Citadel Securities Collaborates With LayerZero to Launch New Blockchain Initiative

Institutions Push for Scalable Blockchain Solutions

While financial organizations are increasingly interested in tokenization and blockchain-based settlements, challenges related to scalability, transaction speed, and industry-wide coordination have largely kept these initiatives in the experimental phase.

Major players such as Citadel Securities, DTCC, and Intercontinental Exchange are now aiming to break through these barriers, focusing on improving trading, clearing, settlement, and the management of tokenized assets.

To address these obstacles, these institutions have thrown their support behind LayerZero’s new blockchain project, named Zero, according to a joint announcement on Tuesday.

Tackling the Blockchain Trilemma

LayerZero is targeting what’s commonly known as the blockchain trilemma—the challenge of achieving scalability without compromising security or decentralization.

“We believe this technology can bring the entire global economy on-chain,” stated Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs. This ambitious vision is shared by other projects, such as BlackRock’s $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, which provides institutional investors with daily dividends and continuous liquidity through public blockchains.

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Industry Collaboration and Investment

Citadel Securities is collaborating with LayerZero to evaluate whether Zero can support high-speed trading, clearing, and settlement, and has made a strategic investment in the network’s ZRO token.

DTCC and Intercontinental Exchange are investigating the blockchain’s potential to scale tokenized securities, collateral, and infrastructure for round-the-clock markets. ARK Invest and Google Cloud have also joined as partners, providing expertise in capital markets and AI-powered payment solutions.

Introducing Zero: A New Blockchain Architecture

Zero is described as the first heterogeneous blockchain, allowing participants to process different sets of transactions. This division of labor is designed to dramatically increase throughput and reduce costs.

LayerZero claims this approach could enable up to 2 million transactions per second across various environments—purportedly making it about 100,000 times faster than Ethereum and 500 times more efficient than Solana.

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Questions Remain About Performance

Decrypt was unable to independently confirm these performance claims. LayerZero has not released additional test results or third-party benchmarks, and declined to provide written answers, instead offering video content from company leadership to elaborate on the announcement.

Looking Ahead: Zero’s Launch Plans

Zero is scheduled to debut in the fall of 2026, launching with three open-access environments dedicated to smart contracts, payments, and multi-asset trading.

Expanding the Ecosystem

The ZRO token will serve as the governance mechanism for LayerZero, facilitating coordination across the network and connecting Zero to over 165 other blockchains, according to the statement.

Companies like Google, Circle, and Stripe have been developing permissioned ledgers and payment systems to accelerate settlements and enable global transfers. In contrast, Zero emphasizes its open, permissionless approach, allowing anyone to validate, build, and transact on the network.