Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
BDACS has selected LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard for its KRW1 stablecoin, giving the won-backed asset a unified cross-chain system as the company seeks to expand its use outside South Korea.
Summary
BDACS has selected LayerZero’s OFT standard to support cross-chain transfers of its Korean won-backed KRW1 stablecoin. KRW1 will maintain a unified supply across connected networks, with tokens debited on the source chain and credited on the destination chain. KRW1 remains backed 1:1 by Korean won held at Woori Bank as BDACS expands the stablecoin across blockchain networks. LayerZero said its OFT standard has processed $280 billion in lifetime transfers across more than 170 blockchains. LayerZero said BDACS, South Korea’s largest digital asset custodian by assets under custody, chose its OFT standard after reviewing options for making KRW1 natively interoperable across multiple blockchains.
KRW1 already operates across several networks, including Ethereum, Avalanche and Circle’s Arc. BDACS said the separate deployments created friction when moving the stablecoin between networks, limiting its distribution and utility.
The new setup is designed to maintain one KRW1 supply across connected chains. When tokens move between networks, KRW1 will be debited on the source chain and credited on the destination chain, while LayerZero’s Stargate application will handle transfers for users.
LayerZero gives KRW1 a unified cross-chain supply LayerZero’s OFT standard is already used for stablecoins including Tether’s USDT0, PayPal USD and Paxos-issued USDG.
The company said OFT currently facilitates 87% of cross-chain transfer volume and has processed $280 billion in lifetime transfers across more than 170 blockchains.
For BDACS, the structure replaces separate pools of KRW1 liquidity with a single supply distributed across connected networks. The issuer retains control over the token while gaining the ability to add new chains without creating isolated versions of the stablecoin.
A similar structure is used by USDT0. As crypto.news previously reported, the omnichain version of USDT uses LayerZero’s OFT standard to move dollar liquidity between supported blockchains without relying on separate bridge liquidity pools. USDT0 launched on Stellar on Sept. 2, extending the same infrastructure to the payments-focused network.
LayerZero has used its interoperability infrastructure for other regulated digital money products. In July, the company partnered with Keeta to make tokenized bank deposits transferable across Ethereum, Solana, Base and the Keeta Network, with nine fiat currencies included in the planned rollout.
PayPal has taken a similar route for its dollar stablecoin. LayerZero previously supported the expansion of PYUSD to additional blockchains through its interoperability infrastructure, using an omnichain structure intended to keep liquidity fungible across supported networks.
KRW1 expands from its original Avalanche launch BDACS introduced KRW1 in September 2025 after completing a proof of concept with Woori Bank.
The stablecoin was initially launched on Avalanche, with each token backed 1:1 by Korean won held at Woori Bank. The setup included an API connection for verifying reserves.
BDACS later moved to extend KRW1 beyond its original network. In October 2025, the company disclosed plans to issue KRW1 on Arc, Circle’s Layer 1 blockchain designed for stablecoins, tokenized assets and programmable finance.
A Polygon deployment followed in December, when BDACS brought the won-backed token to the network with its Woori Bank-linked reserve verification system. The company positioned the Polygon version of KRW1 for payments, remittances and institutional transactions.
LayerZero said the OFT integration will give BDACS a common framework for managing KRW1 across networks instead of maintaining disconnected token supplies as more chains are added.
“The value of a Korean won stablecoin lies in its global scalability,” BDACS CEO Harry Ryoo said.
Ryoo said applying OFT gives KRW1 the technical foundation to move beyond South Korea and support more flexible use across several blockchains.
“Building on this technical foundation, we will continue to expand the scope of KRW1’s use going forward,” he added.
South Korea prepares rules for won stablecoins The cross-chain expansion comes as South Korea continues developing its regulatory framework for won-denominated stablecoins.
The Bank of Korea reiterated in July that it favors a bank-led model during the initial stage of stablecoin issuance. The central bank said bank consortiums should take the lead while lawmakers continue negotiations over the country’s Digital Asset Basic Act and related stablecoin rules.
Private companies have continued testing their own infrastructure during the legislative process. South Korean financial super app Toss signed an agreement with Optimism and Sunnyside Labs in July for a three-month program examining won-linked stablecoin infrastructure, including payment settlement, compliance and privacy requirements.
KT has entered the same market through plans for a Token Factory and won stablecoin platform. The telecommunications group said in July that the system would support token issuance, billing and settlement while drawing on K Bank, BC Card and KT’s network infrastructure.
South Korea’s Won Internationalization Roadmap, published in July 2026, calls for amendments to the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act to establish a legal basis for won-denominated stablecoins. The plan includes offshore won accounts and a 24-hour offshore won settlement network scheduled for pilot work into 2027.
KRW1 will remain fully reserved 1:1 with Korean won held at Woori Bank as its network coverage expands, according to BDACS. The company said its reserves are independently attested.
BDACS surpassed 80 billion won in assets under custody during the first half of 2026. The company holds SOC 1 and ISO 27001 certifications and is pursuing SOC 2 certification, while its existing partners include Woori Bank, Galaxy Digital and Circle.
BDACS Picks LayerZero to Unify KRW1 Across BlockchainsBDACS, South Korea's largest digital asset custodian by assets under custody, has selected LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard for its Korean won-backed stablecoin, KRW1. The move is designed to give the token a single, unified supply across multiple blockchain networks as BDACS looks to expand its reach beyond South Korea.
KRW1 already operates on Ethereum, Avalanche, and Circle's Arc network. According to BDACS, running those deployments separately created friction when moving the stablecoin between networks, limiting its distribution and overall utility. The OFT integration addresses that directly. Under the new setup, tokens are debited on the source chain and credited on the destination chain, with LayerZero's Stargate application handling transfers for end users. No wrapped tokens are involved, which means liquidity stays whole rather than splintering across isolated pools.
KRW1 is fully backed 1:1 by Korean won held at Woori Bank and undergoes independent reserve attestation, according to BDACS.
A Proven Standard With Significant ScaleLayerZero's OFT standard is not a new or unproven piece of infrastructure. The protocol now accounts for 87% of all cross-chain transfer volume and has processed $280 billion in lifetime transfers across more than 170 blockchains. Other stablecoins using the same standard include Tether's USDT0, PayPal USD, and Paxos-issued USDG.
For KRW1, the practical benefit is clear. Rather than managing separate token supplies on each chain it enters, BDACS can maintain one global pool and add new networks without creating isolated versions of the asset. The issuer retains full control over the token contract throughout.
The integration also arrives against a shifting regulatory backdrop. In July 2026, South Korea released a won internationalisation roadmap, jointly unveiled by the Financial Services Commission, the Bank of Korea, the Financial Supervisory Service, and the Korea Securities Depository, proposing amendments to the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act that would create a legal framework for won-denominated stablecoins. Broader legislative discussions in the National Assembly on digital asset regulation are ongoing. BDACS says wider blockchain access could strengthen KRW1's utility as that framework takes shape.
Sources:
crypto.news: South Korea's KRW1 stablecoin taps LayerZero for cross-chain expansion
PANews: South Korean Onshore KRW Stablecoin KRW1 Integrates LayerZero for Cross-Chain Interoperability
LayerZero Labs, the team behind one of crypto’s most widely used cross-chain messaging protocols, has secured both SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 accreditations covering its entire infrastructure. The certification, verified through independent auditing under AICPA Trust Services Criteria, signals that LayerZero’s internal controls around data security, availability, and confidentiality aren’t just well-designed on paper but have actually held up over an extended observation period.
What SOC 2 actually means (and why most crypto projects don’t have it) SOC 2 is an auditing framework created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. It evaluates whether a company’s systems are designed to keep customer data secure, available, and confidential.
The difference between Type 1 and Type 2 matters. Type 1 is a snapshot: an auditor checks whether your controls are properly designed at a single point in time. Type 2 is the harder test, requiring those controls to demonstrate operational effectiveness over a period of three to twelve months. Getting both means LayerZero had to prove its security posture wasn’t just a good idea on a whiteboard but a living, breathing system that worked consistently.
The institutional chess game LayerZero operates a cross-chain messaging protocol that connects more than 160 blockchains, enabling the transfer of stablecoins, tokenized assets, and arbitrary data between otherwise siloed networks.
LayerZero has already built relationships with some heavy hitters. Its partnership roster includes Citadel Securities, DTCC (the entity that settles most US securities trades), ICE (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange), Google Cloud, and ARK Invest. The SOC 2 certification effectively removes one more objection from institutional due diligence checklists.
The timing also aligns with LayerZero’s planned launch of the Zero blockchain, scheduled for February 2026. That chain is being built for high-throughput institutional use cases, essentially a purpose-built environment where enterprises can leverage LayerZero’s cross-chain capabilities with the compliance guarantees they require.
The accreditation was noted on CertiK Skynet, the security-focused monitoring platform, which tracks compliance milestones alongside smart contract audits and on-chain security events. That it surfaced through compliance tracking channels rather than splashy media announcements is itself telling.
ZRO, LayerZero’s native token, stands to benefit indirectly from these developments. Token value in infrastructure protocols tends to correlate with network usage, and if the SOC 2 certification helps unlock new institutional volumes flowing through LayerZero’s messaging layer, the economic activity feeding into ZRO’s tokenomics grows accordingly.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
@LayerZero_Core has secured both SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 accreditations covering its entire infrastructure, the project announced on September 8. The audits were conducted under the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Trust Services Criteria, spanning security, availability, and confidentiality.
What the Two Reports Actually Mean In other words, Type 1 answers whether the right safeguards exist today. Type 2 answers whether they held up under real operating conditions over time.
For a cross-chain messaging protocol handling activity across multiple blockchains, clearing both reports in tandem carries more weight than either alone.
Why It Matters for LayerZero
For LayerZero, the dual accreditation is a clear push toward institutional credibility, reinforcing that the protocol's infrastructure meets independently verified standards rather than self-reported ones.
As institutional appetite for on-chain infrastructure grows, compliance benchmarks like these are increasingly part of the due diligence process.
Sources:
Crypto Briefing: LayerZero achieves Type 1 and Type 2 SOC 2 accreditation for all infrastructure
RSI Security: SOC 2 Type 1 vs Type 2 Key Differences Explained
According to official announcements, South Korean digital asset custodian BDACS has selected LayerZero’s OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard as the cross-chain interoperability solution for its South Korean won stablecoin KRW1. KRW1 is South Korea’s first won-backed stablecoin, currently deployed on Ethereum, Avalanche, and Circle’s Arc network. With the OFT integration, KRW1 will achieve further native multi-chain expansion. LayerZero noted that the OFT standard currently covers over 170 blockchains, handles approximately 87% of cross-chain transfer volume, and has a cumulative transfer value of $280 billion. Adopting this standard, KRW1 will be burned or deducted on the source chain and minted on the destination chain during cross-chain transfers, maintaining a unified supply to prevent fragmented KRW1 liquidity across different chains. LayerZero’s cross-chain transfer application Stargate will execute these transfers. BDACS said the move will provide a technical foundation for KRW1 to expand beyond South Korea. In July 2026, South Korea released the "Won Internationalization Roadmap," which proposes amending the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act to establish a legal framework for won-denominated stablecoins, plus advancing measures like offshore won accounts and a 24-hour offshore won settlement network. BDACS added that KRW1 is currently fully backed by a 1:1 reserve of won held at Woori Bank and undergoes independent reserve attestation.
