LayerZero Labs on Tuesday unveiled Zero, a new blockchain aimed at powering institutional-grade financial markets, alongside a strategic investment from Citadel Securities in ZRO, the network’s native token and governance asset.
ARK Invest is also investing in LayerZero stock and the ZRO token, with CEO Cathie Wood joining a newly formed advisory board alongside ICE executive Michael Blaugrund and former BNY Mellon head of digital assets Caroline Butler, the company said in a press release. The size of the investments was not disclosed.
The announcement signals a deeper push by traditional market infrastructure players towards blockchain-based trading, clearing and settlement, as scalability and performance limitations have long limited real-world adoption.
Tether Investments, the investment arm of the leading stablecoin issuer, also made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, it said on Tuesday.
Citadel Securities said it is working with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero’s architecture could support high-performance workflows in trading and post-trade processes. The company’s investment in ZRO adds to growing institutional interest in LayerZero, best known for operating one of the largest crypto interoperability networks.
After years of pilot projects and cautious experimentation, large financial institutions are moving more decisively into cryptocurrencies as infrastructure improves and regulatory clarity advances. Asset managers, exchanges and clearinghouses increasingly view blockchains not as speculative avenues but as potential upgrades to legacy systems, particularly for trading, settlement and collateral management. The change reflects a growing belief that crypto-native technology is maturing enough to support real-world financial markets at scale.
Zero is designed around LayerZero’s first-of-its-kind heterogeneous architecture, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to separate transaction execution from verification. The company claims the design can scale to about 2 million transactions per second across multiple zones, with transaction costs close to a millionth of a dollar and effectively unlimited block space.
Zero-knowledge proofs allow blockchains to verify that a claim is true without revealing the underlying data, preserving privacy and ensuring validity.
LayerZero said the system offers radical improvements in compute, storage, networking and cryptography, allowing different zones to be optimized for specific use cases rather than forcing all nodes to do identical work.
The project is launched in collaboration with several important institutions. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it will explore using Zero to improve the scalability of its tokenization and collateral initiatives, while Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is examining applications tied to 24/7 trading and tokenized collateral. Google Cloud is partnering with LayerZero to explore blockchain-based micropayments and resource trading for AI agents, reflecting growing interest in programmable money for machine-driven economies.
“Zero’s architecture moves the industry’s roadmap forward by at least a decade,” Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, said in the statement. “We believe we can truly bring the entire global economy into the chain 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 the LayerZero interoperability stack links Zero to over 165 blockchains.
Read more: Robinhood Is Investing in Crypto Trading Platform Talos at $1.5 Billion Valuation
