LayerZero Labs on Tuesday unveiled Zero, a new blockchain aimed at powering institutional financial markets, along with a strategic investment from Citadel Securities in ZRO, the network’s native token and governance asset.
ARK Invest is also investing in LayerZero’s equity and ZRO token, with CEO Cathie Wood joining a newly formed advisory board alongside ICE director 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 for blockchain-based trading, clearing and settlement, as scalability and performance constraints have long limited real-world adoption.
Tether Investments, the investment arm of the leading stablecoin issuer, has also made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, it said earlier Tuesday.
Citadel Securities said it is working with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero’s architecture can support high-throughput workflows across trade and post-trade processes. The firm’s investment in ZRO adds to growing institutional interest in LayerZero, which is best known for running one of crypto’s largest interoperability networks.
After years of pilot projects and cautious experimentation, major financial institutions are moving more decisively into crypto as infrastructure improves and regulatory clarity advances. Asset managers, exchanges and clearing houses are increasingly viewing blockchains not as speculative leads, but as potential upgrades to legacy systems, particularly for trading, settlement and collateral. The shift reflects a growing belief that crypto-native technology is maturing enough to support real financial markets at scale.
Zero is designed around LayerZero’s first-of-its-kind heterogeneous architecture, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) 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 approaching a millionth of a dollar and virtually unlimited block space.
Zero-knowledge proofs let blockchains verify that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data, preserving privacy while ensuring validity.
LayerZero said the system delivers incremental improvements across 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 larger institutions. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it will explore the use of Zero to improve the scalability of its tokenization and security offerings, while the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is exploring applications related to 24/7 trading and tokenized security. Google Cloud is partnering with LayerZero to explore blockchain-based micropayments and resource trading for AI agents, reflecting the growing interest in programmable money for machine-driven economies.
“Zero’s architecture moves the industry roadmap forward by at least a decade,” Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, said in the release. “We believe that we can actually bring the entire global economy on the chain with this technology.
Blockchain is set to debut with three initial zones: a general Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, a privacy-focused payment system, and a purpose-built trading platform. ZRO will anchor network governance and security, while LayerZero’s interoperability stack connects Zero with more than 165 blockchains.
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