BDACS, the largest digital asset custodian in South Korea, has selected LayerZero's OFT standard as its interoperability solution for KRW1, the first on-shore Korean won-backed stablecoin. To build with it, visit Developers or reach out to our team.
KRW1, the first Korean won-backed stablecoin, already exists as a multi-chain asset on Ethereum, Avalanche, and Circle’s Arc. But for BDACS, the issuer of KRW1, the distribution and utility of KRW1 has been limited by friction related to its cross-chain interoperability infrastructure.
After a rigorous review of options to bring KRW1 natively multi-chain, BDACS chose LayerZero's OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token) standard.
A standard already tested at scale The OFT standard is the same standard Tether uses for USDT0, PayPal for PYUSD, and Paxos for USDG. It now facilitates 87% of all cross-chain volume transferred and has transferred $280 billion in lifetime transfers across 170+ chains. BDACS's decision puts KRW1 on infrastructure other major stablecoin issuers already put through rigorous diligence before adopting.
The OFT standard is designed with institutional and enterprise-grade issuers top of mind. It provides issuers with the customization and control they need to satisfy regulators and enterprise-grade security teams, while simultaneously lowering the operational burden to add the next incremental chain and manage the resulting supply fragmentation.
Under the OFT standard, when KRW1 moves across chains, it will now be debited on the source chain and credited on the destination chain. One KRW1 supply will exist across every connected network, instead of several disconnected instances competing for liquidity. Stargate, LayerZero's cross-chain transfer application, is what executes that debit-and-credit transfer for users moving KRW1.
Why the timing matters Korea's Won Internationalization Roadmap, published in July 2026, commits to amending the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act to establish a legal basis for won-denominated stablecoins. Related measures, including offshore won accounts and a 24-hour offshore won settlement network piloting into 2027, build the institutional plumbing for the won to move outside Korea.
Cross-chain interoperability builds the circulation side of that plan. Each KRW1 unit that moves under the OFT standard extends won-denominated liquidity to any LayerZero-connected chain, without depending on one network's ecosystem for reach. Most bridged omnichain stablecoin volume today is denominated in dollars; this integration puts the won into that mix.
BDACS is the largest digital asset custodian in Korea by assets under custody, and the first company to issue a won-backed stablecoin. KRW1 stays fully reserved 1:1 with Korean won held at Woori Bank, with independent attestation of reserves, a compliance position that does not change as KRW1's network reach grows.
Harry Ryoo, CEO of BDACS said, "The value of a Korean won stablecoin lies in its global scalability." He added, "KRW1, the leading Korean won stablecoin, has established a technical foundation to expand beyond Korea into global markets by enabling more flexible use across multiple blockchains through the application of OFT. Building on this technical foundation, we will continue to expand the scope of KRW1's use going forward."
Start building Developers integrating stablecoins across chains can start with LayerZero's OFT standard. Visit Developers or reach out to our team.
About BDACS BDACS is a digital asset infrastructure company providing custody to institutional clients. In the first half of 2026, it surpassed 80 billion KRW in assets under custody, the largest total of any digital asset custodian in Korea. BDACS holds SOC 1 and ISO 27001 certifications and is pursuing SOC 2. It issued KRW1, the world's first Korean won stablecoin, and partners with Woori Bank, Galaxy Digital, and Circle.
About LayerZero LayerZero is where finance and the internet converge. It makes any token or application compatible with every type of blockchain. From protocols to institutions, organizations use LayerZero to build, issue, and scale digital assets and products. It connects 170+ blockchains, processes millions of messages a year, and powers billions in value transfer. Trusted by PayPal USD, Ethena, Ondo Finance and more, LayerZero has become the standard for building on blockchains.
ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said most investors overlook the role LayerZero (ZRO) plays in cross-chain messaging, praising the team behind the interoperability protocol in a post on X.
Her post amplified an argument published two days earlier by Lorenzo Valente, ARK’s director of research for digital assets, who said LayerZero’s interoperability business alone will probably reach nine-figure annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Cathie Wood Says Investors Underrate LayerZeroWood posted on Saturday that most investors “do not appreciate the important role” LayerZero plays in crypto messaging. She also singled out the founding team.
LayerZero relays verified messages between blockchains that cannot otherwise communicate. ARK counts more than 170 supported networks.
Valente made the original argument on Thursday. Messaging protocols turned into critical infrastructure as app-specific chains and rollups multiplied, he wrote. Demand grows further as tokenized real-world assets move on-chain.
The September 3 ARK paper behind Wood’s post puts scale behind the claim. Using data through June, it credits LayerZero with $280 billion in cumulative value transferred and 44% of cross-chain volume in the first half of 2026.
However, LayerZero does not own the category. Circle’s CCTP came second at 41%, and Chainlink pushes a similar cross-chain pitch through CCIP.
ZRO Holds a Monthly Gain Despite Friday’s DropTraders have not followed Cathie Wood in the short term. ZRO trades near $1.04, down about 6% on the day. Its market value stands at $368.7 million, ranking it 120th.
The monthly picture looks stronger. ZRO has added roughly 36% over the past month, most of it in a jump between August 21 and August 23.
LayerZero Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto MarketsThat rebound started from a record low. ZRO bottomed at $0.71 on July 31 and still trades far below its December 2024 peak of $7.47.
Supply keeps the pressure on. Monthly ZRO token unlocks add to a circulating base near 353 million.
ARK is not a neutral observer either. The firm discloses financial interests in both LayerZero Labs and ZRO, so its research doubles as a position.
Meanwhile, Valente framed the revenue call as his own read, not a house forecast. Wood’s endorsement rests on that thesis. Part two of the ARK series may show whether the fees support it.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
LayerZero Labs is sunsetting Stargate V1, the cross-chain bridging protocol that helped define omnichain DeFi when it launched back in March 2022. The V1 liquidity pools will become inoperable after December 15, 2026, and liquidity providers who don’t withdraw before then risk losing access to their positions.
Zero-fee withdrawals are being enabled to smooth the transition.
What’s happening and why The deprecation stems from LayerZero’s decision to retire its V1 Relayer, the underlying messaging infrastructure that Stargate V1 depends on. Without a functioning relayer, the pools simply can’t operate.
This move is part of a broader 2026 initiative by LayerZero to phase out support for low-activity chains and consolidate resources around its newer technology stack.
Approximately two weeks before the December 15 deadline, V1 messaging will be temporarily paused. Pools will then reopen solely for the purpose of allowing withdrawals. That pause window gives the team time to configure the zero-fee exit mechanism so LPs can pull their funds without getting dinged on the way out.
This deprecation applies exclusively to V1. Stargate V2 and Hydra, LayerZero’s newer protocols, will continue operating as normal.
A brief history of Stargate V1 Stargate V1 holds a notable place in cross-chain infrastructure history. It was the first application ever built on the LayerZero messaging protocol, launching in March 2022. Its unified liquidity pools allowed assets to be transferred across multiple chains without the fragmentation that plagued earlier bridging solutions. The Delta algorithm, Stargate’s proprietary rebalancing mechanism, helped maintain pool health across different networks.
The protocol changed hands in August 2025, when the LayerZero Foundation formally acquired Stargate. As part of that transition, the native token shifted from STG to ZRO at a conversion rate of 1 STG to 0.08634 ZRO.
What LPs need to do If you have liquidity sitting in any Stargate V1 pool, withdraw it before December 15, 2026. The zero-fee withdrawal mechanism removes the usual cost barrier, so there’s no financial penalty for exiting.
LayerZero has recommended that users migrate their positions to more liquid chains like Ethereum, Arbitrum, and BSC when withdrawing.
Market implications and what to watch The impact of this deprecation is likely to be concentrated rather than systemic. The users most affected are long-tail LPs who parked capital in V1 and haven’t actively managed their positions.
The real risk here isn’t market-wide contagion. It’s individual users who miss the deadline. LayerZero is doing what it can with the zero-fee structure and extended timeline, but the responsibility ultimately falls on each LP to act before December 15.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
LayerZero Labs, the team behind the widely used cross-chain messaging protocol, unveiled Zero, a new heterogeneous Layer-1 blockchain architecture on February 10, 2026. The architecture uses zero-knowledge proofs to decouple transaction execution from verification, splitting validators into two roles: lightweight Block Validators that handle verification, and optional high-performance Block Producers that handle execution. The verification layer stays decentralized and accessible. The execution layer scales horizontally through parallel Atomicity Zones.
The performance targets are eye-catching. LayerZero is claiming up to 2 million transactions per second per “Atomicity Zone,” with horizontal scaling potentially pushing that figure to 5 million TPS. Transaction costs sit at roughly $0.0001. For context, Ethereum’s mainnet processes around 15-30 TPS on a good day, and even Solana’s theoretical maximum hovers around 65,000 TPS.
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How Zero actually works Each Atomicity Zone functions as its own specialized environment. Rather than competing for block space on a single chain, different use cases get their own lanes. ZK proofs allow the network to confirm transactions are valid without requiring every node to re-execute them.
LayerZero also built custom infrastructure components to support the architecture. QMDB handles state storage, while a system called FAFO manages parallel compute. The development process took approximately 2.5 years.
Institutional backing tells the real story Strategic partners include Citadel Securities, ARK Invest, Google Cloud, the DTCC (which processes the vast majority of US securities transactions), and ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.
LayerZero reinforced that positioning with ATLAS, a headless exchange backend designed to handle financial transactions across multiple asset classes. ATLAS was unveiled on August 25, 2026, and runs on the Zero framework. A notable tokenomics detail: 75% of certain fees generated through ATLAS are directed toward a ZRO buy-and-burn mechanism.
The mainnet launch is targeted for fall 2026. The ZRO token secures the network and benefits from the fee structure built around ATLAS.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
LayerZero has proposed Otter, an automated market maker mechanism designed to strip block builders of the informational advantages that make front-running and sandwich attacks profitable. The name stands for Optimal Truthful Trading with Excess Redistribution, and the core idea is deceptively simple: if you clear trades as a batch instead of sequencing them one by one, the order of transactions stops mattering.
That’s the whole game. MEV, or miner extractable value, relies on block builders rearranging transaction order to profit at traders’ expense. Remove the sequencing advantage, and the economics of exploitation collapse.
How Otter actually works Otter borrows from a well-studied corner of auction theory called the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism. In a VCG auction, each participant’s payment depends on the impact their bid has on everyone else, not on where their bid lands in a queue. It’s the same principle that powers second-price auctions, where the winner pays the second-highest bid rather than their own.
Applied to an AMM, this means trade execution outcomes are determined by the collective pool of bids submitted during a batch window rather than the precise nanosecond each one arrives. A block builder who tries to insert a front-running transaction gains nothing because the clearing price doesn’t shift based on ordering.
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The mechanism is designed so that truthful reporting, submitting your actual valuation and budget, becomes the dominant strategy for both traders and builders. In game theory terms, there’s no incentive to lie about what you’re willing to pay because the system is structured to make honesty the most profitable move for every participant.
