders are themselves working examples of the identity layer: the protocol's directory lists patrick.algo, fisherman.algo, and doug.algo as verified entries linking wallet addresses to each founder's X, GitHub, Discord, and Bluesky accounts.
The protocol also works around one of Algorand's quieter annoyances. A wallet must opt in to an asset before it can receive it, which turns airdrops and bulk transfers into a ritual of per-token approvals. NFD Vaults give an NFD its own independent account that can hold ALGO and any other asset without that manual approval each time. Developer tooling extends the system further: a CoreDNS plugin resolves .algo names to DNS records, and a W3C-compliant DID resolver lets NFDs serve as portable digital identities across applications. A V3 upgrade announced in August 2024 was framed around decentralization, sustainability, and interoperability.
Réti Pooling: an open staking layer
On Algorand, anyone with stake can participate in consensus, but doing it properly means running a node and keeping an online account. Réti Pooling — the protocol and web app behind reti.nodely.io — turns that into an open, non-custodial market of staking pools. Each pool is its own contract spawned from a master validator template; validators run the nodes, depositors contribute ALGO, and consensus rewards flow back to participants. The studio's site describes the protocol as built for the Algorand Foundation.
The deposit figures show both traction and volatility. DeFiLlama records $60.8 million locked in Réti as of August 2026, down from a $100.7 million peak in September 2025 and a February 2026 low of $47.1 million. The studio's site currently lists the protocol among the top five staking pools tracked by DeFiLlama.
Chart: Réti Pooling TVL, Sep 2025 – Aug 2026 (DeFiLlama, USD millions)
Haystack: DeFi assembled for a phone
Haystack is a web and mobile app for swapping, earning, and dropping tokens, built around the Haystack Router — a smart order-routing engine that splits trades across Algorand's exchanges to find the best available price, with execution times under 500 milliseconds and a built-in referral mechanism. A TypeScript SDK, haystack-js, exposes the router to other developers.
The product's numbers are small but real. The HAY token, with a supply of 100 million, saw two sale tranches sell out in under ten minutes, raising $600,000, according to the Algorand Foundation's September 2025 insights report. The app holds a 5.0 rating on Apple's App Store from 41 reviews. Features have been landing in dated sequence: HAY staking went live in November 2025, and a login plus a broader launch followed in February 2026, with sign-in through Google or Apple via Web3Auth, a decentralized identity service. DeFiLlama now tracks HAY staking on Algorand.
Prediction markets without an order book
The most distinctive feature is Haystack PvP, a prediction-market format the studio contrasts with the fixed-odds order books used by Polymarket and Kalshi. In a parimutuel market, every wager goes into one pool, and when the question resolves, winners split the pool in proportion to what they staked. There is no order book and no market maker, so the market is always liquid by construction. TxnLab's engineering team laid out the mechanism in a March 2026 post.
ZeroSignal: private AI, settled per question
The pitch begins with recent history: AI assistants whose conversation databases have leaked, whose chat logs are subpoenaed as evidence, and whose prompts are shared with ad networks. ZeroSignal is TxnLab's alternative — a peer-to-peer network where a request is encrypted on your device, paid for per question, and settled on Algorand.
The design separates three roles so that no single party ever holds the whole request:
| Layer | Role | What it can see |
|---|---|---|
| Client (you) | Encrypts each prompt to one chosen operator, signs the per-request payment, keeps history in local encrypted storage | Your prompt, your IP, your identity |
| Relay | Forwards the encrypted envelope between client and operator | Your IP only — not the prompt, not your identity |
| Operator | Runs the model on its own hardware, briefly | The prompt only — not your IP, not your identity |
Because these roles sit in separate operators and jurisdictions, there is no central log to subpoena and no single company to compel. The site is candid about the one limit: 'The operator that answers does see the prompt it processes. That is the one thing we can't architect away, and we won't pretend otherwise.'
What makes the identity-free model work
Per-request settlement is the load-bearing piece. Each call is paid in USDC, signed by the device, and settled against the operator that answered it, clearing inside the request round-trip thanks to Algorand's single-block finality — a transaction is final as soon as its block is confirmed, with no waiting and no probabilistic settlement. The ledger records an address and an amount, not a word of the prompt. A typical exchange costs about a third of a cent, paid from a balance rather than a subscription; there is no minimum and no invoice. Login is a passkey rather than an email and password, and history stays on the device, encrypted — there is no account database to breach or leak.
Models, one interface
The network offers frontier and open-weight models behind a single chat interface and one OpenAI-compatible endpoint:
| Class | Examples | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Frontier labs | Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, xAI Grok | Deep reasoning and multimodal work, relayed to the provider with nothing attached that identifies the user |
| Open weights | Meta Llama, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen | Run directly on operators' hardware, so a request never needs to leave the network |
Operators set their own prices and compete on speed. The network is already wired for developers: zs-proxy is a drop-in, OpenAI-compatible inference proxy, so existing tools and SDKs can point at ZeroSignal, and zs-node is the operator binary. Both ship through Homebrew and Scoop package managers.
The open-source layer
The studio's GitHub organization holds 32 public repositories with 190 stars across all of them — modest numbers, but the code is the connective tissue under the products.
| Tool | Concept | Real-World Implication |
|---|---|---|
| use-wallet and use-wallet-ui | Framework-agnostic wallet integration (React, Vue, SolidJS, Svelte) with drop-in React components | A dApp can support every major Algorand wallet through one API instead of per-wallet code |
| haystack-js | TypeScript SDK for the Haystack Router | Developers can add smart order routing and DEX aggregation to their own apps |
| reti | The protocol and web app behind Réti Pooling | Anyone can audit or fork the staking layer — or run a pool |
| batch-asset-send | Mass airdrop tool | Distributes assets to accounts, NFDs, NFD Vaults, and segments in one operation |
| nfd-sdk, nfd-coredns, nfd-did | SDK, DNS plugin, and DID resolver for NFDs | Apps can mint, resolve, and authenticate against .algo names |
A small studio with its fingers deep in the stack
TxnLab started with modest backing: a $1.25 million seed round led by Borderless Capital and GoldenTree Asset Management, announced in January 2022, alongside an Algorand Foundation grant for NFDomains. The claims warrant the usual caveats. The NFDomains traction figures are self-reported on the studio's own pages, and its public statistics endpoint returned a 404 during research, so they could not be independently re-verified. Réti's deposits, by contrast, are externally tracked by DeFiLlama. ZeroSignal's privacy model ultimately rests on a network of independent operators that is still young, and parimutuel prediction markets remain an unproven format for broad retail demand.
What binds the portfolio together is position rather than size: a wallet integration library, a naming directory payments flow through, an open staking protocol carrying tens of millions in deposits, and an AI layer settling every answer on-chain. For a three-person team, that is a large share of one ecosystem's core plumbing.
Source
- TxnLab
- ZeroSignal
- Haystack
- NFDomains
- Réti Pooling
- TxnLab on GitHub
- Réti Pooling on DeFiLlama
- ZeroSignal — A private place to think
- ZeroSignal — How it works
- Rocket Pool - DefiLlama
Source: https://txnlab.dev