Crypto Is Rebuilding The Financial System — And Opportunities Abound

LayerZero began with a practical problem: existing bridges did not let applications trigger actions across separate chains, and the team did not trust their security enough for large sums. It now supports about 170 chains and has moved more than $300 billion over its lifetime, including roughly $10–15 billion per month. A speaker estimated that $100–150 billion in assets had been built on the network and claimed LayerZero held 90–91% of the interoperability market. The speaker compared its monthly transfer volume with Western Union and most traditional payment processors.

The team expects many chains to persist, but sees the number of general-purpose environments eventually consolidating to roughly five to 30, rather than thousands. Specialized chains may excel at particular tasks, provided assets can move between them seamlessly. The speaker expects canonical versions and standards to emerge for tokenized equities and other assets, as happened with stablecoins on individual chains. Commercial results cited included USDT0, which added about $10 billion in assets under management in its first year, including on chains Tether had not previously prioritized, and PayPal’s PYUSD, which grew from roughly $300 million to $4–5 billion as it connected chains and expanded its network.

Cross-chain transfers involve trade-offs between speed and finality. Issuers can choose how much confirmation they require: a transfer may complete in about a second while carrying finality risk, or take roughly 30 seconds to 30 minutes under more conservative settings. A solver or other counterparty can fill on the destination chain and take on that risk. The speaker pointed to chain reorganizations and rollbacks—including Polygon reorganizations exceeding 200 blocks and zk-chain rollbacks of hundreds of thousands of blocks—as reasons that settlement choices matter. Stablecoins can sometimes be frozen or seized, unlike most permissionless assets, giving issuers a way to stop or recover funds across chains.

LayerZero’s planned infrastructure extends beyond connecting chains. Zero is a ground-up, ZK-first blockchain designed for millions of transactions per second at low latency; its team estimates about 2 million TPS, or roughly 1 million with EVM overhead. Atlas is a trading environment combining execution, settlement, clearing, matching, risk, and credit. It is intended to support both open markets and access-controlled institutional markets, including those with KYC and registered broker-dealers. Atlas is an engine for partners to build on, not a LayerZero-operated public exchange. The speaker said its live testnet runs a stable version at 200,000 TPS with under one-millisecond latency, while a research prototype has reported 28-microsecond p50 latency.

The company says more than 20 front ends are deploying or testing on Open Atlas, and that four to five of the world’s largest exchanges are testing or deploying on testnet, with multiple committed to taking markets to production. DTCC, ICE, Citadel, and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange were among the institutions discussed or announced. The speaker described SEC and CFTC guidance on licensing and futures commission merchant participation as progress, while noting that some earlier no-action positions appear to conflict with newer SEC guidance, including on when an alternative trading system may be required. Production also depends on coordinating custodians and other upstream partners. The project has publicly targeted a September launch, with broader Open Atlas markets expected before further institutional rollouts.

ZRO is the chain’s native gas token, used for priority fees, block space, and other gas costs. The speaker expects LayerZero’s protocol fee switch to turn on within roughly 18 months, though positive votes have not reached quorum. For Atlas, fees are shared with the front end, and 75% of the remainder goes to buying and burning ZRO; using a fee schedule similar to current market rates, the speaker estimated that flow at about 1.2 basis points per dollar traded. The broader opportunity, in the speaker’s view, is that stablecoins are already pressuring domestic payment rails and banks’ deposit bases, while tokenization could eventually move equity issuance on chain. He said stablecoin use abroad preceded domestic adoption by nearly a decade, but that domestic traction is now emerging; over time, the distinction between on-chain and off-chain markets may disappear.