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 shares and the 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 toward 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 announced on Tuesday.
Citadel Securities said it was working with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero’s architecture could support high-throughput workflows in trading and post-trading processes. The company’s investment in ZRO adds to growing institutional interest in LayerZero, which is 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 toward crypto as infrastructure improves and regulatory clarity advances. Asset managers, exchanges and clearinghouses are increasingly viewing blockchains not as speculative avenues but as potential upgrades to existing systems, particularly for trading, settlement and collateral management. This change reflects a growing belief that crypto-native technology is mature enough to support real-world financial markets at scale.
Zero is built around LayerZero’s first heterogeneous architecture, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to separate transaction execution from verification. The company says the design can achieve around 2 million transactions per second across multiple zones, with transaction costs approaching a millionth of a dollar and effectively unlimited block space.
Zero-knowledge proofs allow blockchains to verify that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data, thereby preserving privacy while ensuring validity.
LayerZero said the system brings radical improvements in compute, storage, networking and cryptography, allowing different areas to be optimized for specific use cases rather than forcing all nodes to do identical work.
The project is launched in collaboration with several major institutions. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it will explore the use of 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 related to 24/7 trading and tokenized collateral. Google Cloud is partnering with LayerZero to explore blockchain-based micropayments and resource exchange for AI agents, reflecting growing interest in programmable currency for machine-driven economies.
“Zero’s architecture advances the industry roadmap by at least a decade,” Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, said in the release. “We think we can actually network the entire global economy with this technology.
The blockchain is expected to debut with three initial areas: a general-purpose 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 to over 165 blockchains.
Learn more: Robinhood invests in crypto trading platform Talos at a valuation of $1.5 billion
