LayerZero Labs on Tuesday unveiled Zero, a new blockchain aimed at powering institutional-grade financial markets, alongside a strategic investment from Citadel Securities into ZRO, the network’s native token and governance asset.

ARK Invest is also investing in LayerZero’s equity and ZRO token, with CEO Cathie Wood joining a newly formed advisory board alongside ICE executive Michael Blaugrund and former BNY Mellon digital assets head Caroline Butler, the company said in a press release. The size of the investments were not disclosed.

The announcement signals a deeper push by traditional market infrastructure players into blockchain-based trading, clearing and settlement, as scalability and performance constraints have long limited real-world adoption.

Tether Investments, the investment arm of the leading stablecoin issuer, has also made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, it said earlier on Tuesday.

Citadel Securities said it is working with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero’s architecture could support high-throughput workflows across trading and post-trade processes. The firm’s investment in ZRO adds to growing institutional interest in LayerZero, which is best known for operating one of crypto’s largest interoperability networks.

After years of pilot projects and cautious experimentation, large financial institutions are moving more decisively into crypto as infrastructure improves and regulatory clarity advances. Asset managers, exchanges and clearing houses are increasingly viewing blockchains not as speculative rails but as potential upgrades to legacy systems, particularly for trading, settlement and collateral management. The shift reflects a growing belief that crypto-native technology is maturing enough to support real-world financial markets at scale.

Zero is designed around LayerZero's first-of-its-kind heterogeneous architecture, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to separate transaction execution from verification. The company claims the design can scale to roughly 2 million transactions per second across multiple zones, with transaction costs approaching a millionth of a dollar and effectively unlimited blockspace.

Zero-knowledge proofs let blockchains verify that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data, preserving privacy while ensuring validity.

LayerZero said the system delivers step-change improvements across compute, storage, networking and cryptography, allowing different zones to be optimized for specific use cases rather than forcing all nodes to perform identical work.

The project is launching in collaboration with several major institutions. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) said it will explore using Zero to enhance the scalability of its tokenization and collateral initiatives, while Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is examining applications tied to 24/7 trading and tokenized collateral. Google Cloud is partnering with LayerZero to explore blockchain-based micropayments and resource trading for AI agents, reflecting growing interest in programmable money for machine-driven economies.

“Zero’s architecture moves the industry’s roadmap forward by at least a decade,” said Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, in the release. “We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology.

The blockchain is set to debut with three initial zones: a general-purpose Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environment, a privacy-focused payments system, and a purpose-built trading venue. ZRO will anchor network governance and security, while LayerZero’s interoperability stack links Zero to more than 165 blockchains.

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