Citadel Securities Teams Up With LayerZero on New Blockchain Push

In brief

• Citadel Securities is backing LayerZero’s Zero blockchain alongside DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, and other institutions.
• Zero is designed to share work instead of having every participant handle every transaction, making it more efficient.
• LayerZero claims Zero could reach up to 2 million transactions per second across multiple environments.

Financial institutions may be warming to tokenization and on-chain settlement, but limits around scale, speed, and coordination have kept most of those experiments from moving beyond pilots. Citadel Securities, DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, and other institutions are banking on overcoming institutional constraints for trading, clearing, settlement, and tokenized assets. That’s why they’ve backed LayerZero’s efforts to build a new blockchain, dubbed Zero, the companies said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The issue LayerZero is targeting is often described as the blockchain trilemma, the idea that networks struggle to scale without sacrificing security or decentralization. “We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology,” Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero Labs, said in the statement.

It’s a bold claim echoed by other efforts currently in the works, including BlackRock’s $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, offering institutional investors yield through daily dividends and round-the-clock liquidity on public blockchains. Citadel Securities said it is working with LayerZero to assess 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 said they are exploring whether the blockchain could scale tokenized securities, collateral, and infrastructure designed for 24/7 markets, while ARK Invest and Google Cloud have joined as partners to advise on capital markets and AI-driven payments use cases.

Zero is billed as the first heterogeneous blockchain, meaning the network does not require every participant to process the same transactions, allowing work to be split up so it can handle far more activity at a supposedly lower cost. The company claims the approach could scale to up to 2 million transactions per second across multiple environments, delivering roughly 100,000x faster performance than Ethereum and about 500x greater throughput than Solana.  Decrypt was unable to verify those claims. LayerZero did not provide further test data or independent benchmarks to support those figures. It also denied requests for written responses, instead offering “video material with leadership to cover the announcement in more detail.” Zero is set to launch in the fall of 2026 with three initial permissionless environments focused on smart contracts, payments, and trading across asset classes.  ZRO, the native governance token for LayerZero, will be used to coordinate the network and connect Zero with more than 165 other chains, per the statement. Companies including Google, Circle, and Stripe have been exploring and building permissioned ledgers and payments systems to enable faster settlement and global transfers. Zero, on the other hand, maintains that it is “permissionless to validate, build, and transact on.”