the scalability trade-off is dead, with Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero

0:00 You went from professional poker player to selling an AI tool to building a three billion crypto infrastructure company. How do you connect all those chapters? When I played poker, I was obsessed with poker.

0:10 It was the only thing I wanted to do. And then after poker got banned in the United States, I really became obsessed with entrepreneurship, and, like, that really started that.

0:18 And so that drove me down this path, and then eventually, in crypto, you know, I've been in the space first touch 2011, pretty heavily involved from 2013 forward.

0:27 How does a, an asset manager, a bank, uh, of today need to think about what's gonna happen in the next couple of years? I think they're already thinking about it.

0:36 Again, I, I think you, you can't live in a world where Tether makes more money than most banks on 100 employees, and Hyperliquid does more volume than, like, all of the central counter.

0:46 You know, like you're just-- Everybody's already paying attention.

0:48 You also once wrote that crypto's real promise was giving every person on the planet an escape hatch from intermediaries and gatekeepers, and now your biggest partners are DTCC, Citadel, and Fidelity.

1:00 Has the mission changed? The way that we've always thought about it is- Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, today with Brian Pellegrino. Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

1:16 Brian, I'm delighted to have you here today. Most people in crypto know you as the CEO of LayerZero.

1:23 Fewer know that before you ever touched blockchain, you were one of the top heads-up poker players on the planet, grinding tens of thousands of hours under the screen name PrimordialAA.

1:35 When poker stopped being a challenge, you built an AI that could predict a pitcher's performance pitch by pitch and sold it to Billy Beane, the Moneyball guy, at the Oakland A.

1:45 And today you run a $3 billion infrastructure company, and last month, Citadel Securities, DTCC, and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange lined up behind his newest bet, a blockchain called Zero that claims to process 2 million transactions per second.

2:02 Brian, extremely excited to have you on the show. Welcome. Yeah, amazing. I'm, uh, super, super excited for it. Brian, can you just take us, uh, back in history a little bit?

2:11 You went from a professional poker player to selling an AI tool, uh, to building a three billion crypto infrastructure company. What's the thought line here, and, and how do you connect all those chapters? I'm not sure.

2:24 I mean, they, they've all, they're all, they all compound. Everything compounds in life. Uh, I, you know, I, it-- So I think all the experiences have been helpful. There, there wasn't, like, a pure through line, right?

2:33 I, I'm driven, for the most part, by obsession. When I played poker... Uh, actually, when I got into programming early on, I was obsessed with programming. It was just, like, the only thing I wanted to do.

2:43 And then when I played poker, I was obsessed with poker. It was the only thing I wanted to do.

2:47 And then after poker got banned in the United States, uh, I really became obsessed with entrepreneurship, and, like, that really started that.

2:55 And so that, um, drove me down this path, and then eventually I saw DeepMind's, uh, sort of Atari Agent demo and got this obsession with AI and spent a bunch of time.

3:05 So I, I told, like you mentioned, some of the, um, those models for a bunch of the pro baseball teams and, and then eventually published with, with Noam Brown and published this AI research.

3:15 Um, in crypto, you know, I've, I've, I've been in the space first touch 2011, pretty heavily involved from 2013 forward. But it really, LayerZero was, was the same thing.

3:24 It was, it was five and a half years ago almost now. I just had, w- we had this core idea, and it's just a thing that you just, like, can't look away from.

3:33 It's a thing you think about when you go to bed at night, when you're in the shower, when you wake up in the morning. And so, uh, I don't-- It hasn't been, like, a coherent, "This is what I set out to do."

3:42 It has been a, a moment or an idea that has captured me, and then you just run it at completely sort of full steam.

3:49 So I, I would just say a very, uh, deep, deep obsession, uh, in each of these things has been, has, has been the only real through line. Yeah. No, we're gonna talk about that obsession in a minute.

3:59 Um, uh, let's stay with, with poker for a bit. You said poker taught you more about risk management than an MBA ever could.

4:06 Can you explain us that a little bit, and, and how does that permeate now what you're doing at LayerZero? Yeah. I mean, poker is, uh...

4:14 there, there's, there's nowhere to hide in poker, especially the game that I played w- was just heads up, right? And so it is really, uh, your, your, your results tell the, the full story.

4:24 There's no, uh, you know, hidden bits there, right? So, uh, luck in a, in sort of binomial distribution, y- you, you, you understand sort of luck, luck can have an impact in the short term, not in the long term.

4:34 And so I think you just learn a lot of things. You learn about how to think about risk. You learn about how to think about, like, asymmetry.

4:41 You learn how about, um, even just simple things in, in terms of expected value and probabilistic thinking. Uh, and then more than that is really the, the mechanics of playing poker, and it's different playing live.

4:52 When you're playing online, you know, you're playing six to eight tables at a time, extremely high stakes, so you're making a decision every, you know, 0.3 seconds roughly, which is just like, you know, decision, decision, decision, decision, and this is repeated every 0.3 seconds for 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and every one of those decisions is for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you don't really get to...

5:15 You, you don't even acknowledge or, or look at what the result was, right? You actually make it, and you immediately have another decision that's over here on the screen to, to make.

5:23 And so you, it is really just focused on synthesizing vast amounts of information very, very quickly, making the best possible decision in that exact moment, and then moving on.

5:34 And, like, the results, you don't even see the results until the end. At the end of the day, then you go back and you check, and you see where you made sort of big deviations or big mistakes.

5:42 Um, but I think that conditioning to, to think about asymmetry, to think about risk in an evaluation perspective and to understand that the immediate result doesn't necessarily matter, the process into the making the best decision at every single point in time and being able to, like, leave once the decision is made and is out of your hand, like, that's fine, uh, and just continue, right?

6:04 That, that compounds over time of just the best possible decisions over and over and over again and, and, and that usually leads to something pretty wonderful.

6:12 And can you take us back in time about four years ago when you started with LayerZero Labs? What was the kind of information that you took in? H- what was your

6:21 universe in your head that eventually led to the foundation of, uh, LayerZero Labs. What was your thinking there back then? Yeah, to be honest, it was almost more exploration.

6:32 And I think a lot of things happen early, right? Poker early on was just a game. Programming early on was just, was just a g- tinkering thing, right? And so, uh, I had been in this space for a while.

6:42 Smart contracts made it much more interesting as a whole, so that was one element that was added to it. And then after that, um, what you really had was, was this explosion of, of DeFi things happening.

6:54 And so one thing that started happening is we were hearing every day Binance Smart Chain, more users than Ethereum, more volume than Ethereum.

7:02 And this was, like, very, um, very, very unique, very interesting, 'cause a lot of other chains existed at the time, but, but nobody, like, used them. It was just total vaporware, sort of ghost towns at the time.

