LayerZero Labs$ZRO) Token has officially announced its new layer 1 blockchain, Zero. Along with this launch, the company announced that it has received strategic investment from financial giants Citadel Securities and Ark Investments.
“We believe this technology can bring the entire global economy onto blockchain,” said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs. “Our mission is to build permissionless infrastructure for a better world.”
The graph shows historical price reversals. $ZRO.
According to the announcement, the acquisition was made by both Citadel and Ark Invest. $ZROthe protocol's native token. Citadel has previously invested in crypto companies such as Ripple and Kraken, but direct purchases of tokens are not common for the company.
Citadel Securities announced that it will share its market structure expertise with LayerZero to evaluate how the technology can be used for trading, clearing and settlement processes.
Meanwhile, Citadel has played an active role in regulatory discussions in the past, arguing that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should not exclude DeFi protocols from the definition of “exchange” or “brokerage firm.”
Acquired by Cathie Wood's Ark Invest $ZRO I acquired the token and also became a direct shareholder of LayerZero. Wood described this development as a “historic opportunity at the intersection of finance and the Internet.”
LayerZero also announced collaborations with Google Cloud and DTCC, two important institutions for technology and financial infrastructure.
Richard Widman, Head of Web3 Strategy at Google Cloud, emphasized that AI agents are beginning to transform into economic actors, and said that cryptocurrency and blockchain infrastructure must be as reliable as cloud systems. Widman said LayerZero is fundamentally rethinking blockchain architecture, and the partnership aims to “expand the definition of the internet to include value.”
Regarding DTCC, President and CEO Frank La Sala said that while adoption of digital assets is progressing, issues of speed and scale are preventing them from realizing their full potential. DTCC is actively working on tokenizing liquid assets such as stocks, ETFs, and government bonds.
Additionally, Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the NYSE) announced that it will investigate whether the Zero blockchain can support a 24/7 transaction infrastructure.
LayerZero claimed that it was the first network to use a “heterogeneous architecture” on the Zero blockchain and could reach a capacity of 2 million transactions per second. The company claimed that Zero offers approximately 100,000 times higher transaction throughput than Ethereum and approximately 500 times higher than Solana.
*This is not investment advice.
