Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️
I watched the DTCC’s CTO go on stage and say one sentence that reframed everything I thought about blockchain scalability. He said it was real.
The “it” was a live demo. 2 million transactions per second (that’s roughly 100,000 times Ethereum’s throughput). Running on a network of Raspberry Pis. Built by Bryan Pellegrino and the LayerZero labs team, the guy who went from professional poker player to selling AI models to the Oakland A’s to running LayerZero, the protocol that moves 85% of all cross-chain messages.
On February 10, Bryan unveiled Zero, a new layer-one blockchain. Citadel Securities, DTCC, and the parent company of the NYSE all backed the announcement.
The pitch: a system fast enough for the New York Stock Exchange to run on-chain. Not in theory. In production.
“We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology.”
We dug into the technical architecture, the $10B stablecoin distribution bet nobody expected to work, and why Bryan thinks AI agents will need payment rails that make Visa look like a fax machine.
About Bryan: Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Before crypto, he was one of the top heads-up poker players on the planet (screen name: Primordial AA) and built AI models for MLB teams, including Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. LayerZero now secures close to $100B in value and has processed hundreds of billions in cross-chain transfers. His investors include Sequoia, a16z, and Citadel Securities.
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🎧 Jump to the best parts
00:00 From Poker to Crypto: A Journey of Obsession
06:08 Risk Management Lessons from Poker
11:48 The Birth of Layer Zero Labs
18:09 Building a Layer One Blockchain: The Zero Architecture
24:00 Privacy in Blockchain: The Three Zones of Zero
29:56 Advisory Board Insights and Future Plans
32:08 The Rapid Rise of USDT Zero
35:49 Choosing the Right Interoperability Standard
39:25 The Strategic Acquisition of Stargate
41:39 The Future of Machine-to-Machine Payments
46:36 Adapting Traditional Institutions to New Realities
49:02 The Evolution of the Crypto Mission
53:09 The Case for In-Person Collaboration
55:04 Lightning Round: Quick Insights
Important Links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanpellegrino/
LayerZero: https://layerzero.network/
Sequoia spotlight: https://sequoiacap.com/founder/bryan-pellegrino/
Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts
My biggest takeaways from this conversation:
1. The scalability trade-off is dead for blockchains
For years, blockchain infrastructure has operated under a simple constraint: you can optimize for speed, or you can optimize for decentralization, but not both.
Solana chose throughput, processing thousands of transactions per second (TPS), but relying on a relatively small set of high-cost validator nodes.
Ethereum took the opposite approach, prioritizing decentralization with a vast network of nodes, at the cost of limited throughput, around 15 TPS.
Every architectural decision over the past decade has been a trade-off within these constraints. Pellegrino argues that this trade-off is no longer fundamental.
Zero’s architecture, built natively around zero-knowledge proofs, removes the requirement for every node to re-execute every computation. Instead, computation is verified, not replicated.
“There’s been almost five billion dollars of bridge hacks. We said, could we build a better bridge? And that led us to realise that was the generalisable problem.”
The result: a system that reportedly achieves 2M TPS while maintaining decentralization comparable to Ethereum.
This wasn’t presented as a theory. In a live demonstration to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the system ran on a distributed network of Raspberry Pis. DTCC CTO publicly confirmed the demonstration and described it as real.
“You could not have the New York Stock Exchange on chain in any system that exists prior. And now they’re saying, wow, that is possible.”
What makes this notable is a stack of interdependent innovations:
QMDB (verifiable database): Processes up to 3 million state updates per second, roughly 100× faster than existing verifiable databases and significantly faster than traditional systems like RocksDB.
FAFO (execution scheduler): Enables over one million EVM transactions per second by optimizing transaction ordering and parallelism.
SVID (data compression layer): Uses ZK-based compression so nodes only download partial data (a shard plus a transaction commitment), addressing bandwidth constraints that limit high-throughput systems.
Pellegrino describes this as a compounding system, each layer unlocking the next.
Related reads:
2. Stablecoins are the “distribution” wedge for institutions
Tether had about $186B in circulation. Nearly all of it, around $180B, was concentrated on just two networks: Ethereum and Tron.
The prevailing assumption was simple: once you’re live on the major chains, distribution is effectively maxed out. That assumption is now being challenged.
USDT-0, built on LayerZero, expanded Tether’s presence to 20+ additional networks. In less than a year, it enabled roughly $70–75 billion in cross-chain transfers.
More importantly, it drove $10 billion in incremental AUM.
At typical reserve yields (~4%), that translates to $400–450M in annual revenue from ecosystems most teams had written off.
“There is immense value, even in the longer tail of distribution, much more than people give it credit for.”
The usage pattern matters:
A high volume of small retail transfers
A smaller number of very large institutional flows
Including a single $800M transfer
“The most memorable number was a single transfer of $800M. And then the AUM growth alone was about $400 million directly to Tether’s bottom line.”
This mix signals something important: once access improves, professional capital follows. Market makers, in particular, are using this expanded reach to capture arbitrage across chains that were previously too slow or too costly to access. As a result, the total economic activity, not just user count, has expanded.
Related podcast and reads:
