Louis Bellet’s Yellow Plans to Scale its Layer 3 Network to Improve Global Crypto Trading

Yellow’s protocol aims to give developers and exchanges the tools to build faster, safer, and chain-agnostic trading platforms in ways that current decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and bridges cannot, Bellet said, in an interview for Sandmark. 

Instead of operating an exchange, Yellow’s Layer 3 network relies on creating a unified infrastructure layer specialized in trading – something that’s essential given the increasing number of blockchains and the growing appetite for trading crypto assets. Rather than operating as a standalone DEX, Yellow provides the underlying system and developer tools for companies to build their own cross-chain DEXs.

A comprehensive approach 

“The major difference is that a decentralized exchange is usually one deployment on a chain,” Bellet said. “Yellow Network is the infrastructure for building decentralized exchanges, cross-chain or chain-agnostic. We’re building the highway for tomorrow’s trading.”

Louis Bellet is based in San Francisco, according to his LinkedIn profile, while Yellow is registered in the Seychelles. It’s an ambitious project, seeking to address fundamental issues such as blockchain scalability, market liquidity in global trading and security – mirroring what the Lightning Network does for trading Bitcoin, but focusing more broadly on streamlining blockchain operations for other crypto asset trading. 

Essentially, Bellet and his team of developers have been building a decentralized clearing network to serve the trading of digital assets – a mechanism for peer-to-peer off-chain interactions through a ClearSync account. Recent milestones include a sale of Ethereum-hosted $YELLOW tokens that raised $1 million from investors in late August. 

From astronaut to programmer

Bellet has attributed his motivation to become a programmer and system architect to his father, who worked with Dennis Ritchie, one of the principal developers of AT&T’s Unix interactive operating system, in the 1990s. Bellet was so struck by Unix that he shelved an earlier childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. He designed and built a dozen large-scale systems, excelling under “mentor” Chris Larsen, co-founder of Ripple, which is one of Yellow’s backers today.

Ripple led a $10 million seed funding round in September 2024 that valued the company behind Yellow Network at more than $200 million.

“Ripple is like one of a kind in the crypto space, and for us, it’s a great family and model to work with,” Bellet said.

Technical milestone

The team has hit a major technical milestone this year with the release of its clearing layer. Building on that momentum, Yellow has partnered with ETHGlobal to host multiple hackathons, where developers have tested the network’s L3 SDK (software development kit) and delivered strong proof-of-concepts on top of its chain-agnostic layer. 

Bellet said the feedback from the developer community has been “overwhelmingly positive”, with many praising how Yellow’s approach frees them to focus on product building rather than wrestling with ecosystem integrations. Looking ahead, Bellet revealed that Yellow will be sponsoring ETHOnline in just a few days, with its TGE (token generation event) scheduled for the end of the year.

The company has also been preparing to release “Neo DAX,” an open-source stack that enables teams to build DEXs in a matter of weeks.

Interoperability, language diversity 

Bellet emphasized the importance of giving developers freedom to work in the languages and frameworks they prefer which is a contrast to Web3’s current reliance on a narrow set of smart contract languages. 

He sees AI-powered coding tools as accelerating this shift, enabling smaller teams of relatively senior developers to achieve output levels that once required much larger groups. 

Scaling infrastructure, partnerships

As the firm moves forward, Yellow’s focus is on scaling infrastructure across multiple chains and expanding partnerships, collaborating with companies from exchanges and market makers. That’s resulted in Bellet working the crypto conference agenda with meetings and side events in Seoul and Singapore in recent weeks.

“Every event, I’m meeting new Layer-2 founders, and we want to move directly to concrete steps,” Bellet said. “We’re scaling and deploying, and the momentum is very exciting.”