Where the extracted value goes One of Otter’s more interesting design choices involves what happens to the surplus value that would normally flow to MEV extractors. Rather than requiring all outputs to be distributed to the traders in a given batch, Otter allows residual surplus to be redirected locally within the liquidity pool.
This creates a direct channel for rewarding liquidity providers, subsidizing fees, and supporting other ecosystem participants. It’s essentially a recycling system: value that would have leaked to arbitrageurs gets pumped back into the infrastructure that makes trading possible in the first place.
The censorship resistance requirement There’s a significant caveat buried in the design. Otter’s guarantees only hold up if the underlying consensus layer is censorship-resistant. Without that property, block builders can simply exclude bids they don’t like, undermining the batch auction’s fairness guarantees.
The LayerZero team is explicit about this constraint: achieving both user honesty and builder strategy-proofness in AMMs becomes impossible when bids can be censored and block space is finite.
Otter follows LayerZero’s earlier release of ATLAS, an exchange engine focused on efficiency and fee mechanisms. Together, the two projects suggest a sustained research effort aimed at rethinking on-chain market structure from first principles rather than patching existing designs.
The paper is still pending peer review and carries no deployment timeline or token launch details. VCG mechanisms in particular are known for being theoretically optimal but computationally expensive, and adapting them to the constraints of blockchain execution, where gas costs and block times impose hard limits, will be a meaningful engineering challenge.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
USDT0, the infrastructure that brings Tether's USDT to every network, is now live on Stellar using the LayerZero OFT standard. The Stellar ecosystem can now tap into the same deep, global liquidity pool shared across LayerZero-connected blockchain ecosystems. To build on Stellar with LayerZero, visit Developers or reach out to the team.
Stellar moves money in seconds, charges less than a tenth of a cent per transaction, and reaches cash-to-crypto ramps across over 180 countries. For more than a decade, the network has powered cross-border payments, aid distribution, and consumer financial services where reliability and cost control matter as much as throughput.
What Stellar hasn't had until now is dollar liquidity that behaves the same way across every network it touches. Moving USDT cross-chain meant custodial bridges, wrapped representations, and fragmented supply.
Now, the LayerZero endpoint is live on Stellar, and USDT0 is the first asset to deploy on it.
USDT0 is Now Live on Stellar Built on the OFT Standard, USDT0 maintains a single unified supply backed 1:1 by USDT. From day one, Stellar participants can now tap into the same deep, global liquidity pool shared across LayerZero-connected blockchain ecosystems. USDT0 has transferred over $100B of value lifetime across LayerZero rails.
Rather than introducing another bridged or wrapped representation, the deployment anchors USDT0 directly within Stellar's asset model while connecting it to the same unified liquidity framework used across other major ecosystems. For Stellar, this is less about adding a new stablecoin and more about upgrading how liquidity behaves.
"Stellar has spent years proving that payments infrastructure can be fast, cheap, and global without sacrificing reliability," said Lorenzo R., Co-Founder of USDT0. "What it hasn't had until now is dollar liquidity that behaves the same way across every network it touches. That's the problem USDT0 solves. Every payment firm, fintech, and treasury operation on Stellar can now draw from the same $190+ billion in USDT liquidity that the rest of the world is already building on, without friction or fragmentation."
"Stellar has been trusted to power cross-border payments for more than a decade," said Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation. "The addition of USDT0 to the Stellar ecosystem strengthens the network's industry-leading payments stack."
Stellar is Built for Where USDT is Already Used USDT has a deep global footprint, used widely in fast-growing markets across Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, the very regions where Stellar has spent years building payments infrastructure. With USDT0 now on Stellar, users in these regions can move the stablecoin they already trust on infrastructure purpose-built for it: sub-cent fees, five-second transaction finality, and on/off-ramp coverage across 180+ countries.
The LayerZero OFT standard streamlines onchain experiences for asset issuer developers by eliminating the need for intermediary bridges or wrapped assets, so builders benefit from reduced complexity and operational overhead. Critically, asset issuers using the OFT standard get this benefit while simultaneously maintaining the customization and control they need for robust ongoing operations. The result is simpler treasury management, cleaner payment flows, and one less conversion standing between you and your end users.
For exchanges, that means offering USDT0 deposits, transfers and withdrawals on rails that settle in seconds for fractions of a cent, with no destination-chain liquidity to bootstrap. For wallets and fintechs, it means giving users in USDT-dominant markets across Latin America, Africa, and Asia a way to send, receive, and hold the asset they already prefer, while enterprises and PSPs can settle with counterparties in USDT0 and manage USDC, EURC, and USDT0 in a single treasury integration on one network.
Dollar value can now flow across chains while settling on an execution layer that has been battle-tested in production. Start at Developers or reach out to the team.
About LayerZero LayerZero is where finance and the internet converge. It makes any token or application compatible with every type of blockchain. From protocols to institutional asset issuers, organizations use LayerZero to build, issue, and scale digital assets and products. It connects 170+ blockchains, processes millions of messages per year, and powers billions in value transfer. Trusted by Tether, PayPal USD, Ethena, Ondo, and more, LayerZero is the standard for building on blockchains.
Stellar Brings Omnichain USDT to Its Mainnet@StellarOrg has deployed @USDT0_to liquidity on its mainnet, connecting @Tether's stablecoin reserves to its native payment infrastructure through @LayerZero_Core's Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) protocol. The move marks a significant step in Stellar's push to become a competitive rail for cross-border stablecoin settlement.
USDT0 is the omnichain version of Tether's USDT, operated by Everdawn Labs under a Tether license. Rather than issuing a new native token, real USDT is locked in a vault on Ethereum mainnet, and an OFT representation mints on the destination chain. Each unit is backed 1:1, and the canonical collateral never leaves Ethereum, removing the counterparty risks typically associated with wrapped or bridged assets.
Speed, Cost, and the Case for StellarThe integration is designed to exploit Stellar's core technical strengths. Transactions on the Stellar network are confirmed in three to five seconds on average, and the average transaction cost sits at roughly $0.0007, a fraction of what traditional wire transfers charge. That combination of near-instant finality and sub-penny fees makes it a practical infrastructure layer for high-frequency cross-border payments, particularly in underserved remittance corridors.
The timing is also notable from an ecosystem perspective. In February 2026, Tether Investments announced a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, deepening the relationship between the two parties behind the USDT0 standard. The Stellar Community Fund has since noted that leading asset issuers, including USDT0, Paxos, and Ethena, are preparing to launch on Stellar via LayerZero, suggesting this deployment is part of a broader wave of institutional-grade liquidity coming to the network.
For users, the practical outcome is access to a dollar-denominated stablecoin that moves across borders quickly, cheaply, and without relying on intermediary bridges that introduce additional smart-contract risk. For Stellar, it is a credibility upgrade, adding a globally recognised stablecoin backed by Tether's reserves to a network already positioned around payments and financial inclusion.
Sources:
Tether Investments: Strategic Investment in LayerZero Labs
Stellar: Cross-Border Payments Overview
Eco: What Is USDT0? Tether's Omnichain Stablecoin Explained
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
CZ: Some hot money is flowing back from the AI sector to the crypto market, and the crypto industry will not disappear.
Binance founder CZ published a post noting that some "hot money" is flowing back from the AI sector to the crypto market. Currency-related industries will not disappear, as both individuals and AI will still need currency in the future.
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Ansem: Crypto Market Remains in the Early Stage of a Bull Run, Retail Investors Are Entering with More Capital
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Arbitrum DAO generated $6.19 million in revenue in the first half of the year, with Robinhood Chain emerging as a new revenue source.
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Agent of "BTC OG Insider Whale": Bitcoin has held the $76,600 support level; if it breaks through $79,000, it could test higher highs.
Garrett Jin, the representative of the "BTC OG Insider Whale", stated in a post that Bitcoin (BTC) has held the critical level of $76,600. If BTC climbs further above $79,000, the price may attempt to form a higher high. However, even if BTC does post a higher high, this would still not be sufficient to confirm a genuine breakout in the market.
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NVIDIA rises nearly 5%, with its current market capitalization standing at $5.49 trillion.
According to market data from BIT (bit.com), NVIDIA's stock rose 4.82%, with its current market capitalization standing at $5.49 trillion.
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Making money from FOMO? The peak APR for the JINQIAN liquidity pool (LP) on Uniswap hit 83,832%.
Tonight, the "short squeeze on underlying stocks" narrative surrounding JINQIAN/FAMI on Robinhood’s blockchain has been denied by the parties involved, putting an end to the on-chain hype. However, a review of the entire incident shows that the biggest gains were not only made by top on-chain traders; smart money also reaped substantial profits by setting up JINQIAN trading pair liquidity provider (LP) pools on Uniswap. According to data from Uniswap’s official page, during JINQIAN’s first rally from a $7 million market cap to $60 million, the peak APR of its main trading pair JINQIAN/ETH hit 83,832%, and has since dropped to 79,708%. As of press time, the JINQIAN/USDG trading pair still has a 6% transaction fee, with the pool’s annualized APR reaching as high as 126,440%. This means that if traders bought JINQIAN tokens during the rally, then established liquidity pools at higher price levels, timely collected LP fees, and sold off part of their JINQIAN holdings, their risk-reward ratio would be far higher than that of simply holding JINQIAN tokens. However, current market sentiment has become overly FOMO, and on-chain scams are on the rise. Even setting up LP pools for individual popular meme coins cannot fully avoid risks from token price fluctuations, so users should exercise caution with their investments.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
ATLAS collapses matching, clearing, and settlement into a single blockchain-native stack. The world's largest market maker is already collaborating. Whether the custodians of legacy market structure follow is the $16 trillion question.
LayerZero unveiled ATLAS—Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement—on August 25, 2026, aiming to consolidate the fragmented plumbing of global finance into a single, high-performance architecture. The system leverages the Zero blockchain, a Layer-1 network capable of exceeding two million transactions per second with sub-millisecond latency. ATLAS is not a trading venue itself; it is a “headless exchange,” a modular infrastructure layer designed for third parties to build and operate their own markets atop a unified settlement engine.
The “headless” designation is the core mechanism. By decoupling the exchange engine from the user-facing interface, LayerZero positions itself as the underlying utility for onchain capital markets. CBO Simon Baksys described a dual-configuration model in a recent interview: Open ATLAS caters to the permissionless requirements of crypto and prediction markets, while Institutional/Regulated ATLAS embeds KYC, AML, and fairness obligations directly into the protocol. It is a pragmatic attempt to bridge the wilder shores of decentralized finance with the rigid compliance frameworks required by traditional financial firms, potentially utilizing stablecoins or tokenized deposits for settlement.
Institutional interest is tangible, though the level of commitment varies significantly. Citadel Securities, having made a $55 million investment in the ZRO token, is actively collaborating on market structure expertise to evaluate how trading, clearing, and settlement workflows might function on the Zero stack. The DTCC and ICE require a more nuanced reading. Both entities are currently exploring the Zero blockchain—the DTCC for its Tokenization Service and Collateral App Chain, and ICE for potential trading and clearing infrastructure—but neither has committed to a full-scale deployment. In institutional finance, the distance between an evaluation and a production-ready integration is often measured in years.
