LayerZero plans ‘Zero’ blockchain launch with Citadel Securities and ARK Invest backing

LayerZero Labs has built one of the crypto industry’s most widely used cross-chain messaging stacks, with its protocol connecting more than 165 blockchains and serving as infrastructure for apps that move assets and data across networks. The company’s ZRO token underpins governance across that ecosystem, and LayerZero has increasingly positioned itself as a bridge between crypto-native products and institutional experimentation in tokenization.

In an announcement published Tuesday, the company said Zero will use a heterogeneous design that separates transaction execution from verification and relies on zero-knowledge proofs and the Jolt zero-knowledge virtual machine to increase throughput. LayerZero claims the approach can scale to as much as two million transactions per second per “zone,” while bypassing the replication model in which every node repeats the same work. 

The network is expected to launch with three initial “zones,” which LayerZero described as permissionless environments governed by the underlying network. The company said the starting set will include a general-purpose EVM environment compatible with Solidity contracts, a privacy-focused payments environment, and a dedicated zone intended for trading across asset classes.

LayerZero said Zero will use its native token, ZRO, as the governance asset and as a way to provide interoperability between zones and across the more than 165 blockchains connected through the LayerZero protocol.

On the funding and partnership side, LayerZero said ARK Invest is investing in both LayerZero equity and ZRO, and that Citadel Securities has made a strategic investment in the token while working with the company on market-structure applications. The company also announced an advisory board that includes ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, ICE executive Michael Blaugrund and former BNY Mellon digital assets head Caroline Butler.

LayerZero said several large institutions will explore the technology for potential use. The company named DTCC, which plans to evaluate applications tied to its tokenization and collateral initiatives, and ICE, which is examining potential uses of Zero as it prepares infrastructure for 24/7 markets and tokenized collateral. LayerZero also said Google Cloud will partner to explore use cases involving AI agents and micropayments.