7:14 And so that itself, more users than Ethereum, more volume than Ethereum, was interesting.

7:17 So we said, "Hey, what could you do with this environment that was fast and cheap, but you treated it, you know, don't, don't trust it in the beginning.

7:25 Trust Ethereum and, and just treat it as entirely ephemeral," right? You're gonna, you're gonna almost like a roll-up before a roll-up, right?

7:30 So you're gonna have this fast and cheap environment, you're gonna do a bunch of computation there, and then you're gonna roll the result back. And actually, the fir- like, for, again, it was, it was more

7:40 driven by joy, by interest. Like, the first thing we did, the, the way we tinkered, was we actually built a game. We built a toy game that was between the two chains.

7:47 And it was a game just for, not something we're gonna release, not... So it was just for us, just a little toy game we were tinkering on.

7:53 And as we were building that, we realized that there was no way to take the resulting state of what we had done in the game and send it back to Ethereum.

8:01 And that led us down this path of, of, of bridges and realizing that, you know, surely there was some way to do this. And then we looked at the ways to do it, and it was, like, terrifying.

8:12 Uh, you know, really we were horrified by the security and we're like, you know, we would never trust any amount of money, let alone billions of dollars.

8:18 And then now, fast-forward to today, there's been almost five, $5.5 billion of, of bridge hacks, um, just from that sort of like, that, that was right, right? It was, I mean, it was really bad back then.

8:29 And so then we started to say, "Well, well, could we build a better bridge?" Right? Could we do that? And we started to design what became Stargate later on.

8:36 We started to design the mechanics for what a better bridge looked like. And as we're building that, we realized we had the exact same problem, that there was still no way to trigger events.

8:44 You couldn't actually do arbitrary contract invocation between chains. And then that led us to like, like, of course, that's the generalizable problem, and that just became so apparent to us then.

8:54 But it only became apparent because we were building for ourselves. We were building for ourselves, we were solving our own problems that we saw in the world.

9:02 And then by the time we got there, we just had so much conviction that we had explored, we'd already exhausted the space of, of what was possible. Uh, and then it was just what is the best possible way to do this, right?

9:12 And how can you harden this thing, and how can you, um, make it resilient and usable and generic and, like, all of these things, right?

9:18 Uh, but early on leading us there was, was, it was just, again, it was more driven by joy and exploration than, um, you know, we had no intention of starting a business, that's for sure.

9:29 And, uh, Bryan, you recently had a very, very high-profile announcement. You launched an actual blockchain, a Layer 1. Can you take us back to those conversations?

9:39 So you had very high-profile partners in that launch as well. Citadel Securities, I mentioned it, ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, DTCC. Uh, can you walk us through those conversations?

9:51 How did they start and, and how did you convince them to get involved with LayerZero, but also in, with blockchain in general? Yeah. So

10:00 I think for, for the most part it was, uh, it was funny, I was just answering a similar question of like what was, what was the, like, one-line pitch? I was like- Mm...

10:09 I, I've always been ba- I've always been bad at one-line pitches. That's never been the case. And so really it was, it was getting in the room and it was walking them through.

10:15 And so we had the, we had the opportunity to present to sort of the executive team of the DTC, and it was walking them through everything sort of that we had b- done.

10:26 Like here, here is the existing systems, here is how they work, here is sort of the constraints of those systems, here are the specific breakthroughs that we've had, and here is the result, and here's what exists.

10:35 And so Dan Doney, the, the CTO of the DTC at our, at our event sort of was on stage and he very publicly said like, "Listen, like we've, we, we've seen every, you know, all of these groups have been pitched every single iteration of a blockchain of the technology they could possibly be pitched," right?

10:49 And he said, "We've seen it all and we've tried it all, and we sort of have built a structure and we could get maybe to 1,000 transactions per second, but once we put in the data and everything else we want, you're, you're talking like 100 transactions per second."

11:01 And so one thing he did is he said, "Prove it," right?

11:04 Uh, and so we had to, we had a demo for them and we show this 2 million transactions per second live in production and, and sort of on stage he says, you know, y- you know, "And it's real." And I was blown away, right?

11:14 And I think that really was the-- These were conversations that were driven by we, like, one, our existing positioning, right?

11:23 So we existed in market, we have, you know, almost $100 billion built on top of us today, hundreds of billions of dollars moving across LayerZero.

11:30 Like we have earned sort of the, the right over time to maybe have some of these conversations and get in the room.

11:35 But once we were there, I mean, these are really obviously, like very sharp, critical organizations who have seen for m- for most groups g- getting one of these would be, you know, massive. It would be a huge unlock.

11:49 So getting all of them together re- really says something. But what really was showing them something, and they, they sort of reflect this in their commentary, that exists now that, that could not exist before, right?

11:59 It is, you could not have the New York Stock Exchange on chain, uh, in, in any system that exists prior, right? It just could, could not happen. And now they're saying, "Oh, oh wow, that is possible."

12:11 And some of this is driven by, like, opportunity and what that presents, and some of that is driven to, hey, we're like reframing our mental model of like how fast this space is moving and maybe disruptive forces and other things, right?

12:21 So every group has their own, um, you know- Sort of reasons for, for what gets him excited or interested in w- in wanting to lean in and do something. But the conversations were very technical driven.

12:33 It was very much, uh, what could be done. And I think that prospect of what could be done, 'cause most of the world before that was like, blockchains are great and they're interesting,

12:44 but to really do what we wanna do, we're gonna have to run this little tiny private conglomerate, right? We're gonna have to run our own chain. We're gonna have to run our own, you know, X, Y, or Z.

12:53 And you're just gonna have a world of, of sort of private instances everywhere. Uh, and I think this was one of the first times they said, "Oh, oh wow, like n- now we actually can do it."

13:02 So you have BlackRock sort of publicly evangelizing tokenization of everything and public chain thesis and that, and it's like, okay, now, now some of these things are actually possible in that world.

13:11 And I think that, that really, um, struck a chord at exactly the right time. Yeah.

13:17 And you, you just mentioned some of these numbers, and I- I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, but that's 2 million transactions per second. That's about 15,000 times as much as Ethereum. Uh, so- Yep...

13:30 those are the numbers that we're working with. And I think you also mentioned that LayerZero's, or Zero's, that's the name of the blockchain, Zero's architecture moves the industry roadmap forward by at least a decade.

13:45 For our institutional allocators and our audience who are evaluating where to place bets on infrastructure, what does Zero make so much better than what chains today can deliver today?

13:58 How, how do you solve that scalability issue without compromising in other areas like security? Yep. Yeah. So really there's two--

14:07 As we viewed it, when we started to explore this problem, we viewed it as just two distinct paths you could take, and one was a path of, of extreme decentralization. So this was Ethereum.