This infrastructure race is becoming increasingly crowded as the market for tokenized assets begins to see real-world testing. Coinbase launched 13 tokenized U.S. equities on the Base blockchain on August 24, and the Robinhood Chain went live in July. These platforms are not necessarily competing for the same users, but they are all vying to define the standards for how tokenized real-world assets will move, settle, and be collateralized.
LayerZero’s approach to value capture is deliberate. The ZRO tokenomics are designed to mimic traditional exchange economics: venues can stake ZRO for higher fee rebates, and 75% of fees—after accounting for those rebates and payments to market creators—are directed toward a buy-and-burn mechanism. It is a protocol-level attempt to align the incentives of the infrastructure provider with the volume generated by the venues built on top of it, moving beyond the speculative token models of the past.
The industry faces a looming choice between unified standards and a proliferation of siloed chains. As the DTCC prepares for the full commercial launch of its Tokenization Service in October 2026—with a roster of participants including BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs—the pressure to integrate is mounting. While LayerZero has secured Google Cloud as a technology partner and ARK Invest as a shareholder, the success of ATLAS will depend on whether it can attract enough liquidity to become a standard, rather than just another isolated venue.
The timing of the ATLAS announcement, which saw the ZRO token surge between 19% and 30%, reflects the market’s appetite for infrastructure that promises massive throughput. The real test will occur later this fall when ATLAS is expected to launch. For now, the industry is watching to see if the “headless” model can successfully integrate with the existing, deeply entrenched systems of the DTCC and the global exchanges.
The mechanism is in place, but the ultimate hurdle is trust. Institutions are notoriously cautious about migrating the core of their business to new stacks. Whether ATLAS can provide the necessary reliability to satisfy these gatekeepers will determine if this is a genuine shift in market structure or merely a sophisticated technical experiment.
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LayerZero’s Zero blockchain architecture can now horizontally scale to five million transactions per second. The claim builds on a foundation the team has been laying since early 2026, when it first unveiled its heterogeneous L1 design capable of hitting two million TPS per individual “Atomicity Zone.”
The tech stack behind the numbers Zero’s architecture separates transaction execution from verification using zero-knowledge proofs. The design allows lightweight Block Validators to run on consumer-grade hardware, while optional high-performance Block Producers handle the heavy lifting.
LayerZero built four proprietary components to make this work. QMDB handles state storage and can process up to 3 million updates per second. FAFO, the parallel computation engine, enables over 1.2 million EVM transactions per second on benchmark hardware. Jolt Pro manages ZK proving, and SVID handles networking.
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Transaction costs sit at roughly $0.0001 per transaction.
ATLAS and the institutional play On August 25, 2026, LayerZero unveiled ATLAS, a headless exchange infrastructure built on the Zero blockchain. ATLAS launched with an initial capability of 200,000 TPS and sub-millisecond latency.
Citadel Securities, DTCC, ICE, and Google Cloud have all been named as institutional partners. Tether’s USDt0 stablecoin is already running on the infrastructure.
Following the ATLAS announcement, the ZRO token surged approximately 20%, pushing its market cap to around $746 million.
From messaging protocol to L1 ambitions LayerZero built its reputation as a cross-chain messaging protocol, enabling communication and asset transfers across different blockchain networks. The Zero blockchain, announced on February 10, 2026, represents a pivot from infrastructure middleware to full L1 ambitions.
The horizontal scaling approach is what makes the five million TPS claim technically coherent. Instead of trying to make a single chain impossibly fast, Zero allows multiple Atomicity Zones to operate in parallel. Each zone handles up to 2 million TPS independently.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
The Trump administration has frequently intervened in financial markets, and the European Central Bank (ECB) fears this "claw" could extend to the Federal Reserve.
ECB officials have recently grown increasingly concerned over the US government’s frequent interventions in foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Sources familiar with the matter said that during last week’s Jackson Hole Symposium, Federal Reserve officials proactively reached out to reassure their European counterparts, committing to upholding existing international cooperation arrangements. However, given the Fed’s institutional independence from the US administration, Fed officials cannot guarantee that the Trump administration will not abruptly reverse course. European officials are particularly focused on recent financial market operations by the US Treasury. On August 1, the US Treasury intervened in FX markets by selling euros and buying yen, and European sides expressed dissatisfaction over the US failure to provide advance notice of such operations as is customary. Additionally, US Treasury Secretary Bessent’s recent expansion of long-term Treasury repurchase operations has also sparked European officials’ concerns over the growing blurring of lines between fiscal, exchange rate and monetary policies. European officials further warned that if the US administration continues to deploy financial tools for economic and trade goals, markets could start questioning the Fed’s policy independence and the stability of the US dollar swap lines. There are also worries that the US government may further pressure the Fed to directly intervene in Treasury markets in the future. No signs have emerged that the dollar swap arrangements will change. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has recently stepped up communication with European policymakers, and his performance in international financial cooperation has drawn relatively positive feedback from European officials.
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China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) supports the rollout of AI applications: FDE on-site presence, token purchases, and computing power voucher issuances.
Beating AI Express (Insight): China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has launched a special initiative to cultivate AI application service providers. Local governments are encouraged to leverage measures such as first-purchase and first-use policies, and risk compensation to boost procurement of large models, intelligent agents, and Token services, while using tools like "computing power vouchers" to cut computing costs. The MIIT will also build a national resource pool for AI application service providers, targeting over 2,000 such providers by the end of 2026 and no fewer than 3,000 by the end of 2027. These providers mainly assist enterprises in rolling out AI projects, with services covering pre-consultation, solution design, system development, integration and delivery, as well as post-launch operation and maintenance and security governance. The policy also specifically highlights FDE (Field Deployment Engineers), encouraging service providers to form FDE teams to work directly at user sites to resolve project implementation challenges. Local authorities will also open real business scenarios, organize supply-demand matching, and convert high-frequency, essential business needs into standardized AI products that can be delivered repeatedly.
20 minutes ago
Bybit launches PONS perpetual contracts today.
Bybit today adds the new Pons (PONSUSDT) perpetual contract, supporting up to 20x leverage.
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OpenAI rolls out results-based pricing: Some major clients only pay when the AI delivers actual results.
Beating AI News reports that OpenAI has in recent months introduced a new payment model to some of its large enterprise clients: customers only pay once AI has fully completed their tasks. The Information notes that use cases already implemented include customer service. Businesses can pay based on the actual customer service tasks AI completes, rather than being billed solely by tokens, API calls, or seat counts. OpenAI has not disclosed specific client names, pricing details, or the criteria for defining "task completion," and declined to comment on the matter. This is not a new package OpenAI is rolling out for all enterprises; the official public pricing for its Enterprise plan remains primarily based on usage quotas and tokens, so this "pay-per-result" model appears to be custom contracts negotiated exclusively with select large clients. OpenAI has long signaled this direction: in January this year, CFO Sarah Friar stated that AI business models would shift toward pay-per-result in the future, and in July, OpenAI further noted that rather than focusing on token unit prices, the industry should prioritize the total cost for AI to complete a task. This approach has now been incorporated into actual contracts.
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Nearly $80 million in Bitcoin buy orders were front-run, while a new address plans to go long near $75,000.
According to monitoring by TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), a recently created address placed 30 non-position-reducing limit buy orders for BTC at 14:22 today, with prices ranging from $75,000 to $76,000. The total planned purchase volume is 1,046.7831 BTC, translating to a nominal value of approximately $79.032 million based on the order prices. The address currently holds no open positions; all 30 orders are identical in size at 34.892 BTC each, with each order valued between roughly $2.62 million and $2.65 million. BTC is currently trading at $78,689.4, meaning these buy orders are priced 3.42% to 4.69% below the current market rate. It is learned that this address was activated four days ago, receiving around $5.1 million in funds, after which it executed four short positions that yielded a profit of $330,000. If the orders are filled, this will mark the address’s first long position. On-chain perpetual and address analysis tool TradingBeats is now live, supporting real-time viewing of Hyperliquid data, enabling in-depth analysis from address tracing to whale operations, with comprehensive insights available at a glance.
Prediction market platform Polymarket suffered a major outage on August 31. Its official status page shows that the Trading API (CLOB) encountered "open order read response delays" starting around 6:30 UTC, resulting in a full suspension of trading. The platform’s website remains accessible and market data can be viewed, but users cannot place orders. The team is working on repairs, with a target to restore trading by 10:00 UTC at the latest. Ahead of the recovery, Polymarket will enter a 15-minute mode allowing only order cancellations. All other systems—including the website, data, and authentication services—are operating normally.
The Trump administration has frequently intervened in financial markets, and the European Central Bank (ECB) fears this "claw" could extend to the Federal Reserve.
ECB officials have recently grown increasingly concerned over the US government’s frequent interventions in foreign exchange and Treasury markets. Sources familiar with the matter said that during last week’s Jackson Hole Symposium, Federal Reserve officials proactively reached out to reassure their European counterparts, committing to upholding existing international cooperation arrangements. However, given the Fed’s institutional independence from the US administration, Fed officials cannot guarantee that the Trump administration will not abruptly reverse course. European officials are particularly focused on recent financial market operations by the US Treasury. On August 1, the US Treasury intervened in FX markets by selling euros and buying yen, and European sides expressed dissatisfaction over the US failure to provide advance notice of such operations as is customary. Additionally, US Treasury Secretary Bessent’s recent expansion of long-term Treasury repurchase operations has also sparked European officials’ concerns over the growing blurring of lines between fiscal, exchange rate and monetary policies. European officials further warned that if the US administration continues to deploy financial tools for economic and trade goals, markets could start questioning the Fed’s policy independence and the stability of the US dollar swap lines. There are also worries that the US government may further pressure the Fed to directly intervene in Treasury markets in the future. No signs have emerged that the dollar swap arrangements will change. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has recently stepped up communication with European policymakers, and his performance in international financial cooperation has drawn relatively positive feedback from European officials.
20 minutes ago
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) supports the rollout of AI applications: FDE on-site presence, token purchases, and computing power voucher issuances.
Beating AI Express (Insight): China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has launched a special initiative to cultivate AI application service providers. Local governments are encouraged to leverage measures such as first-purchase and first-use policies, and risk compensation to boost procurement of large models, intelligent agents, and Token services, while using tools like "computing power vouchers" to cut computing costs. The MIIT will also build a national resource pool for AI application service providers, targeting over 2,000 such providers by the end of 2026 and no fewer than 3,000 by the end of 2027. These providers mainly assist enterprises in rolling out AI projects, with services covering pre-consultation, solution design, system development, integration and delivery, as well as post-launch operation and maintenance and security governance. The policy also specifically highlights FDE (Field Deployment Engineers), encouraging service providers to form FDE teams to work directly at user sites to resolve project implementation challenges. Local authorities will also open real business scenarios, organize supply-demand matching, and convert high-frequency, essential business needs into standardized AI products that can be delivered repeatedly.
20 minutes ago
Bybit launches PONS perpetual contracts today.
Bybit today adds the new Pons (PONSUSDT) perpetual contract, supporting up to 20x leverage.
20 minutes ago
OpenAI rolls out results-based pricing: Some major clients only pay when the AI delivers actual results.
