On Tuesday, LayerZero Labs unveiled Zero, a new institutional-grade permissionless layer-1 blockchain designed specifically for powering the scale and security requirements of the global financial markets. The company is known for operating one of the largest interoperability networks in the digital assets space.
Zero is backed by a powerhouse roster of institutional investors and partners, including Citadel Securities, ARK Invest, Google Cloud, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). LayerZero is now positioning itself as the primary settlement layer for high-performance trading and tokenized assets.
Citadel, ARK, ICE, and DTCC Make Strategic Investments in Zero: an Interoperable L1 for Global Financial Markets
The company said both Citadel and ARK had made strategic investments into the protocol, acquiring its equity and native ZRO token. While Citadel has invested in various crypto firms, including Ripple and Kraken, this is the first time it has made direct token purchases. Traditionally a skeptic of permissionless DeFi, the Wall Street market maker is now actively collaborating with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero can apply trading, clearing, and settlement workflows with high-performance and reliability.
LayerZero has established a high-profile advisory board featuring some of the most influential figures in finance and investment, such as Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Invest, Michael Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at ICE, and Caroline Butler, former global head of digital assets at BNY. However, the size of the investments was not disclosed.
Their presence signals a shift in the industry, as they bring deep expertise in disruptive innovation, exchange operations, and institutional custody to a permissionless public ledger. Wood described Zero as a “historic opportunity at the intersection of finance and the internet”.
Perhaps the most significant partnership for Zero is that of DTCC and ICE – two organizations that form the backbone of the U.S. stock exchange. DTCC said it will be exploring securities tokenization opportunities, while the ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), is examining applications tied to 24/7 trading markets and tokenized collateral. Commenting on the development, DTCC CEO Frank La Salla stated,
“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“.
Tether and LayerZero’s USDTO Token Targets Cross-Chain Microtransactions and Agentic AI Use Cases
Meanwhile, Tether Investments, the independent investment arm of stablecoin giant Tether, also announced its own strategic investment in LayerZero Labs. This capital infusion is aimed at bolstering the interoperability infrastructure of USDTO – Tether’s omnichain stablecoin, launched in partnership with LayerZero, to address fragmented stablecoin liquidity across blockchains by enabling seamless, low-cost, and secure cross-chain USDT transfers without relying on traditional token bridges.
USDTO leverages LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard with a lock-and-mint model. This enables the token to exist across multiple networks while maintaining a unified global supply. When a user sends USDT from one chain to another, the OFT contract burns the USDT on the source chain and mints an equivalent amount of USDTO on the destination chain, while maintaining a 1:1 peg to the U.S. dollar.
Since its launch in January 2025, USDTO has facilitated more than $70 billion in cross-chain value transfers without fragmenting liquidity. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the investment validates LayerZero’s utility in real-time asset transfers across any transport layer, calling it a critical primitive for the emerging agentic AI economy, where autonomous software agents will require the ability to orchestrate micropayments at an unprecedented scale.
Google Cloud is also exploring micropayments and resource trading for AI agents on Zero, reflecting the growing interest in programmable money for machine-driven economies.
Zero Promises Throughput of 2 Million TPS, 100,000x More Than Ethereum
Zero is designed around LayerZero’s “heterogeneous” architecture that leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to separate transaction execution from verification. The company claims this design allows the blockchain to process up to 2 million transactions per second (TPS), a figure approximately 100,000x faster than Ethereum, across three initial zones – including dedicated EVM-compatible environments, privacy-focused payments, and multi-asset trading, with transaction costs approaching a millionth of a dollar.
ZKPs allow blockchains to verify that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data, preserving privacy while ensuring validity.
LayerZero says the system delivers improvements across compute, storage, networking, and cryptography, enabling the different zones to be optimized for specific use cases rather than forcing all nodes to perform the same work. The ZRO token will anchor network governance and security, while the company’s interoperability stack will link Zero to more than 165 blockchains.
“Zero’s architecture moves the industry’s roadmap forward by at least a decade,” said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, in the release. “We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy on-chain with this technology.”
At the time of writing, LayerZero (ZRO) is trading at $2.30 – up 19.46% in 24 hours.