14:17 You were going to be cheap, accessible, decentralized. Um, transactions might be expensive, but running nodes would be cheap. Um, but you're gonna be slow, right?

14:26 And you're gonna be at 15 transactions per second like Ethereum today. Or you could go the Solana route, and you can be fast, uh, extremely fast, but it's going to be extremely expensive to run a node.

14:35 So this is gonna be sort of a, a centralizing force, right? You'll only have a couple of hundreds of nodes as opposed to, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands of nodes. And so our early

14:44 conceptualization of this was just, can you be as, as fast as Solana and as decentralized as Ethereum? And obviously we overshot, right?

14:52 'Cause that's like doing, you know, a thousand transactions per second and, and being able to be as decentralized as Ethereum. And we, we landed at sort of millions of transactions per second.

15:00 That was an opening question. And to answer the why others can't or what changes, a lot of this is just we had a series of very large breakthroughs that all compounded very heavily on each other.

15:12 And so one thing was, was this path of zero-knowledge proofs.

15:16 And, and you're, you know, we're like a decade into Z- Z- ZK and the evolution of this technology, and most of the world was looking at it purely through the lens of privacy.

15:26 And we started really looking at it through the lens of the, of the ability to just remove replication from an underlying blockchain. So the co- the core problem of a lot of this is replication.

15:34 So if you have a million nodes in your network, and you're doing some amount of computation, right?

15:38 Some transaction, some processing, all 1 million nodes have to download the data, download the transactions, and process that. So you re- you repeat the exact same computation a million times.

15:48 It's, like, very inefficient, right? So we saw the ability to ZK to, like, solve a bunch of this.

15:53 And then you have the existing systems that are now trying to take their old system and plug in sort of this new technology on top of this.

16:00 And so on top of this path of ZK, uh, and us having a very unique insight on, on how to build from the, from the ground up these systems, uh, we, we invented, uh, and originated out of, out of LayerZero QMDB, which was a, a really, really large breakthrough.

16:15 And so this is on the database side and sort of questioned this core property of, uh, of whether, whether you actually needed a try and whether, like, MPT was actually the right data structure for a bunch of these.

16:26 And so, um, QMDB, you know, you're talking 3 million updates per second. Um, you're, you know, 100x faster than the fastest verifiable database in the world.

16:36 Six X faster even from the fastest unverifiable database, which was like RocksDB out of Facebook. So even non apples to apples, they're faster than existing ver- unverifiable databases while being verifiable.

16:47 And then that unlock, now that you have this, this scale on the, on the storage side, 'cause physical storage had historically been a very big bottleneck, well, then you actually had this unlock of, of we published a paper on FAFO showing, well, now with this, you can actually, with the scheduling algorithm, you can achieve over a million transactions per second on the EVM.

17:05 And then with that, you run into this problem of network, because now every node in the network needs to download all of the transactions and all of the data.

17:12 And if you're doing a million tran-- like even Solana is, is running up against sort of bandwidth constraints, uh, thousands of transactions per second and millions of transactions per second.

17:20 It's not even remotely close. And so then, uh, ZK with SVID was sort of this next breakthrough that we had. With the ZK side, it's actually ability to, to sort of compress the data.

17:30 So every node doesn't need to download all of the data. They can only download a shard of the data, the transaction commitment, and you can h- sort of have the exact same properties that you would have otherwise.

17:38 And so all of these things compounded together, and I, I like to use this expression monger at it of like a, a Lollapalooza effect.

17:46 And it really had this Lollapalooza effect of, of a completely new architecture from the ground up and a bunch of breakthroughs that, that sort of were not industry breakthroughs. They were our breakthroughs, right?

17:56 These were things that we originated out of LayerZero, and we were the ones who sort of like founded this unique breakthrough that ended up with an architecture that is, that is able to be just substantially more, uh, distributed while at the same time having, like, substantially more scalability than any existing system.

18:13 And so, uh, that, that really is, like, how we got there. It wasn't a single thing. But what makes it hard about the existing systems is a lot of this is driven by the ZK side.

18:22 So, like, Solana, uh, is c- you know, unverifiable.

18:25 Uh, so they, you sacrifice light clients, uh, which seems sort of maybe right at the time for them to, to try to do to hit the scaling route that they're going, which was towards Visa-style throughput.

18:35 Um, but then you also d- don't have the ability to use ZK, uh, which, which really, like, now becomes a very big hindrance. And Ethereum does

18:44 But they have a, they have a very long way to go to be able to, like, reshape the entire existing system, right? And so for us, we really had the benefit of, of just having the unique insight. We're not trying to

18:55 paste it into an existing system. It is from the ground up, first principles, assume that the extreme ZK is solved, what does the world look like?

19:02 And then have slowly sort of incremented our way towards creating that world.

19:05 And when did it click for you during that journey when you realized that you need to move from just building cross-chain bridges to actually building a layer one blockchain that competes against Ethereums and Solanas of the world?

19:20 So, so honestly, it didn't click for, like, for me. This was driven by my co-founder Raz, and he was very, very, like, disillusioned with the, with the space, right? Uh, with the way that things were going.

19:33 And so at the time, Ethereum had sort of sacrificed its sharding roadmap and had gone to layer two-centric roadmap, and they were pushing this, this idea that layer twos themselves sort of, uh, are an extension of Ethereum.

19:46 They inherit the underlying security of Ethereum. They, they sort of carry all of that.

19:50 And Ryan was just very, um, aggressively opinionated that this was not at all the case, and this would basically sort of never be the case for that. And so every day he was complaining about this stuff. And I was like,

20:02 like, I mean, L-L2s at the time were fifty percent of our overall volume at layer zero, and I was like, "Like, chill out." Like, these are our biggest customers. Like, you know what I mean?

20:10 Uh, we were very focused on just, like, building the core layer zero.

20:13 But, but he really, really, um, was pushing this idea that this was overall a centralizing force and sort of bad overall for the, for what he views, you know, the trajectory of the industry.

20:24 And eventually I was just, you know, w- "All right, wise guy, like, what, what would you do," right? And he, he started to whiteboard this idea, and he, he took this really unique unlock, and he drew this architecture.

20:36 And obviously, like most things that we do internally, we just debated it heavily. My first instinct is, "No, this is stupid. Like, I can break it here, and I can break it here."

20:43 And we just went back and forth, and eventually he had gotten to a point where, where, like, I couldn't break it anymore.

20:49 It was very clear to me that, that long term, that was going to be the way that these systems looked like. But for us, there were two things.

20:56 One, we, we didn't know when ZK would be ready, and, uh, you know, could be 10, 20 years. We didn't know where the, like, when that actually could happen.

21:04 And then we thought some of the stuff would just be, like, completely off the shelf, sort of commoditized. And, uh, so we started to tinker and look at what this might look like.