Beating AI News reports that OpenAI has in recent months introduced a new payment model to some of its large enterprise clients: customers only pay once AI has fully completed their tasks. The Information notes that use cases already implemented include customer service. Businesses can pay based on the actual customer service tasks AI completes, rather than being billed solely by tokens, API calls, or seat counts. OpenAI has not disclosed specific client names, pricing details, or the criteria for defining "task completion," and declined to comment on the matter. This is not a new package OpenAI is rolling out for all enterprises; the official public pricing for its Enterprise plan remains primarily based on usage quotas and tokens, so this "pay-per-result" model appears to be custom contracts negotiated exclusively with select large clients. OpenAI has long signaled this direction: in January this year, CFO Sarah Friar stated that AI business models would shift toward pay-per-result in the future, and in July, OpenAI further noted that rather than focusing on token unit prices, the industry should prioritize the total cost for AI to complete a task. This approach has now been incorporated into actual contracts.
20 minutes ago
Nearly $80 million in Bitcoin buy orders were front-run, while a new address plans to go long near $75,000.
According to monitoring by TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), a recently created address placed 30 non-position-reducing limit buy orders for BTC at 14:22 today, with prices ranging from $75,000 to $76,000. The total planned purchase volume is 1,046.7831 BTC, translating to a nominal value of approximately $79.032 million based on the order prices. The address currently holds no open positions; all 30 orders are identical in size at 34.892 BTC each, with each order valued between roughly $2.62 million and $2.65 million. BTC is currently trading at $78,689.4, meaning these buy orders are priced 3.42% to 4.69% below the current market rate. It is learned that this address was activated four days ago, receiving around $5.1 million in funds, after which it executed four short positions that yielded a profit of $330,000. If the orders are filled, this will mark the address’s first long position. On-chain perpetual and address analysis tool TradingBeats is now live, supporting real-time viewing of Hyperliquid data, enabling in-depth analysis from address tracing to whale operations, with comprehensive insights available at a glance.
Prediction market platform Polymarket suffered a major outage on August 31. Its official status page shows that the Trading API (CLOB) encountered "open order read response delays" starting around 6:30 UTC, resulting in a full suspension of trading. The platform’s website remains accessible and market data can be viewed, but users cannot place orders. The team is working on repairs, with a target to restore trading by 10:00 UTC at the latest. Ahead of the recovery, Polymarket will enter a 15-minute mode allowing only order cancellations. All other systems—including the website, data, and authentication services—are operating normally.
LayerZero Labs just took one of the most ambitious swings in crypto infrastructure. The company, best known for connecting blockchains so they can talk to each other, announced ATLAS, a blockchain-based exchange designed specifically for financial institutions. Citadel Securities and DTCC, the entity that settles virtually every stock trade in the US, are partnering on the effort.
What ATLAS actually is ATLAS is not another Coinbase or Binance competitor. It’s a backend infrastructure play, meaning regular users won’t interact with it directly. Instead, brokers, trading platforms, and regulated financial entities will plug into ATLAS to access digital asset liquidity.
At launch, the platform will support spot digital asset token trading and perpetual futures. LayerZero has signaled that prediction contracts, traditional futures, and options trading will follow in subsequent phases.
The exchange will run on Zero, a new heterogeneous Layer 1 blockchain built by LayerZero. Zero claims throughput of approximately 2 million transactions per second, a figure that would dwarf most existing blockchains if it holds up under real institutional load. For context, Solana’s theoretical maximum sits around 65,000 TPS, though real-world performance is considerably lower.
Zero also inherits LayerZero’s core advantage: connectivity. The chain can interface with more than 165 other blockchains through LayerZero’s existing cross-chain infrastructure, which means assets and data can flow between ecosystems without the usual friction of bridging.
Why Citadel Securities and DTCC matter here Citadel Securities is one of the largest market makers in the world, handling roughly a quarter of all US equity trading volume on a typical day. DTCC, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, processes the clearing and settlement of trillions of dollars in securities transactions annually.
Their collaboration with LayerZero focuses on exploring blockchain applications for trading, clearing, and settlement workflows. In practical terms, that means they’re testing whether Zero’s architecture can handle the kinds of post-trade processes that currently run on decades-old infrastructure.
Citadel Securities has also made a strategic investment in LayerZero’s native ZRO token. That’s notable because Citadel Securities doesn’t typically dabble in token speculation. A strategic token position suggests the firm sees ZRO as integral to the network’s functioning, not just a tradeable asset.
LayerZero’s evolution from messaging to ecosystem LayerZero started life as a protocol that let blockchains send messages to each other. LayerZero transferred nearly $9 billion in value in a single recent month, making it the largest cross-chain bridge provider by volume. The company was valued at $3 billion during a 2023 funding round that included Tether and a16z crypto.
By creating both the blockchain (Zero) and the exchange (ATLAS), LayerZero is vertically integrating in a way that few crypto infrastructure companies have attempted.
CEO Bryan Pellegrino has framed the exchange as a connectivity layer for brokers and platforms. The goal is to enhance liquidity and user engagement for financial institutions that want blockchain’s efficiency without building their own infrastructure from scratch.
What to watch as the launch approaches ATLAS is targeting a fall 2026 launch window. Several factors will determine whether this project reshapes institutional crypto trading or joins the long list of ambitious infrastructure plays that fizzled.
First, the throughput claims. Two million TPS is an extraordinary number. Whether Zero can sustain that performance with real institutional order flow, not just synthetic benchmarks, will be the first test that matters.
Second, regulatory positioning. By building a backend service for regulated entities rather than a consumer-facing exchange, LayerZero is making a deliberate bet. This approach avoids the regulatory minefield that has ensnared retail-facing exchanges, but it also means ATLAS needs buy-in from compliance teams at major financial institutions. DTCC’s involvement is a strong signal on this front, given the organization’s deep regulatory relationships.
Fourth, the ZRO token’s role in the ecosystem deserves scrutiny. Citadel Securities’ strategic investment implies the token will serve a functional purpose within ATLAS or Zero, potentially for staking, fees, or governance.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
LayerZero has unveiled ATLAS, a new market infrastructure designed to let financial institutions and trading platforms operate their own venues without building an exchange from scratch.
ATLAS, short for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity, and Settlement, combines trade matching, clearing, settlement, and risk management within a single system. LayerZero said the platform is designed for both open markets and institutional venues with controlled access.
Unlike a traditional crypto exchange, ATLAS will not operate its own consumer app or trading venue. Instead, platforms can use its infrastructure to run markets under their own brands, retain their users, and collect fees generated by trading activity.
Institutions can determine who is permitted to trade on their venues and apply their own market rules. Open markets can remain accessible to anyone. Both operate on the same infrastructure, allowing market makers to price assets across different venues.
ATLAS is built on Zero, the blockchain LayerZero announced in February with collaborators including Citadel Securities, DTCC, ARK Invest, and Intercontinental Exchange. Zero uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify trades onchain and is designed for high-throughput financial applications.
LayerZero said ATLAS currently delivers sub-millisecond median latency in stress tests, with 2.641 millisecond latency at the 99th percentile.
LayerZero said ATLAS is scheduled to launch later this year. ZRO, LayerZero’s native token, rose as much as 20% following the announcement.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
LayerZero's ATLAS Takes Aim at Traditional Settlement Infrastructure@LayerZero_Core has deployed ATLAS (Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement), a new "unhosted" exchange model that consolidates matching, clearing, and risk management into a single integrated system. The protocol is built on Zero Chain technology, the same Layer-1 blockchain LayerZero announced earlier this year with backing from Citadel Securities, DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, and Google Cloud.
ATLAS is engineered to process 200,000 transactions per second with sub-millisecond latency, positioning it as infrastructure capable of handling institutional-grade settlement volumes. The protocol comes in two variants, Open ATLAS and Institutional ATLAS, designed to serve different segments of the market while preserving verifiable self-custody for participants.
A $4.7 Quadrillion OpportunityThe target is significant. The DTCC, the post-trade utility that clears and settles most U.S. securities activity, processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions in 2025. That scale of legacy infrastructure is precisely what ATLAS is designed to challenge, enabling global markets to run 24/7 across real-world assets (RWA), foreign exchange, and derivatives without the settlement delays and custody constraints of traditional systems.
The timing is notable. In December 2025, the SEC issued DTCC a no-action letter allowing it to hold and record tokenized equities and other real-world assets on blockchain networks, with authorization to deliver tokenization-related services on approved blockchains for three years. LayerZero's ATLAS launch arrives as traditional post-trade infrastructure is itself beginning to modernise, intensifying the competition for next-generation settlement rails.
LayerZero is already a significant force in cross-chain infrastructure. As of March 2026, the protocol connects more than 165 blockchains and oversees roughly $87 billion in assets across 750-plus Omnichain Fungible Tokens, with 140 million messages processed since launch. ATLAS extends that reach into the exchange and settlement layer, a considerably larger and more regulated market.
Whether an unhosted, blockchain-native exchange model can absorb the compliance, counterparty, and operational demands of institutional securities markets remains to be seen. But the ambition is clear: LayerZero is no longer just a messaging protocol. With ATLAS, it is making a direct bid for the plumbing of global finance.
Sources:
LayerZero Announces Zero Blockchain (BusinessWire, February 2026)
Who Settles Wall Street? Inside DTCC's Move to Stellar (The Defiant)
Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (Wikipedia)
The headless exchange routes 75% of post-venue trading fees into ZRO buybacks and burns, and pays trading venues rebates of up to 65%.
LayerZero introduced ATLAS on Tuesday, an exchange engine built on its Zero blockchain that provides matching, clearing, settlement and risk management to trading venues. The product has no frontend or consumer application of its own.
The design moves LayerZero from carrying assets between chains to running the machinery underneath the venues where they trade, and ties ZRO's fee capture to volume the protocol does not itself distribute. Every user reaches ATLAS through a third-party application, which keeps between 20% and 65% of the trading fee depending on how much ZRO it stakes and how much volume it routes.
ZRO traded at $1.29 at 16:01 UTC, up 12.5% on the day and 63% over the past week, according to CoinGecko. The token bottomed at $1.06 at 09:00 UTC, hours before the announcement, and has climbed since. Its market cap is $454 million on $170 million of 24-hour volume. The weekly gain follows an all-time low of $0.71 set on July 31; ZRO is down about 83% from its December 2024 peak of $7.47 and roughly 39% over the past year.
ZRO price, past 30 daysBuy And BurnAfter the venue takes its rebate, 25% of what remains goes to whoever created the market being traded and 75% goes to buying and burning ZRO, according to the announcement. Rebate tiers require venues to stake ZRO, scaling to 1% of total supply at the top band. ATLAS charges one all-in trading fee that already embeds the venue's economics, which LayerZero said removes the incentive for sophisticated traders to bypass a venue and trade directly against the underlying exchange.
That fee split is the mechanism LayerZero has been building toward since STG holders approved a takeover of the Stargate bridge in August 2025, a token swap valued at about $110 million that converted every circulating STG into 0.08634 ZRO. The firm has run buybacks at least twice since, repurchasing 50 million ZRO from early investors that September and spending $10 million in November.
No Frontend By DesignLayerZero's stated reason for shipping without an interface is that trading venues will not build on rails owned by a competitor. "Trading venues should not have to build on infrastructure that siphons their own users away from them," the announcement said.
