LayerZero Labs has announced the launch of 'Zero', a new blockchain designed for institutional-grade financial markets, alongside strategic investments from major traditional finance players. The company revealed on Tuesday that Citadel Securities has made a strategic investment into ZRO, the network's native token and governance asset. Additionally, ARK Invest is investing in both LayerZero's equity and the ZRO token.
The size of these investments was not disclosed. ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood is joining a newly formed advisory board alongside ICE executive Michael Blaugrund and former BNY Mellon digital assets head Caroline Butler. Tether Investments, the investment arm of the stablecoin issuer, also confirmed a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs earlier on Tuesday.
Citadel Securities stated it is collaborating with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero's architecture could support high-throughput workflows across trading and post-trade processes. This move signals a deeper push by traditional market infrastructure players into blockchain-based trading, clearing, and settlement, as scalability improvements address previous adoption barriers.
Zero is built around a novel heterogeneous architecture that uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to separate transaction execution from verification. LayerZero claims this design can scale to approximately 2 million transactions per second across multiple zones, with transaction costs approaching a millionth of a dollar and effectively unlimited blockspace. The system aims to deliver improvements across compute, storage, networking, and cryptography, allowing different zones to be optimized for specific use cases.
The project is launching with several institutional partners. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) will explore using Zero to enhance the scalability of its tokenization and collateral initiatives. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent of the New York Stock Exchange, is examining applications for 24/7 trading and tokenized collateral. Google Cloud is partnering with LayerZero to explore blockchain-based micropayments and resource trading for AI agents.
"Zero's architecture moves the industry's roadmap forward by at least a decade," said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs. "We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology."
The blockchain will debut with three initial zones: a general-purpose Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, a privacy-focused payments system, and a purpose-built trading venue. ZRO will anchor network governance and security, while LayerZero's existing interoperability stack will link Zero to more than 165 blockchains.