21:13 And then our chief architect sort of had this breakthrough. He had, he had a baby.

21:16 He went on paternity leave, and while he was there, he had a lot of time to think, and he created, uh, QMDB while he was on this paternity leave.

21:23 And so this unlock of QMDB, well, we're like, "Oh, well, well, now this becomes very interesting."

21:28 And so it wasn't until about then, um, and so you're talking maybe a year and a half, two years ago, uh, and then it was like, "Okay, well, w-we really, like, have to do this now."

21:38 Um, and it, it, it felt, um, you know, or originally it was, like, a moral obligation for me. It was like, we have to do this because it is, like, good for the industry.

21:48 But we didn't know that it was possible to do or when we could do it.

21:51 It was just, like, a almost a distant future, um, where we were convinced that that was what it was like, and we were hoping other people were gonna move there. And then with QMDB, it became like,

22:01 well, now we, we like, we can do it right now, or we can, like, start solving these unlocks to, to get us there. And so that's when it really became real.

22:08 Something that you did as well is you use a architecture with three permissionless zones, and one of those zones is the privacy zone, and that's interesting because institutions consistently said they w-won't put sensitive data on public blockchains and, and that has been a challenge with Ethereum and, and Solana and other layer one chains.

22:29 Can you expand on that a little bit? What's, what are those, uh, zones and, and what's the privacy zone?

22:35 There's, like, a fourth shadow zone too, which is system zone, but this is more just for staking and for, for other things. So you, you can write that off for now. But, uh, three zones of review.

22:43 Cr-crypto as a whole really has three pieces of existing product market fit, right? One is general purpose smart contracts, right? This is composables, this is DeFi, this is stable coins.

22:52 This is, like, all of these things together in a, in a single environment, right? And so, you know, general purpose EVM zone, that's zone one.

23:00 Zone two is our very strong belief that markets are moving from seven/five to twenty-four/seven, and, like, the global markets of the world are, are sort of going to be reshaped, and it is driven, uh, by the success of stable coins.

23:13 Have been a very large bellwether here. You know, Tether is making ten to fifteen billion dollars a year and a hundred employees and, and just incredibly profitable, one of the best businesses on the planet.

23:23 You have Hyperliquid now does more volume than, than sort of like Robinhood or some of the century, uh, more traditional counterparts, right?

23:31 Um, and so, like, all of these things are just, like, driving forces, that this, this is happening. And obviously the focus of this was bringing together the, the DTCs, the ISES, the Citadels of the world.

23:42 The-these were sort of the groups as we're, as we're talking about what does the evolution of markets actually look like.

23:47 And then the third zone is sort of a focus on, on payments, on, on privacy, on what, what this actually looks like. And there's been a lot of work in terms of how, how do you actually...

23:55 Like you said, most groups are not going to just open up their data for, for whether even, even, even in corporate, but even, like, intercompany payment. If I'm paying my employees just payroll, right?

24:08 Uh, you would not want every employee to basically see exactly what everyone is making and be able to look and target the employees. Like, all of these different things just become, like, nobody wants to do that.

24:19 Uh, there's, there's, like, common sense privacy of, of just not, uh, exposing every single thing that you do, and I think that's been one of the downsides of blockchains historically, is that is just one.

24:30 I mean, public, you want it to be verifiable. That is, like, a very key critical property across the board. But you don't necessarily want every single person to see every single thing that you do.

24:40 Uh, and so there's, there's...

24:42 One of the benefits of ZK is that just, like, in building this team that is incredible and has these breakthroughs in ZK along the way, which have largely been from the compression side of ZK and driven there Happens to be the same technology is incredibly powerful from, from private perspective in, in terms of data and information.

25:00 Um, and so we've just spent a lot of cycles there. Uh, very excited to sort of show over time what we've built alongside people, what that actually looks like, um, all, all, all of that.

25:09 And so, uh, yeah, uh, very excited to show more. Yeah, excited to, to see more.

25:15 Uh, Brian, uh, one thing you announced as well during that announcement three weeks ago is that Cathie Wood, Michael Blaugrund from ICE, uh, that's the parent company of New York Stock Exchange.

25:25 We had him on the podcast. And Caroline Botter, formerly, uh, BNY Mellon, are on Zero's advisory board. How active are these advisors, and are they actually doing design reviews?

25:36 Are they involved in the technical, uh, implementation, or is it more a passive role? Yeah. So I think we've been incredibly fortunate.

25:44 And it's just obviously, you just had Michael on so, uh, you know how wonderful he is. Uh, I, I think they've just all been, like, incredibly generous with their time and attention.

25:53 Uh, they have just been a group that we can pick up the phone and call at any point in time. They've all been super interested, obviously, in what we're doing, and I think they've been sort of involved in, in many ways.

26:05 Uh, but yeah, I mean, absolutely, when we're talking, um, when we're talking markets, when we're talking about, like, market structure and what this looks like, like, I'm, I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to talk to Michael, and I'm going to talk, like, how sort of ICE and NICE, like, think about these things.

26:21 I'm going to talk to Cathie. Uh, you know, these, these are conversations that happen pretty frequently, and they're, again, just, like, really generous with their time and, uh- Mm-hmm... w- we take full advantage of it.

26:31 I think it's great to have people like that. Another number that you mentioned during that release, and you mentioned it before as well, is that 2 million transactions per second throughput.

26:40 And something we've heard or read, uh, in those announcements was, "Yeah, that's great, but that number right now is not verified." Have you verified that internally?

26:50 And if yes, like, do we have, like, public documents, uh, that people can look up and see h- how you actually did that? Yep, absolutely.

26:58 So, like, we stood on stage at DemoNet and showed sort of verifying a million transactions per second, one month of Ethereum's history in 30 seconds on this network of Raspberry Pis.

27:07 So everybody in the room at the event sort of watched us do this demo. Now, uh, again, in, in DTC, my, um, Dan Donney from DTC, he, uh, CTO of the DTCC, publicly sort of states exactly this.

27:21 Like, s- saw this, saw it in production, it's real, et cetera. So we have done demos for groups. We have, like... Th- this was not a please trust us on the technology.

27:29 Again, these, like, very, very sharp, critical organizations, um, and just continue to go down that path. So we already, you know, I'm, I am playing with our own internal testnet.

27:39 Uh, all, all of these things are, are live and in production. And so that side, uh, absolutely. But what we did say post-event is honestly, we're, we're reasonably happy, uh, for some amount of skepticism into the fall.

27:54 Like, we think it's good. We actually think people should be. Claims get thrown around all the time. Uh, we think people should have some healthy degree of skepticism.

28:02 Uh, our public statement has been, like, we are going to show every step of the way along the way, and we will publish.