ATLAS connects three groups: venues that launch trading environments, market creators that define what trades — the announcement lists perps, spot, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes and predictions — and market makers that quote them. The engine ships in two configurations, Open ATLAS for crypto-native applications and prediction markets, and Institutional ATLAS, which runs the same engine while letting an institution set the rules its markets enforce.
Sub-Millisecond ClaimsLayerZero said ATLAS delivers sub-millisecond median latency in a test environment meant to mirror a public deployment, with 1.418 milliseconds at the 95th percentile and 2.641 milliseconds at the 99th. It expects double-digit microsecond latency in a colocated setup. At launch the system will be provisioned for 200,000 transactions per second.
None of those figures come from a live deployment. LayerZero has given no launch date for ATLAS, and Zero itself has not reached mainnet.
Zero Under The HoodZero is the multi-core blockchain LayerZero announced on Feb. 10 alongside investments from Citadel Securities and ARK Invest and collaboration with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and Intercontinental Exchange. ZRO rose 40% on that announcement. Tether announced a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs the same day without naming an amount.
Zero separates execution from verification: block producers run workloads and generate zero-knowledge proofs, and block validators check the proofs without repeating the work. Separate zones run concurrently, so exchange activity does not compete with payments for block space. LayerZero's technical paper claims its parallel execution engine can process "up to more than 1.2 million EVM transactions per second with a single Block Producer." No mainnet date has been published.
The ATLAS announcement said LayerZero's OFT token standard has moved $290 billion in volume across more than 160 chains. LayerZero's July 29 blog post put the figures at "$260B+" across "170+ chains," and its homepage still says $200 billion. The dollar figure has climbed while the chain count has fallen. DefiLlama tracks $153.5 billion in cumulative bridge volume for LayerZero and $6.87 billion in total value locked, third among bridge protocols. Bridge volume over the past 24 hours was $288.6 million.
Kelp Hack Still LoomsThe rally sits against LayerZero's security record. In May the firm's incident report said Kelp's rsETH bridge had been downgraded from a two-of-two to a one-of-one decentralized verifier network configuration before an April attack drained roughly $292 million, and that a LayerZero developer had been socially engineered six weeks earlier. LayerZero now requires at least three-of-three verification by default.
LayerZero, a blockchain interoperability protocol helping cross-chain transfers, has announced ATLAS, new exchange infrastructure for trading platforms and financial institutions.
ATLAS, short for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement, is built on the Zero blockchain that LayerZero announced in February in collaboration with Citadel Securities, DTCC, ARK Invest and Intercontinental Exchange. Zero is designed for financial markets and uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify trades onchain.
LayerZero said ATLAS is a "headless exchange," meaning it does not have its own consumer app or trading platform. Crypto exchanges, brokers, and financial institutions can use ATLAS at the backend while keeping their own users and interface.
LayerZero said that with ATLAS, trading platforms won't have to build infrastructure themselves or rely on a competing exchange, and that the system brings matching, clearing, settlement, and risk management into one place instead of handling them separately.
ATLAS will support both "open" and institutional markets. Open markets can serve crypto apps, prediction markets, and other public trading products, while institutional markets can set their own rules for who can trade and under what conditions.
"The world's global asset base is expanding faster than ever before. It is globally accessible, continuously available, and includes an increasingly large number of assets with sufficient depth and liquidity to build meaningful markets around," said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero. "We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all."
ATLAS will connect three main groups: trading venues, market creators and market makers. Trading venues will run user-facing platforms. Market creators will define the assets and markets that trade, including spot tokens, perpetuals, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes and prediction markets. Market makers will provide liquidity.
ZRO token's role LayerZero also detailed the role of (ZRO) in ATLAS and Zero. ZRO will secure Zero through delegated proof-of-stake, serve as the gas token and be used for governance. Trading venues can also stake ZRO to qualify for higher fee rebates on ATLAS, with the highest tier requiring up to 1% of ZRO supply.
ATLAS will charge one all-in trading fee. In Open ATLAS, trading venues will receive rebates ranging from 20% to 65%, based on ZRO stake and/or trading volume. After that rebate, 25% of the remaining fees will go to market creators, and 75% will be used to buy and burn ZRO, according to LayerZero.
LayerZero said ATLAS is expected to launch later this year.
The project expands LayerZero beyond its core interoperability business. LayerZero said its Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) Standard has supported more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume across more than 160 blockchains, including stablecoins and tokenized stocks.
The launch comes as a number of firms have recently moved cross-chain operations from LayerZero to Chainlink following an April attack on Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge. The attack resulted in the loss of 116,500 rsETH, worth about $292 million at the time, from the LayerZero-enabled bridge.
Jack Melnick, who recently joined LayerZero from Berachain to lead strategy for Zero and ATLAS, said in an X post that ATLAS is the first product built on top of Zero. He compared LayerZero's move into exchange infrastructure to how custodian banks became central to settlement and later added trading services around the assets they already handled.
ZRO, LayerZero's native token, surged following the announcement. It was up more than 16% over the past 24 hours and trading at $1.26, according to The Block's ZRO price page.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
LayerZero has introduced ATLAS, infrastructure that lets trading platforms and financial institutions operate their own exchanges without building matching, clearing, settlement and risk-management systems from scratch, according to the company's announcement. LayerZero's ZRO token rose as much as 30% following the news, and is currently trading near $1.20, up 55% over the past week, according to CoinGecko data.
ATLAS is what LayerZero calls a "headless exchange": it has no consumer-facing application or trading venue of its own. Instead, operators run their own branded venues on top of it, keeping their users and fees, rather than choosing between building an exchange from the ground up or becoming a customer of a rival platform. LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino said the goal was to build "the neutral, performant backend to power them all."
The system runs on Zero, a blockchain LayerZero first announced in February 2026 after roughly two and a half years of development. Zero verifies trades on-chain using zero-knowledge proofs and is designed to provide fast, final, cryptographically provable settlement. Citadel Securities, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, ARK Invest and Intercontinental Exchange have all been named as collaborators on the underlying infrastructure. ATLAS is scheduled to launch later this year.
The push into exchange infrastructure comes as LayerZero works to rebuild institutional confidence after a difficult stretch. A May exploit affecting Kelp, a protocol built on LayerZero's messaging layer, prompted at least one major partner, Kraken, to shift some of its interoperability needs to Chainlink, according to Cryptoast. Chainlink has since built out its own institutional presence, including a partnership with the DTCC on a tokenization platform and an alliance with Amazon Web Services announced in April. ATLAS gives LayerZero a more concrete institutional pitch of its own, though it arrives as an announcement of a system still months from launch, while Chainlink's partnerships are already in deployment.
LayerZero's core business is interoperability: its messaging protocol has moved more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume across 165 blockchains. ATLAS represents a shift from connecting existing venues toward providing the infrastructure for new ones, a bet that the bigger opportunity in tokenized markets is supplying the plumbing behind institutional trading venues rather than the messaging layer between them. Whether banks and trading platforms are willing to build on infrastructure this new, rather than adapt systems already running in production elsewhere, will determine whether ATLAS becomes the standard Pellegrino is describing or one of several competing backends.
LayerZero has unveiled ATLAS, an exchange infrastructure layer built on its Zero blockchain for crypto trading platforms and financial institutions, while ZRO has climbed more than 16% following the announcement.
Summary
LayerZero has unveiled ATLAS as exchange infrastructure for trading platforms and financial institutions. ATLAS will combine matching, clearing, settlement and risk management on the Zero blockchain. ZRO will secure Zero and give ATLAS trading venues access to higher fee rebates. LayerZero plans to use 75% of remaining Open ATLAS fees to buy and burn ZRO. ZRO jumped more than 16% following the ATLAS announcement. LayerZero said ATLAS, short for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement, will serve as a backend for trading venues without operating a consumer-facing exchange of its own, allowing exchanges, brokers and financial firms to keep control of their users and interfaces.
The system brings trade matching, clearing, settlement and risk management into a single stack, functions that financial institutions often handle through separate infrastructure. LayerZero plans to launch ATLAS later this year.
Built on Zero, the layer 1 network LayerZero introduced in February, ATLAS will use the blockchain’s zero-knowledge proof architecture to verify trades onchain while handling workloads designed for financial markets.
The Zero network was introduced alongside involvement from Citadel Securities, ARK Invest, Intercontinental Exchange and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. As previously reported by crypto.news, Zero was designed to scale to as many as 2 million transactions per second while separating transaction execution from verification through zero-knowledge proofs.
ATLAS gives trading venues their own front end Under the headless exchange model, ATLAS will provide the trading engine while companies building on it manage the product that customers actually use.
LayerZero said the setup removes the need for operators to build exchange infrastructure from scratch or depend on backend technology controlled by a competing exchange. Trading venues can connect their own applications to ATLAS, select markets and handle customer distribution while the underlying system processes trades and settlement.
The infrastructure will support two configurations. Open ATLAS will be available for crypto applications, prediction markets and other public financial products, while Institutional ATLAS will allow operators to apply their own access and trading requirements.
Both will use the same underlying engine, according to LayerZero, although institutional market operators will determine which participants can trade and what rules apply to individual markets.
ATLAS is being built to connect three groups. Trading venues will operate the customer-facing platforms, market creators will decide what assets and products can trade, and market makers will supply liquidity.
Market creators will be able to establish markets covering spot crypto assets, perpetual futures, stocks, bonds, commodities, meme tokens and prediction contracts.
LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino said the infrastructure was designed as a neutral backend for an asset market that increasingly trades continuously and across multiple venues.
“The world’s global asset base is expanding faster than ever before. It is globally accessible, continuously available, and includes an increasingly large number of assets with sufficient depth and liquidity to build meaningful markets around,” Pellegrino said.
“We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all.”
LayerZero said its current ATLAS environment has produced sub-millisecond median latency, while p95 and p99 latency reached 1.418 milliseconds and 2.641 milliseconds, respectively. The company plans to initially provision the system for 200,000 transactions per second at launch.
ZRO will secure Zero and determine ATLAS rebates ZRO will have several functions across Zero and ATLAS, adding uses for the token outside LayerZero’s existing interoperability network.
According to LayerZero, ZRO will secure Zero through delegated proof-of-stake and serve as the blockchain’s gas and governance token.
Trading venues operating through ATLAS can also stake ZRO to receive higher fee rebates. The highest rebate tier can require a stake equal to as much as 1% of the token’s total supply.
Open ATLAS will charge a single trading fee, with venues receiving rebates between 20% and 65% depending on their ZRO stake, trading volume or a combination of the two.
After the venue rebate is deducted, LayerZero said 25% of the remaining fee revenue will be paid to the market creator. The other 75% will be used to purchase ZRO and permanently burn the acquired tokens.
The model gives ZRO another fee-linked mechanism after LayerZero recently tied parts of its existing infrastructure revenue to token purchases. LayerZero said in August that excess revenue from new Stargate OFT transfer fees would be used for ZRO buybacks.
ZRO rose sharply after ATLAS was announced, gaining more than 16% over 24 hours to trade near $1.26, according to price data cited in the original report.
