Major financial institutions including Citadel Securities, DTCC, and Intercontinental Exchange are backing LayerZero’s new blockchain, Zero. The companies aim to overcome scaling issues for trading, clearing, settlement, and tokenized assets. LayerZero claims its “heterogeneous” design, which shares work instead of requiring all participants to process every transaction, could enable up to 2 million transactions per second. The network is scheduled to launch in fall 2026, with the ZRO token coordinating governance and connections to other blockchains.
Citadel Securities, DTCC, and Intercontinental Exchange are among the institutions backing LayerZero’s effort to build a new blockchain dubbed Zero. They are exploring whether it can overcome institutional constraints around scale, speed, and coordination for on-chain trading and settlement.
Zero is designed as the first heterogeneous blockchain, meaning it does not require every participant to process the same transactions. LayerZero claims this approach could scale to up to 2 million transactions per second across multiple environments.
“We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy on-chain with this technology,” stated Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs. The claim is echoed by other large-scale efforts, including BlackRock’s $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund, BUIDL.
Citadel Securities said it is assessing whether Zero could support high-performance trading, clearing, and settlement and has made a strategic investment in the network’s ZRO token. DTCC and Intercontinental Exchange are exploring its potential for tokenized securities and 24/7 market infrastructure.
Zero is set to launch in fall 2026 with three initial permissionless environments for smart contracts, payments, and trading. The ZRO token will be used for network governance and to connect Zero with more than 165 other chains.