28:08 We've obviously published QMDB, which has been, like, heavily peer-reviewed, now being rolled out through Commonware into some of even the largest, newer, um, sort of performance blockchains in the world.

28:18 Same thing with Fabric, so on and on. Code is there, uh, publicly verifiable. Experiments are publicly verifiable, all of these things, right? Um, and so we will continue to do that along the way.

28:29 Strategically, we didn't think we have to, uh, show every bit of everything on announcement day, on Feb 10th, and then sort of just, uh, have seven to nine months for everybody to have it all.

28:40 We're very comfortable, like, have this, be skeptical, that's fine. It's our job to convince you. We will show and convince you along the way.

28:47 Uh, we will have everything publicly observable, uh, very clearly by mainnet this fall. So, uh, launch of the mainnet is this fall. Uh, you're still in that timeline. What happens between now and then? Yeah.

29:00 So, uh, again, when we stood on stage, we, we had sort of DemoNet, right? So the ability to show verifying these transactions and the, the first version of the network.

29:09 Since then, we've already gone local net, internal testnet. Again, I, I'm, like, live. I can deploy contracts, I can play, I can do everything. And then there's this in-flight, uh, work on the other two zones, right?

29:20 So it is finalizing the, the market structure of the market zone and the actual, uh, sort of everything that goes into building that.

29:28 And then the same thing on, on the privacy side and the payment side, and what does that actually look like working with partners in bringing, uh, the full set of requirements from their end to market and actually being able to deliver those things.

29:41 Um, so it's, it's a big exercise of... I mean, I think most of the hard technical core underlying stuff is done.

29:48 Uh, and it's actually, it's funny, we g- we got a bunch of, um, sort of criticism or skepticism online, which is, um, sort of like a, "Yeah, but have they thought about this? Have they thought about this?"

29:58 And our, our, you know, team is br- really brilliant, amazing, uh, group. Um, sort of was like, "Do, do they think we're idiots?" Like, of, you know, like, of course.

30:10 So there's, like, so much stuff that we've done that we haven't published yet, which is, again, fine. Healthy skepticism is totally fine, but I think a lot of the core stuff we've gotten done.

30:18 There's still a ton on the, on the economic side.

30:21 There's still a ton on the sort of feature richness side, uh, to get the partners that we're aiming for to be able to actually, like, be using these systems live in production.

30:31 And then there's a whole motion of, of sort of like go to market. It is not enough to just launch a chain and, like, hope everybody comes anymore. Uh, we're, we're not, like, naive enough to think that.

30:40 We've been obviously in the, in the groups that we've pulled together and, um, just very, very clear focus on, on actually getting, like, meaningful value into production immediately.

30:52 Uh, and fortunately, this is something we've been very good about on the LayerZero side because, you know, we started, nobody knew anything about us, and we have just slowly, you know, now we're today where, uh, where we are today, and that, that has just been on the back of really finding groups who are

31:08 Motivated to, to build meaningful systems that, that shape, actually shape parts of their business.

31:13 And this had been groups like, you know, Tether, and this has been groups like PayPal, and this has been groups like Athena and these, uh, which we have really just spent a lot of time and a lot of cycles building real production systems with.

31:25 And then watching that grow steadily to, to doing, you know, from, from millions to billions to tens of billions of dollars monthly.

31:34 Uh, and that evolution is just built on, like, finding the groups who the outcome will, will meaningfully shape their business, and spending the cycles and actually doing it and getting it there to production.

31:46 I think we're just gonna-- we're doing the exact same thing. Yeah, yeah.

31:49 Yeah, and, and speaking about Tether, uh, you also launched a USDT Zero stablecoin that went from zero to 70 billion in cross-chain transfers in under 12 months.

31:59 I think that's one of the fastest adoptions of anything in crypto history. But what was the unlock for that? What made this possible? Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. This is, it's one of my favorite examples to give

32:13 when I talk to other institutions because most people don't understand necessarily the value in, in distribu- They, they generally understand the value in distribution.

32:21 But like, yeah, yeah, we'll just, once we're on Ethereum and Solana or once we're on here and here and here, like we're pretty much covered, right? We're done. Um, and so Tether at the time, Tether had like $186 billion.

32:33 Uh, they, they'd sort of like saturated the landscape of, of core chains that you would think most people like want to be on or must be on, right? And so USDT Zero was this concept of like, hey,

32:46 ex- like, let USDT Zero as a, as a concept extend this to these, these other environments, um, that we think have a ton of value, but historically may have been challenging or just like, you know, they, they just like hadn't, um, taken the time to go there yet, right?

33:03 But it was really something that I think there was a lot of skepticism around, uh, how, how much like, you know, let, let's see where, what the underlying value is and what that actually looks like.

33:12 'Cause all of the value, you know, Ethereum and Tron alone were like 180 of the 186 billion, right? It was just like almost all of the value was just on those two chains.

33:22 It would've been very difficult for most to drive really meaningful growth. And so we did this, and we extended it to these networks.

33:30 And fast-forward and, like you said, nine months later, it's done $75 billion in volume. At one point, it had grown AUM by like $10 billion, which is, you know, $400, $450 million directly net on the bottom line.

33:43 Uh, and it was just like very clear that there was, it, it, there is immense value, even in the longer tail of distribution, much more than people give it credit for.

33:52 And so that I think has just been an incredible proof point to every other organization looking to expand.

33:58 And I think you now see this happening with, with lots of other asset issuers and lots of other, um, again, obviously like Ondos, tokenized equities, a bunch of the other tokenized equities are built on top of LayerZero.

34:09 And so you start to see even, even across asset classes, which, uh, has, has been really amazing. And, and who do you think drove that adoption, those 70 billion in cross-chain transfers? Were those like retail users?

34:20 Are those institutional traders? Yeah. I, I think- What mix set up? Yeah, I think it's a mix. I mean, certainly, definitely retail, uh, is, is responsible for some portion of that flow.

34:30 But at the same time, we have, we had a single transfer that was $800 million, right? Like almost a billion dollars in one single transfer. Um, and so there, there, there's a strong mix, right?

34:39 These are market makers who are taking advantage of sort of like all of the expansion of arbitrage.

34:45 Before, it's very, very hard, uh, to actually get assets in each of these chains, or it's very hard to get them out of the chain.

34:50 And so now if there's an opportunity, you can have USDT equivalent there, like, a- almost instantly, right? Um, and so you have the ability to capture much more economic surface.

35:01 Um, and then certainly it is retail, and it is just, uh, there, there's a bunch of applications themselves that drive some of these pathways. So it's been, it's been a pretty big mix.

35:11 Um, but you're talking high dollar number transfers.

35:15 You know, there, there's a large number of small value transfers and then a small number of very, very high value transfers, and those are just very clearly bifurcated between like the institutional side and the retail side.