LayerZero expands beyond cross-chain transfers ATLAS pushes LayerZero into trading infrastructure after the company built its main business around moving assets and messages between blockchains.
LayerZero said its Omnichain Fungible Token standard has processed more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume spanning more than 160 networks. Assets using the framework include stablecoins and tokenized stocks.
The expansion follows a difficult period for LayerZero’s interoperability business after the April attack on Kelp DAO’s rsETH bridge.
Attackers drained 116,500 rsETH worth roughly $292 million from a LayerZero-enabled bridge on April 18 after compromising infrastructure used in the token’s cross-chain verification setup.
LayerZero later said the incident was limited to Kelp DAO’s configuration, which used a single decentralized verifier network, and maintained that its core protocol had not been compromised. Its incident report said attackers poisoned RPC infrastructure used by the verifier and used the compromised setup to pass a forged cross-chain message.
Following the attack, LayerZero said it would stop signing messages for applications using 1-of-1 verifier configurations and move affected integrations toward multi-verifier security. The company subsequently tightened bridge security around single-signer deployments.
Kelp DAO disputed parts of LayerZero’s account and later announced that rsETH would migrate to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. The protocol said the rsETH migration plan was intended to strengthen security after the exploit, while Pellegrino rejected Kelp DAO’s claims about how its verifier configuration had been established.
Other projects also moved cross-chain infrastructure to Chainlink in the following weeks. By May, assets associated with migrations involving Kelp DAO, Lombard, Solv, Re.xyz and Kraken had exceeded $4 billion, according to an earlier report covering the move toward Chainlink CCIP.
Jack Melnick, who joined LayerZero from Berachain to lead strategy for Zero and ATLAS, said in an X post that ATLAS is the first product built on Zero.
Excited to announce that I’ve joined LayerZero to lead Strategy, focusing on GTM of Zero & ATLAS.
For the last four years, I’ve worked as a protocol builder, flirting with the cutting edge of what is feasible (and responsible) to build on blockchain. Those that have worked with… https://t.co/X3NfTx2C5j
— Cap'n Jack (@jackmelnick_) August 25, 2026 Melnick compared LayerZero’s expansion with the development of custodian banks, which became important settlement providers before adding trading services around assets they were already responsible for handling.
Key Highlights LayerZero introduced ATLAS, an integrated trading and settlement platform on the Zero blockchain The platform merges trade execution, clearing, settlement, and risk oversight into a unified framework ZRO experienced a 30%+ price increase post-announcement, reaching approximately $1.26 Token buyback and burn mechanism will consume 75% of net fees after venue rebates Strategic partners include Citadel Securities, DTCC, ICE, ARK Invest, and Google Cloud LayerZero has rolled out ATLAS, a comprehensive trading and settlement framework operating on its Zero blockchain infrastructure. The reveal triggered a significant rally in the ZRO token, which climbed over 30% from approximately $1 to reach $1.26.
LayerZero (ZRO) Price ATLAS represents Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement. The platform functions as core infrastructure for exchanges, brokerage firms, and financial service providers — integrating order matching, clearing, settlement processes, and risk controls within a single ecosystem.
LayerZero characterizes ATLAS as operating in “headless exchange” mode. This architecture means there’s no direct consumer application. Instead, trading platforms connect to ATLAS infrastructure while maintaining their proprietary user interfaces and customer relationships.
Two distinct deployment models are available. Open ATLAS targets cryptocurrency applications and prediction market platforms. Institutional ATLAS enables financial organizations to establish custom compliance frameworks governing participant access and trading parameters.
The platform is designed to facilitate trading across multiple asset classes, including cryptocurrency spot markets, perpetual futures contracts, equities, fixed income securities, commodities, and prediction markets.
How ZRO Powers the ATLAS Ecosystem The ZRO token plays a fundamental role within the ATLAS architecture. It functions as both the staking asset for Zero blockchain security through delegated proof-of-stake consensus and as the native gas token for network transactions.
Trading venues can stake ZRO tokens to unlock enhanced fee rebate structures. The premium tier demands staking quantities equivalent to 1% of ZRO’s total token supply.
Once venue rebates are distributed, the remaining fee pool splits 25% to market creators and 75% toward ZRO token buybacks and burns, creating deflationary pressure on circulating supply.
Partnership Ecosystem and Context LayerZero revealed the Zero blockchain initiative in February with backing from prominent institutions including Citadel Securities, DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, ARK Invest, and Google Cloud.
Jack Melnick, who transitioned to LayerZero from Berachain to oversee Zero and ATLAS strategy, drew parallels to how custodial banking institutions developed trading capabilities atop settlement infrastructure.
Security Setbacks and Recovery The ATLAS introduction follows a challenging chapter for LayerZero’s primary operations. This past April, malicious actors exploited vulnerabilities to extract roughly 116,500 rsETH tokens valued at approximately $292 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-based bridge.
In response to the breach, multiple protocols migrated their cross-chain infrastructure from LayerZero to Chainlink alternatives.
Despite these setbacks, LayerZero reports its OFT Standard has processed over $290 billion in cross-chain transaction volume spanning more than 160 blockchain networks.
The ATLAS platform is scheduled for full deployment in late 2026.
LayerZero has spent most of its life categorized as interoperability plumbing. That framing now looks too narrow. The protocol detailed trading infrastructure built on its Zero blockchain, placing it closer to market structure than to simple cross-chain messaging. The announcement, covered in the original report, names Citadel Securities as a backer and says DTCC and ICE are exploring institutional market applications.
The market read it as more than a pilot note. ZRO surged, according to the report, and the move fits a market that has been rewarding specific catalysts rather than broad beta, a dynamic visible in recent weekly gainer rankings. What separates ZRO’s jump is the structural anchor: a market maker, two market infrastructure operators, and a native trading stack.
The shift from bridge protocol to market infrastructure For most cross-chain protocols, the core product is moving data or assets securely between networks. LayerZero’s trading infrastructure changes the emphasis. Running on the Zero blockchain suggests the team wants settlement and order flow to live inside its own stack, not just connectivity. That is a different revenue and risk profile.
It also arrives as tokenization is moving from concept to post-trade plumbing. Established players have been consolidating tokenized asset infrastructure, as tracked in BlockchainReporter’s tokenization roundup. If LayerZero can attach institutional settlement demand to the Zero chain, ZRO starts to look less like a fee utility and more like exposure to market plumbing.
Why Citadel, DTCC, and ICE matter Citadel Securities is not a passive investor. Its involvement suggests interest in liquidity mechanics rather than ideology. DTCC clears and settles traditional securities. ICE owns exchanges and clearinghouses. Two of those names exploring applications is not deployment, but it indicates the conversation has moved past proof-of-concept.
For a crypto native protocol, that is a different kind of signal. It is not about a foundation grant or a venture round. It is about whether the system can handle the operational and regulatory load that comes with institutional flow. That is precisely where the uncertainty sits.
The infrastructure push also feeds into a competition for developer attention. LayerZero will need builders beyond market participants to keep the Zero chain active. Chains that combine application activity with institutional pilots have shown stronger developer retention, a pattern visible in recent developer activity rankings. The harder question is whether trading infrastructure attracts the same type of application builders.
Regulatory and market-structure questions Any time DTCC and ICE appear in a crypto announcement, the regulatory layer gets heavier. Clearing, settlement, and exchange applications invite questions about custody, reporting, and market abuse controls. LayerZero has not detailed how those requirements will be handled, and the source material leaves compliance specifics untouched.
That creates a wide range of outcomes. A full institutional rollout could turn the Zero chain into core market infrastructure. A slower, permissioned pilot could leave ZRO’s price move exposed. Traders are betting on the first path while the available information supports the second. The gap between those scenarios is likely to keep volatility elevated.
Political pressure adds another variable. If stablecoin and market structure legislation moves in the US, the path for tokenized trading infrastructure becomes either clearer or more contested. The recent fight over a major crypto bill, detailed in BlockchainReporter’s Senate coverage, shows how quickly the rules can shift. LayerZero’s institutional ambitions are sensitive to exactly that kind of legislative friction.
AUTHOR
Entrepreneur and freelance writer based in Nakuru, Kenya. I cover cryptocurrency, the Blockchain technology, and financial topics. It’s my joy to transform the simplest phrases in a way they reach a reader’s heart to help them discover how crypto is disrupting the world as we have known it. I believe in transforming the world, one word at a time.
TLDR LayerZero unveiled ATLAS, a new exchange infrastructure layer built on its Zero blockchain. ATLAS combines trade matching, clearing, settlement and risk management into one system. ZRO token rose more than 16% after the announcement, trading near $1.26. LayerZero plans to use 75% of leftover Open ATLAS fees to buy and burn ZRO. The system is designed to serve trading venues, brokers and financial firms without competing with them. LayerZero has introduced a new project called ATLAS. The system is built on Zero, the company’s own blockchain network. It is designed to give exchanges and financial firms the tools they need to run trading platforms.
The name ATLAS stands for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement. LayerZero says it will act as a backend system rather than a public exchange. Companies that use it will keep control of their own users and interfaces.
How ATLAS Works ATLAS brings several functions together in one place. These include trade matching, clearing, settlement and risk management. Many financial firms currently handle these tasks through separate systems.
The system runs on Zero, a network LayerZero launched earlier this year. Zero uses zero-knowledge proofs to check trades on the blockchain. The network was built with input from firms including Citadel Securities, ARK Invest, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
LayerZero says Zero can handle up to 2 million transactions per second. ATLAS will launch with support for 200,000 transactions per second. The company reports sub-millisecond median latency during testing so far.
ATLAS will come in two forms. Open ATLAS is meant for crypto apps, prediction markets and other public products. Institutional ATLAS will let operators set their own rules for who can trade.
Both versions use the same trading engine. Market creators using the system can list assets such as crypto tokens, stocks, bonds, commodities and prediction contracts.
What This Means for the ZRO Token The ZRO token will play a central role in the new system. It will secure the Zero network through staking. It will also serve as the network’s gas and governance token.
Trading venues that stake ZRO can earn higher fee rebates on ATLAS. The top rebate tier requires a stake equal to as much as 1% of the total ZRO supply.
Open ATLAS will charge one trading fee. Rebates for venues will range between 20% and 65% based on their stake or trading volume.
After rebates are paid, 25% of remaining fees go to the market creator. LayerZero says the other 75% will be used to buy ZRO tokens and burn them permanently.
Following the announcement, ZRO jumped more than 16% within 24 hours. The token was trading near $1.26 after the news broke.
LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino said the goal was to build a neutral backend for a growing range of assets. He said the world’s asset base is expanding and trading is becoming more continuous across markets.
The ATLAS launch comes after a difficult stretch for LayerZero’s cross-chain business. In April, attackers drained about $292 million in rsETH from a bridge tied to Kelp DAO that used LayerZero’s technology.
LayerZero said the issue was limited to a single verifier setup used by Kelp DAO. The company said its core protocol was not affected. It later stopped supporting single-verifier bridge configurations.
Kelp DAO disputed parts of LayerZero’s explanation. It later moved rsETH to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. Other projects made similar moves in the weeks that followed.
Jack Melnick, who leads strategy for Zero and ATLAS, said ATLAS is the first product built on the Zero network. He compared the move to how custodian banks expanded into trading services over time.
