Montevideo, Uruguay, August 20th, 2026 (Chainwire) — Aligned, a full-stack Ethereum infrastructure project, has launched $ALIGN, the native token of its ecosystem, with listings on major exchanges. Aligned allows fintechs and institutions to build financial products on Ethereum, with one-click solutions for wallets, rollups, interoperability, and zero-knowledge services.

The project is working to turn Ethereum into the world's financial backend, and its ecosystem is designed as the single integration that fintechs, institutions, and enterprises use to build financial products on Ethereum. Less than one percent of the world's assets are onchain, and most of what has moved sits on Ethereum as stablecoins, tokenized treasuries, and wrapped assets — a base that keeps growing, with stablecoins in circulation now measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, tokenized money-market funds from mainstream asset managers such as BlackRock's BUIDL bringing traditional products onchain, and clearer stablecoin rules in markets like the United States and the European Union giving issuers more defined ground rules. Building on top of them, however, is still harder than it should be. A fintech going onchain usually signs with multiple vendors — one for wallets, another for scalability solutions, including rollups and proving systems — and then spends months wiring them together and keeping them in sync. There is no standard way to ship a financial product on Ethereum yet, and Aligned was built to fix that.

Aligned was developed in close collaboration with LambdaClass, a company behind key contributions across the Ethereum ecosystem, including work on Starknet, zkSync, Polygon Miden, and EigenCloud (formerly EigenLayer), as well as Ethrex, the execution client that powers Aligned's Rollup-as-a-Service, and lambdaworks, a cryptography library written in Rust. By integrating with Aligned, users can access wallets, rollups, interoperability, and zero-knowledge services through a single stack.

The stack is shipping one piece at a time:

• Proof Aggregation Service: live on mainnet alpha. It batches the proofs a rollup generates so verification stays cheap as Ethereum scales — verifying zero-knowledge proofs individually on Ethereum mainnet is gas-intensive, often costing hundreds of thousands of gas per proof, which is the cost aggregation is designed to compress.
• Wallet-as-a-Service: MVP already launched. Users sign in with Google or Face ID and get a real Ethereum wallet, with no seed phrases, extensions, or gas fees — an embedded-wallet approach that has become a common onboarding pattern across consumer crypto products.
• Rollup-as-a-Service, the LambdaVM, and the interoperability protocol: in development. The LambdaVM is Aligned's RISC-V zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine), built in collaboration with LambdaClass and 3MI Labs. Each ships as it is ready.

As the world's assets move onto Ethereum, Aligned says it is creating the stack that makes it easy to build on. In the future, $ALIGN will be available as an option to pay for services across that stack, from Proof Aggregation to Wallet-as-a-Service, and as more teams build on Aligned, it will be the asset they use to pay for that usage. The company describes it as a utility token: it is not equity, a share, or a claim on revenue or dividends, and it does not promise a yield or a price.

$ALIGN has a fixed supply of 10 billion tokens, with about 16% circulating at launch — a small initial float by the standards of token launches, where the remainder of a fixed supply typically unlocks over multi-year vesting schedules. The full allocation and the Genesis airdrop are laid out in the ALIGN tokenomics. The airdrop was distributed across several waves spanning developers and researchers; the Discord and Galxe communities; distinguished contributors to Ethereum and ZK, such as Protocol Guild, L2BEAT, ZachXBT, and ZK Podcast; and holders of ecosystem tokens including Starknet, Mina, zkSync, Polygon, Scroll, Taiko, and EigenCloud.

Aligned says it is committed to Ethereum by choice, focusing all of its efforts on it. Through the rest of the year, the team plans to ship the remaining pieces of the stack and grow the number of products built on it. The concrete markers of that progress will be the launches of Rollup-as-a-Service, the LambdaVM, and the interoperability protocol, and, further out, whether $ALIGN's planned role as a payment option across the stack moves from roadmap to live usage. The longer-term goal is to make building a financial product on Ethereum a single decision, not a systems-integration project.

Airdrop eligibility and launch details are available at community.alignedlayer.com, with the full tokenomics published at blog.alignedlayer.com. Updates are also posted on X at @alignedlayer.

About Aligned

Aligned builds the tools that turn Ethereum into the world's financial backend. It gives fintechs, institutions, and enterprises one integration for wallets, rollups, interoperability, and zero-knowledge services, so they can build real financial products on Ethereum instead of assembling a stack from separate vendors. Users can learn more at alignedlayer.com.

*$ALIGN is the native asset of the Aligned ecosystem, built on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token and also available on Base, with a fixed total supply of 10 billion and an initial circulating supply equal to approximately 16% of the total token supply. It will be used across the Aligned stack. $ALIGN is not equity, a share, or a claim on revenue or dividends. This announcement is informational only and is not financial advice. Do your own research.

Media contact: Roberto Catalan, Aligned Layer — roberto@yetanothercompany.xyz