35:25 Okay. So I, I also wanna talk a little bit about interoperability. Um, one of the players, uh, probably a lot of people know is Chainlink.

35:32 Then we have Wormhole, which has one of the deepest Solana ecosystem integrations. Aliche, Axelar is another one with, on Cosmos.

35:40 If you're an executive and you need to decide what kind of interoperability standard you wanna go with, what's the case for LayerZero? Yeah.

35:49 I mean, listen, uh, we, we have to make this case all the time, so it's like extremely straightforward in my mind.

35:55 Today, we are about 85% of every single message and all of the value that sort of gets moved across the ecosystem.

36:01 So like the next largest, uh, especially of the, sort of the three you mentioned, you're, you're talking single-digit percentages of market share. So I think there is a lot of

36:12 presentation or theater around the state of the world maybe being more competitive than it is at the moment.

36:18 But if you wanna look at what is live, what is in production, uh, LayerZero is a thing that is live in production, moving, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars annually with almost $100 billion built on top of it, right?

36:29 So that's, that's one. And then the second is that every single one of these groups that you mentioned, uh, their contracts are upgradable.

36:36 And this always been, this is a very opinionated stance we took early on, and we said, "We are making our contracts 100% immutable. Measure twice, cut once. We have no ability to change them." We stood behind that.

36:48 We said, "Here's a $15 million bug bounty. If you can break it, if you can find any existing bug, we will just pay you $15 million outright."

36:56 Um, we're five and a half years later, never been broken, obviously securing a massive amount of value, doing a massive amount of transactional volume.

37:04 Uh, when you look at the security of systems, you have to measure just like how much is secured in the time in production. Those are really the factors I think most institutions factor in.

37:13 And if you look at the bridge hacks, we're $5 billion of bridge hacks later Every single, the, the common sort of trope or concern that everyone has is, is that the validator set will be malicious, right?

37:24 That the validator set is going to be the thing that, that becomes corrupt, and you have all these parties colluding, and they rug all of the users' money. And that has never been the case.

37:33 100% of these hacks have happened for totally benign reasons.

37:37 They've been developers who are pushing an upgrade to ma- you know, make it a little bit more attractive or add a new feature, do this thing, and they push a piece of code, and humans make mistakes over time, right?

37:48 There is just, like, an error rate that is going to happen. Um, so, like, the hack for Wormhole of $350 million was just this. And actually, the same thing that they did,

37:59 another person there made the same mistake another week later, which fortunately was found by, by a white hat, right? And so, like, you have this hack and then, uh, on and on in all of these.

38:09 They've, they, they've been compromising of keys, there have been control issues, they have been benign, uh, pushing-code issues. It has never been this scary, malicious validator set, right?

38:19 And so, um, that we are the only group who has ever basically been building with that model in mind, and I think that has resonated very deeply with a lot of the institutions that listen.

38:30 Like, if you're Goldman Sachs, like, guess what? You're probably not going to hand write access of your, of your bank and of the internal ledger over to some third party, right?

38:40 And with us, that has always been the case. You, you don't need to trust us. Infrastructure is infrastructure. If you wanna handshake directly with your counterparty, you can handshake directly.

38:48 You can run the infrastructure, and now we have more and more groups, right? We have, uh, Fidelity just announced that they're running a DVN.

38:54 They're, like, really large institutional groups who are starting to provide some of this core infrastructure.

39:00 And so all of those things sort of compound together to have just-- They've, they've made a, a more compelling offering overall, and I think that's been our biggest wedge in market, is just, like, just focusing on making the best possible product for the customer set that we're focused on.

39:14 Yeah, and you also acquired Stargate for $110 million US, beating a competing bid from Wormhole. Uh, what did that Stargate acquisition unlock for you? Yeah.

39:25 So it's, it's actually very interesting because, uh, it's interesting that we have, you know, competing bids at the time here. 'Cause we built Stargate, right?

39:31 We built, uh, Stargate was that first bridge that we had thought about building.

39:35 When we launched LayerZero, we also launched Stargate because we thought the ecosystem needed, um, you know, you had to show what could be built with the underlying technology.

39:44 LayerZero was entirely net new at the time, entirely fresh code. You had to give people an easier way to adopt, abstract the value transfer layer away.

39:53 And so Stargate, fast-forward today, has done, you know, $150-plus billion of volume, like hugely widely adopted. For us, we knew Zero, this blockchain, was coming up.

40:03 We knew all of the things, and Stargate had sort of been stranded. It had been, you know, so we, we launched it, and then we had to bring in this external foundation. It was run by this external group.

40:12 Uh, and it was, it was one of those things where it was, hey, like, we want to have sort of everybody aligned.

40:19 We don't wanna have this misalignment of, uh, of all of these people who had made a bet on Stargate and made a bet on this thing we built early not to have any, like, vested interest in these other things that we're doing.

40:31 Um, and so part of it was, like, this consolidation of just, like, bring everything together.

40:35 And part of it was the ability to have a more direct relationship with the end consumer and to be able to build up the stack and not rely on these third parties to sort of run Stargate or run the other consumer applications, but say, "Hey, we have a, a more developed product thesis of what people actually want and how we can add value to all the asset issuers."

40:55 And ultimately, asset issuers have been our largest, uh, sort of customer of, of LayerZero, the interoperability side, uh, forever now.

41:02 Um, and so it was more, you know, we saw a very strategic way to add value to them with offerings that we could build out within Stargate. Okay.

41:09 So, um, one of the things you also mentioned in that announcement, uh, four weeks ago is that you partnered with Google. Google is exploring AI agent micropayments.

41:19 You also backed TrueNorth for out- autonomous agent wallets. And you said in another podcast that traditional payment rails are fundamentally broken for machine to machine.

41:31 Uh, can you just expand on that a little bit and explain us that vision and, and how that connects with what you're building at LayerZero? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, it's, it's very interesting. I, I,

41:43 you talk to a group, so, like, Tether is a great example of this. There's a bunch of other great examples of this, and you talk about, like, what does the world look like and demand scale for payments?

41:51 And the answers are, are so wildly varied, right?

41:55 If you look at all of pure payments today, like human payments on blockchains, global, global payments, I, I think you're talking maybe 100,000 transactions per second from, like, all sort of payment systems together.

42:06 Um, on blockchains, you're talking 50 transactions per second, roughly, across all chains, all stablecoin sort of transactions, right? Uh, so it's, it's really low. Uh, it's really, really, really low.

42:17 And when you talk to some of the people closest to the problem, they're, they're saying, like, you're, you're talking about the need for...

42:23 A Cloudflare CEO actually just, just said, uh, they, they wanna explore, like, layer one or the underlying technology, uh, because they see a world of, like, 10 million-plus transactions per second needed just from them, just from what they're doing, right?

