LayerZero Announces Zero Blockchain to Build Global Market Infrastructure In Collaboration with Citadel Securities, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Intercontinental Exchange; With Strategic Investment in ZRO from Citadel Securities

Zero introduces a first-of-its-kind heterogeneous blockchain architecture; uniquely capable of powering the future of global finance and the internet.

• Four 100x breakthroughs in compute, storage, networking, and zk unlock 2M TPS per zone, $0.000001 tx cost, and virtually unlimited blockspace
• Includes collaborations with finance and technology giants, including Citadel Securities, DTCC, Google Cloud, and Intercontinental Exchange
• Announces world-class advisory board including ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LayerZero Labs today announced Zero, a new blockchain designed to eliminate the long-standing scalability challenges of decentralized networks. The rollout brings together some of the world’s foremost experts in finance and technology including Citadel Securities, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Google Cloud, and Intercontinental Exchange.

“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. Our mission is to build permissionless infrastructure for a better world – this is the beginning of that world.”

To support Zero, LayerZero has formed a new Advisory Board, convening three of the most respected voices in finance, including Cathie Wood (Founder, CEO, & CIO of ARK Invest), Michael Blaugrund (VP of Strategic Initiatives, Intercontinental Exchange), and Caroline Butler (former head of digital assets at BNY Mellon).

Technical Breakthroughs

Zero is built on four compounding 100x breakthroughs in storage, compute, network, and zero knowledge, scalable to 2 million transactions per second (TPS) across unlimited zones. Zero’s improvements make blockspace abundant, scalable to ~100,000x faster performance and greater throughput than Ethereum and ~500x more than Solana.

While traditional blockchains require every node to replicate the same work, Zero introduces the first ever heterogeneous architecture. By leveraging zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and Jolt to decouple transaction execution from verification, Zero eliminates the fundamental “replication requirement” that has historically constrained blockchains to fewer than 10,000 transactions per second.

Industry Leading Partners

Citadel Securities is collaborating with LayerZero to provide market structure expertise and evaluate how its technology could apply to trading, clearing and settlement workflows that require high performance and reliability. The firm has also made a strategic investment in ZRO, the network’s native token and governance asset.

DTCC will be collaborating to help shape the future of digital market structure for the securities industry. The firm will investigate ways to leverage the significant technological advancements embedded within the Zero blockchain architecture to enhance the scalability of the DTC Tokenization Service and Collateral App Chain.

“DTCC has been driving acceptance and adoption of digital assets, but realizing the full potential of blockchain technology has been elusive due to limitations in speed and scale. By working collaboratively across the industry, we believe that we can unlock the value of blockchain and deliver transformational benefits to market participants, including collateral mobility, new trading modalities and programmable assets. We look forward to working with LayerZero and others to further advance our digital strategy by tokenizing securities with uncompromising security, robust scalability, sound legal footing and seamless interoperability.” — Frank La Salla, DTCC’s President and CEO

ICE, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and operator of a network of leading derivatives exchanges and clearing houses around the world including operating the world’s largest energy markets and the world’s largest clearing house for credit default swaps, has been at the forefront of market innovation for more than 25 years. ICE is examining potential applications of Zero as it prepares its trading and clearing infrastructure to support 24/7 markets and the potential integration of tokenized collateral.

“ICE has a long history of advancing the technology that underpins global markets, and we continue to explore innovations that can enhance the efficiency, reach and impact of global capital,” said Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives at ICE. “Our exploration of Zero’s high‑performance blockchain architecture aims to deepen our understanding of how advancements in on-chain technology could unlock new use cases and opportunities across trading, clearing, settlement, and capital formation.”

ARK Invest is becoming a shareholder of LayerZero equity and $ZRO.

“This is a historic opportunity at the intersection of finance and the internet. I am thrilled to join LayerZero’s advisory board and help accelerate the adoption of Zero by the largest markets and companies in the world. I’ve known Bryan and co. for sometime now and can think of very few other organizations that make me this excited about the future.” – Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO, & CIO of ARK Invest

Google Cloud will be joining as a partner to explore how to enable AI agents to make micropayments and trade resources instantly without needing a bank account.

“We see a convergence happening between cloud computing and blockchains. As AI agents start to become economic actors, the programmability of cryptocurrencies and blockchains will require infrastructure as reliable as the cloud itself. LayerZero is rethinking how blockchains work from the ground up. By pairing their expertise with our infrastructure, we are exploring how to expand the definition of the internet to include value.” – Richard Widmann, Head of Web3 Strategy at Google Cloud

Going Forward

Zero will be permissionless to validate, build, and transact on. It is set to launch in the fall of 2026 with three initial “zones” – permissionless environments fully owned and governed by the underlying network – to reinvent what’s possible onchain: from a general purpose EVM environment compatible with any solidity contract, to privacy-focused payments infrastructure, to a canonical, best-in-class environment for trading across all markets and asset classes.

ZRO is the token of the network and LayerZero will provide interoperability between Zones and across the 165+ blockchains it connects.

Contacts

Media Contact
For media enquiries or interviews, please contact:

LayerZero
press@layerzero.foundation

Emily Keliher
emily@keliherpr.com