zro

The well-known infrastructure project LayerZero ($ZRO), with strong venture capital backing, has entered into a number of important partnerships and attracted even more investment.
After Bitcoin plummeted to $60,000 on February 6, losing nearly 15% in a single day, a number of major cryptocurrencies rose by tens of percent. One of these is the LayerZero (ZRO) project token, which added more than 50% from its low on the day of Bitcoin's collapse. The price surge came amid the project's merger with a pool of major institutional partners and investors as part of the development of a new cutting-edge blockchain network.
As of February 12, the ZRO token is trading at around $2.1 — this price level has allowed the asset to take first place in terms of percentage growth since the beginning of 2026, with an indicator of 80%, among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies. According to Coinmarketcap, the active growth began from a low of $1.356 on February 6, with a local peak of $2.59 reached on the 11th.
On February 10, LayerZero announced the launch of a new blockchain, Zero, in partnership with major institutional companies including market maker Citadel Securities, investment fund ARK Invest managed by Cathie Wood, the US Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Google Cloud, and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, operator of the NYSE).
As stated in the announcement, Citadel will provide expertise to adapt Zero for trading, clearing, and settlement. DTCC intends to use the new network's architecture to scale tokenization and collateral management services. ICE will explore the use of Zero to implement infrastructure in its trading services. Google Cloud will explore the possibility of using blockchain for micropayments between AI agents.
Separately, on the same day, Tether announced a “strategic investment” in LayerZero to support the development of USDT0, a version of the USDT stablecoin for cross-chain use.
Zero is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2026 and, as stated in the press release, the blockchain will be able to process 2 million transactions per second at a cost of less than a cent per transaction. The network is positioned as an execution layer for tokenization and transactions with any asset class, as well as a technical breakthrough for blockchains. The ZRO token will serve as the network's native asset and protocol governance token.
The total investment in LayerZero Labs, excluding new capital from Tether, amounts to $261 million. Alongside heavyweights Andreesen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital, more than 30 other investors have invested in it, including the venture divisions of Samsung, Christie's auction house, USDC stablecoin issuer Circle, NFT marketplace OpenSea, crypto exchange OKX, and others.
The company was the “star” of the crypto market in 2023-2024 and raised initial capital to develop an interoperability protocol that connects isolated blockchain networks, allowing them to exchange data and assets directly without using insecure bridges.
What is Zero?
Blockchain Zero can solve the scalability problem thanks to a breakthrough in the development of Zero-knowledge technology, ZK (zero-knowledge proofs). As LayerZero CEO Brian Pellegrino told Fortune, this will allow different parties to verify information while maintaining confidentiality.
"LayerZero has an incredibly deep understanding of the markets. Bringing finance to the speed of the internet is a truly grand idea. Speed and bandwidth have remained one of the key barriers. Here, we see a completely different league.
In a separate post dedicated to the technologies underlying Zero, investment firm a16z noted that the blockchain includes a number of technical improvements. These include a “new approach to zero-knowledge proofs” based on a16z's development of Jol technology.
Jolt is a cryptographic solution that allows a virtual computer to process and verify data while complying with specific privacy and security policy restrictions. At the same time, the solution provides a fast system for proving correct calculations within blockchains, relieving networks of significant loads
Jolt is also based on the Jolt RISC-V architecture, which, according to a16z, is also characterized by high speed, security, and ease of use.
RISC-V is an open processor architecture suitable for both smartphones and supercomputers. It is modular, scalable, and gives developers flexibility in creating hardware solutions for specific tasks. RISC-V has already been used in the development of blockchain networks. i.i.t.u.
One of them is Polkadot (DOT), founded by English computer scientist Gavin Wood. Buterin also noted this technology as one of the options for implementation in Ethereum, with the potential to speed up processes tenfold, which would make it “almost as simple as Bitcoin.”
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