42:37 So you talk about the agentic side. The scale goes from, like, we have 15 transactions per second on Ethereum.

42:43 We have thousands, you know, low thousands of transactions on Solana, and we're being told you need, you know, 10 million to upwards of, like, a billion transactions per second in the long run.

42:55 And that's just, like, a huge, huge disparity. And there's obviously, there is no ledger. You're never gonna do, uh, you know, a billion transactions or even, like, 200 million transactions per second on a single...

43:05 This is just never going to happen. So you have to have all, you have to move a bunch of this out to the edge. You have to have, uh, this way of, like, sort of compression. Uh, so this is peer-to-peer channels.

43:14 There's a bunch of other things you can do downstream from this. Um, but you're never gonna get that on, like, a single consolidated ledger. It will be batched back.

43:21 It's where, again, ZK becomes, like, very, very helpful. Um, but you're talking about a world where machine-to-machine language and machine-to-machine interactions right now are, are

43:31 Wild, uh, in terms of the number of these relative to a pure human interaction.

43:36 So the, the growth of the scale of that when you talk about machine-to-machine interactions, like even now, I feel like, um, you know, I'm a monkey for my, for my clawed or my, my open claw or something, right?

43:47 Like we're trying, you know, you're doing something and it's like, okay, I, I need an API access.

43:52 Go make an account and sign up and like register your credit card and get me the API key so I can now start doing this thing.

43:59 And a lot of that is just going to be stripped away, and there's a lot of conversation around like what that looks like, where you just have direct, you know, streaming payments for, for API access, streaming payments for, for different pieces of data.

44:11 So there's all of these pieces of the stack where you're going to need sort of like this, uh, ephemeral agentic sort of payment structure.

44:20 These are payments that are, are-- you're talking Visa's 2.9% plus like a 30 cent minimum, like that doesn't really work when you're talking like, you know, you're doing transactions for 1/10,000 of a penny.

44:32 And so like that, you, you need a system that can actually do that and do it gracefully and can actually scale and have core costs low, and how can you actually process these micropayments?

44:41 And so all of these things have been clearly now, um, and, uh, Google, uh, you know, uh, is the case and, and many times was like way out ahead of the curve on some of this stuff.

44:53 Um, but now it is just like everybody's interested in this. This is very clearly a big problem to solve. Yeah. Yeah. And, and how closely are, are you working with Google on that?

45:03 Are they i- involved in like technical decisions and, you know, or is this, is this more a, a vision at this point?

45:10 Yeah, so I mean- Or, or, uh, like a, a conviction that it's gonna go in that direction and we need to do something. Yeah. So Si-Simon, our CBO, actually came from Google.

45:20 He bu- built the digital asset team at Google alongside Rich. Um, and, you know, spent seven years there.

45:27 He was a, a big, you know, factor in, in pushing for Google to actually hold crypto on its balance sheet and like do all of these things.

45:33 So we've just had a very, uh, long-standing relationship, uh, with, with, with the organization. Uh, we showed them very early sort of what we were doing and working on.

45:42 They were very interested from some of the things that they're exploring. Um, and so it's, it's just a continuation.

45:48 Like goal, goal is, uh, and I think one of the, one of the benefits we have as we develop many of these things is we get to go out and talk to the absolute best groups in the industry, right?

45:58 Like when we're talking about building, you know, sort of like you're thinking about, okay, how, how does this substrate like facilitate payments or agentic payments or does it-- Like guess what?

46:07 We get to talk to Tether and Google and like all of these other partners.

46:10 When we're talking about the market zone and like what does market structure look like or what changes when you move from seven-five to 24/7 or what does it-- Like we get to go out and talk to DTCC and talk to ICE and talk to Citadel, right?

46:22 Like that is a huge benefit of bringing all of these groups together and having the partners that we do, is be able to have these conversations at the forefront of like how this is being developed and what they actually need to be able to meet sort of the demand side that they're looking at.

46:36 All right. So I would love to look a little bit into the future, and I had this conversation with Michael at IC as well.

46:43 There's gonna be a whole new reality coming towards us, where suddenly those traditional institutions need to adapt to, uh, new infrastructure, uh, 24/7 trading, um, foster settlement. What's your perspective on this?

46:58 How does a, an asset manager, a bank, uh, of today need to think about what's gonna happen in the next couple of years, given your understanding of what you're building and where this is gonna lead? Yeah.

47:11 So I think they are, um... One, I think they're already thinking about it. Again, I, I think you, you can't live in a world where

47:18 Tether makes more money than most banks on 100 employees and Hyperliquid does more volume than like all of the central counter, you know. Like you're just-- Everybody's already paying attention.

47:27 So they're-- Getting them to actually think about it is, is not the problem. They're all, they're all thinking about it, right?

47:32 And so really it is what, what are the biggest unlocks and w- who benefits the most from that or who is most disrupted from that, right?

47:38 And so like, uh, reduction of settlement times, uh, obviously is like a very, a very big thing that changes a lot in terms of what that system looks like.

47:47 Um, and moving from like, you know, T+1 or T+X settlements across a bunch of different mediums. Um, so that's one thing that's just like very clear and abundant.

47:55 The ability for like direct and immediate tokenization, the ability for, um, disintermediation of some of the trust layers. Obviously, if most--

48:07 If markets evolve in a way that, that this is sort of the underlying infrastructure for, for many markets, uh, or for the world, sort of like global markets, what does it look like for markets to move from more local and fragmented to more global as a whole?

48:19 So access to many different, um, instruments and asset types, uh, is one big shift. Again, settlement timing is one big shift. 24/7 markets is one big shift.

48:30 And each of these things like on their own right drastically change existing systems. When, when you put them all together, it is, uh, it really is like, you know, just, just completely new world.

48:41 And, uh, Brian, you also once wrote that crypto's real promise was giving every person on the planet an escape hatch from intermediaries and gatekeepers. And now your biggest partners are DTCC, Citadel, and Fidelity.

48:54 How do you think about that evolution, and has the mission changed or is it what the escape hatch always looked like? No, mission has n- mission has not changed at all, and I, I-- Freud's right.

49:05 I think this is like a great question, right?

49:07 Uh, the way that we've always thought about it is in like, again, I, I am so thankful that we have the BlackRocks of the world pushing public chains and pushing, uh, you know, publicly evangelizing for, for some of this stuff because there is a world that the technology just got rolled and it is just like a new backend for a bunch of private instances.

49:28 Like that is the world that exists, right? And the banks have a new, slightly more efficient backend or financial institutions and that's it. It's just replumbed and that's it. Uh, and I think there-

49:38 Things like Tether, things like some of these other groups have proven that permissionless access adds just immense, immense, immense value. And so I think now you see a push for a lot of that stuff.

49:49 And so, um, I think the best thing you can do is the rails themselves should be neutral and unopinionated and should provide a technology that enables these things.

50:01 And then you have the ability for all of these groups and all these financial institutions to come in and to recreate some of these systems.

50:07 And this ability to add, you know, their own, even, even today, stablecoins, right? Like stablecoins have their own layer of compliance.

50:13 They have their own layer of, like, the ability to, to do the things that they need to do to, like, exist in the existing financial system.

50:20 And you're gonna have these layers that are built in, sort of an asset side, and I think that is what you want.

50:24 Like, that is the best case is that all of these things come, and they build in their own layers, and they build in their own structures. And guess what?

50:31 The world is now built on, on neutral, sort of uncapturable permissionless rails, and that allows, really allows for, like, competition in the most healthy way.

50:43 It allows for, um, sort of like the most, uh, decentralized or the strongest security properties, the ability to take risk out of existing systems and give people a different path through that.

50:54 If you can create a system that has less risk as a whole, a system that, you know-- Aave, for example, is, you know, very recently was like, would it be a top 50 bank in the United States based on the TVL there?

51:07 This is running for, for many years for, for massive, massive amounts of volume and loans processed and all of these things, uh, without blowing up.

51:14 And like, there are-- you, you can create these primitives that offer alternatives to existing systems and trade-offs, uh, and allow for a system with less risk overall, and I think that is just, like, an incredible benefit to the world.

51:28 And that doesn't ever happen if everything ends up in private chains, right? And so, like, I think it is such a phenomenal benefit to, to humanity at large to get

51:40 these systems moving to public and open rails, even with their own layers on top of them, even with their own, um, uh, restrictions and everything that they sort of bake into these things.

51:52 I, I think, again, a stablecoin, if you went back ten years ago, 15 years, the early ethos of crypto would, would hate stablecoins, right? This centralized issuer, and they're holding treasury. You can't even verify.

52:04 Uh, you know, now you have, like, public attestations from auditors, but you can't verify on-chain, you know, the, the treasuries and how much they hold and all of that.

52:11 And, and yet you fast-forward to today, and it's actually realized that stablecoins themselves have been incredibly accretive, uh, to the, to the underlying chains themselves, right?

52:20 And this is just a, a s- an issuer that has their own set as an application, and the user can decide the trade-offs that they wanna make, but the rails themselves, uh, don't need to compromise themselves, right?

52:35 And it allows for alternatives of these things and allows for the creations of systems and these other, these other products, and I think that nature of competition just is, is incredibly good for the system at whole and for the consumer.

52:48 And, uh, Brian, I still remember when we met two years ago at ETHDenver, what you told me about how you organize your company. You're on, uh, I think now about 160-person company that's 100% in person in Vancouver.

53:03 In an industry that's obsessed with decentralizing everything, why is that still the right call? Yeah. Um, it's a trade-off, right? So, uh, pragmatism is, is the real answer. We, we were remote early on, very early on.

53:16 We got everybody together, and we just-- The con- the cost of context switching, the cost of communication, all these things drastically just reduced immediately.

53:27 Um, we moved way faster than we ever could, and we told people at the end of that, "25 people, we're, we're moving. Everyone has to pack up their lives and come, or you're not at the company anymore," right?

53:37 And every single person did it. And now there's... I love these, uh, sort of like extraneous benefits. Uh, it's harder to hire talent for sure. It's our senior talent.

53:45 It's harder to get them to uproot their lives and come. But there is an embedded litmus test in that. And every single, you know, 85% of the people who work at LayerZero aren't from here.

53:54 85% of those people have packed up their lives and moved here to do this thing, right? People are here because they're very mission-aligned. They're focused on the thing that they were doing.

54:03 They have decided to take this sort of leap and dedicate a portion of their life to doing this thing and is just like a competitive, highly intellectual, highly driven organization. And I think that has paid

54:18 10,000 fold the dividend of being remote and having a slightly wider talent pool, but having sort of more fraying culture or having, um,

54:29 all of the issues of, of time zone and coordination, like everything else that comes downstream from that.

54:34 So it's a very opinionated stance, and it might not be the right decision for everybody, but it's very much been the right decision for us. Brian, thank you for that. We're almost at the end. Uh, a quick lightning round.

54:44 Very short questions, very brief answers. Uh, the first one is, will a major US bank put production volume on Zero before 2028? Yes or no? Yes. You get 30 seconds in an elevator with a sovereign wealth fund CIO.

54:58 What's the pitch for them, and why should they care about cross-chain infrastructure or LayerZero? Uh, I'm horrible at 30-second pitches, uh, so I typically wouldn't be good there.

55:08 Uh, but, but we have a pretty great relationship with a bunch of, you know, trillion dollar sovereign wealth funds. So, uh, this, this is something we've, we have done, and we've done fairly well.

55:16 So, uh, no, I mean, I, I, I think ultimately, um, I don't like 30-second pitches. I like being able to paint somebody a vision, and I wanna bring together parties who are aligned in the vision.

55:26 Uh, so what I would do, I would, I would tell them who we are, what we do at large, and a very, very short focus on, on sort of like where we stand in the market today.

55:36 And if that is enough to book a real conversation and walk through, then, then great. But I'm, I'm historically terrible at 30-second pitches. Yeah.

55:45 All right, uh, w- what's the single biggest misconception about LayerZero? Single biggest misconception. I don't know.

55:51 There were, there were so many early on, and I think it has just, like, resolved itself as market has changed. I think probably the biggest misconception is that people still think LayerZero is a bridge.

56:00 And while today we, we do, like, most, almost all the volume is being moved is, is value transfer, is moving assets, but at its core, LayerZero is, is a pure packet, right? It is just information.

56:12 And as the cost, especially with zero, as the cost of some of this stuff goes down, the universe of what is possible, uh, really, really opens up for information at large, uh, versus just purely financial, uh, applications.

56:27 Brian, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. This was extremely fascinating and interesting. Uh, where can people learn more about you, about LayerZero? Yeah.

56:36 LayerZero, uh, is just @LayerZero_Core on, uh, _Core on Twitter.

56:41 Um, h- follow e- almost everything goes out there on, you know, there's LinkedIn, there's sort of many other channels, and I am, uh, always available, uh, through the screen name you, you mentioned earlier.

56:53 So @PrimordialAA. Uh, probably far too much time on, uh, on X, and, uh, I'm, I, I'm there. Yeah. Great. Uh, Brian, I wish you all the best also for the upcoming mainnet launch, and, uh, talk soon. Amazing.

57:08 Thank you so much. Thank you. You obviously liked this video enough that you got to the end. Listen, do me a favor. Hit that like and subscribe button because I think you'll like it.

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57:36 See you next time. [outro music]