Excited to announce that I’ve joined LayerZero to lead Strategy, focusing on GTM of Zero & ATLAS.
For the last four years, I’ve worked as a protocol builder, flirting with the cutting edge of what is feasible (and responsible) to build on blockchain. Those that have worked with… https://t.co/X3NfTx2C5j
— Cap'n Jack (@jackmelnick_) August 25, 2026
LayerZero plans to launch ATLAS later this year. The company says its Omnichain Fungible Token standard has already processed more than $290 billion in cross-chain transfers.
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.
GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors are slightly red, HYPE outperforms; BTC at $78.7k BTC ETFs see another $320M inflows; ETH outperforms with $180M Hyperliquid activates AQAv2, routing more fees to buybacks & burns (and touts new lending feature) LayerZero introduces ATLAS as new settlement and trading engine (ZRO +10%) Pistacio soars 200x as Pump.fun sees biggest revenue day since Sept 2025 🏛️ LayerZero Wants to Be the Plumbing Behind Every Exchange
LayerZero spent six years building rails to move tokens between blockchains. On Tuesday it announced ATLAS, a trading and settlement engine designed to sit underneath exchanges rather than compete with them. ZRO was trading near $1 earlier in the session and jumped more than 20% on the news.
ATLAS has no app and no frontend. Trading venues plug into it, keep their own interface and customers, and skip building matching, clearing, settlement, and risk systems themselves. LayerZero’s argument is that venues built on existing exchanges always end up competing with that exchange’s own app, and institutions won’t put their core business on rails a competitor operates. They are shipping two versions: one for crypto apps and prediction markets, and one for firms that need to enforce their own rules on the same engine. Markets can range from spot and perps to stocks, bonds, commodities, and predictions.
ATLAS is the embodiment of our belief that the world’s rapidly expanding asset base needs a neutral, performant engine that underpins the venues that will build across markets spanning the globe. Any market, anywhere in the world, 24/7, with industry-leading performance, all…
— LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) August 25, 2026
ZRO is wired into all of it. Venues stake the token for fee rebates of 20% to 65%, and after those rebates, 75% of what’s left buys and burns ZRO while 25% goes to whoever created the market. That turns the token into a claim on trading volume, which is why the announcement moved the price.
This major announcement comes at a critical time for the LayerZero ecosystem. In April, attackers took roughly $292 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge, and protocols have been leaving since, including BitGo’s $7.7 billion in wrapped Bitcoin and Wyoming’s state stablecoin, roughly $15 billion in total. It’s been a big exodus. But now momentum is returning. And LayerZero has built the infrastructure to house all the biggest winners of this upcoming cycle in perps, tokenized stocks, prediction markets and broader RWAs. Now we’ll see how potential partners respond…
🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets Crypto majors are slightly red with HYPE leading; BTC -0.6% at $78.4k; ETH even at $2,460; SOL -2% at $97; HYPE +3% at $82 Top alt movers include ZRO (+10%), SPX (+10%) and PYTH (+4%) Oil -2% at $80; Gold -0.5% at $4,670 Stock futures are flat ahead of PCE and NVIDIA earnings; DOW even, Nasdaq -0.1% Crypto-margined Bitcoin futures fell to about 12% of open interest from near 100% in 2019 and 2020, with $570.08 million liquidated over 24 hours The Crypto Fear and Greed Index hit 81, “extreme greed,” for the first time since late 2024, climbing 45 points in 30 days Goldman Sachs raised its Coinbase target to $196 from $173 on Tuesday, keeping a Buy & pointing to derivatives and prediction markets, while Canaccord lifted Strategy to $175 from $130 on what it called a materially brighter setup The Blockchain Association urged regulators to keep stablecoin identity checks at the issuer level, warning that extending KYC to peer-to-peer transfers would “cripple the industry” Thirty-nine state banking associations signed on to the BankChain Alliance, a bank-owned network for tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and payments targeting a 2027 launch A federal jury convicted Block Bits Capital founder Japheth Dillman of wire fraud and conspiracy for raising nearly $1 million on trading software he knew did not work. Security firm Socket linked 77 Firefox extensions to a wallet-stealing campaign, confirming 40 as malicious impersonations of OKX, Rabby, and TronLink Japan's FSA, Finance Ministry, and central bank will form a study group this summer on blockchain rails for around-the-clock settlement of stocks and government bonds Corporate Treasuries & ETFs
The Bitcoin ETFs saw $337M in net inflows on Monday; the ETH ETFs saw $116M in inflows Grayscale’s Zcash fund began trading Tuesday on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH, converting a trust that has existed since October 2017 Bitwise launched Automated Token Portfolios built on Coinbase’s tokenized stocks, letting eligible non-US investors hold AI, robotics, and Magnificent Seven baskets in their own wallets Meme Coin Tracker
Meme leaders were red; DOGE -4%, SHIB -3%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -4%, TRUMP -5%, BONK -5%; Fartcoin +17% to $213M Robinhood chain saw major gains again; PONS +40% to $88M, AI +35%, DELTA +40%, YOLO +45% and NET +110%; Cashcat +10% at $225M Solana leaders included Pistacio (+200x), Martians (+50x), and nosis (+260%); Ansem +10% at $280M 💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker Hyperliquid activated AQAv2 on Tuesday, routing roughly 90% of the reserve yield on USDC held at the protocol into HYPE buybacks and burns every 30 days Pump.fun did $2.4M in revenue yesterday, its highest daily total since September 2025 The Grayscale Zcash ETF did $14.8M in volume on its debut day 🚚 What is happening in NFTs? NFT leaders were mostly green, led by Pudgy’s; Punks even at 32.45 ETH, BAYC -2% at 8 ETH, Pudgy +7% at 4.5 ETH RH Machines (+46%) and Hedgehogs (+18%) led top movers FWAIR PFPs fell 11% to a 2.88 ETH floor while the Token Works team published a post mortem from the first launch Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.
GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors are slightly red, HYPE outperforms; BTC at $78.7k BTC ETFs see another $320M inflows; ETH outperforms with $180M Hyperliquid activates AQAv2, routing more fees to buybacks & burns (and touts new lending feature) LayerZero introduces ATLAS as new settlement and trading engine (ZRO +10%) Pistacio soars 200x as Pump.fun sees biggest revenue day since Sept 2025 🏛️ LayerZero Wants to Be the Plumbing Behind Every Exchange
LayerZero spent six years building rails to move tokens between blockchains. On Tuesday it announced ATLAS, a trading and settlement engine designed to sit underneath exchanges rather than compete with them. ZRO was trading near $1 earlier in the session and jumped more than 20% on the news.
ATLAS has no app and no frontend. Trading venues plug into it, keep their own interface and customers, and skip building matching, clearing, settlement, and risk systems themselves. LayerZero’s argument is that venues built on existing exchanges always end up competing with that exchange’s own app, and institutions won’t put their core business on rails a competitor operates. They are shipping two versions: one for crypto apps and prediction markets, and one for firms that need to enforce their own rules on the same engine. Markets can range from spot and perps to stocks, bonds, commodities, and predictions.
ATLAS is the embodiment of our belief that the world’s rapidly expanding asset base needs a neutral, performant engine that underpins the venues that will build across markets spanning the globe. Any market, anywhere in the world, 24/7, with industry-leading performance, all…
— LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) August 25, 2026
ZRO is wired into all of it. Venues stake the token for fee rebates of 20% to 65%, and after those rebates, 75% of what’s left buys and burns ZRO while 25% goes to whoever created the market. That turns the token into a claim on trading volume, which is why the announcement moved the price.
This major announcement comes at a critical time for the LayerZero ecosystem. In April, attackers took roughly $292 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge, and protocols have been leaving since, including BitGo’s $7.7 billion in wrapped Bitcoin and Wyoming’s state stablecoin, roughly $15 billion in total. It’s been a big exodus. But now momentum is returning. And LayerZero has built the infrastructure to house all the biggest winners of this upcoming cycle in perps, tokenized stocks, prediction markets and broader RWAs. Now we’ll see how potential partners respond…
🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets Crypto majors are slightly red with HYPE leading; BTC -0.6% at $78.4k; ETH even at $2,460; SOL -2% at $97; HYPE +3% at $82 Top alt movers include ZRO (+10%), SPX (+10%) and PYTH (+4%) Oil -2% at $80; Gold -0.5% at $4,670 Stock futures are flat ahead of PCE and NVIDIA earnings; DOW even, Nasdaq -0.1% Crypto-margined Bitcoin futures fell to about 12% of open interest from near 100% in 2019 and 2020, with $570.08 million liquidated over 24 hours The Crypto Fear and Greed Index hit 81, “extreme greed,” for the first time since late 2024, climbing 45 points in 30 days Goldman Sachs raised its Coinbase target to $196 from $173 on Tuesday, keeping a Buy & pointing to derivatives and prediction markets, while Canaccord lifted Strategy to $175 from $130 on what it called a materially brighter setup The Blockchain Association urged regulators to keep stablecoin identity checks at the issuer level, warning that extending KYC to peer-to-peer transfers would “cripple the industry” Thirty-nine state banking associations signed on to the BankChain Alliance, a bank-owned network for tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and payments targeting a 2027 launch A federal jury convicted Block Bits Capital founder Japheth Dillman of wire fraud and conspiracy for raising nearly $1 million on trading software he knew did not work. Security firm Socket linked 77 Firefox extensions to a wallet-stealing campaign, confirming 40 as malicious impersonations of OKX, Rabby, and TronLink Japan's FSA, Finance Ministry, and central bank will form a study group this summer on blockchain rails for around-the-clock settlement of stocks and government bonds Corporate Treasuries & ETFs
The Bitcoin ETFs saw $337M in net inflows on Monday; the ETH ETFs saw $116M in inflows Grayscale’s Zcash fund began trading Tuesday on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH, converting a trust that has existed since October 2017 Bitwise launched Automated Token Portfolios built on Coinbase’s tokenized stocks, letting eligible non-US investors hold AI, robotics, and Magnificent Seven baskets in their own wallets Meme Coin Tracker
Meme leaders were red; DOGE -4%, SHIB -3%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -4%, TRUMP -5%, BONK -5%; Fartcoin +17% to $213M Robinhood chain saw major gains again; PONS +40% to $88M, AI +35%, DELTA +40%, YOLO +45% and NET +110%; Cashcat +10% at $225M Solana leaders included Pistacio (+200x), Martians (+50x), and nosis (+260%); Ansem +10% at $280M 💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker Hyperliquid activated AQAv2 on Tuesday, routing roughly 90% of the reserve yield on USDC held at the protocol into HYPE buybacks and burns every 30 days Pump.fun did $2.4M in revenue yesterday, its highest daily total since September 2025 The Grayscale Zcash ETF did $14.8M in volume on its debut day 🚚 What is happening in NFTs? NFT leaders were mostly green, led by Pudgy’s; Punks even at 32.45 ETH, BAYC -2% at 8 ETH, Pudgy +7% at 4.5 ETH RH Machines (+46%) and Hedgehogs (+18%) led top movers FWAIR PFPs fell 11% to a 2.88 ETH floor while the Token Works team published a post mortem from the first launch Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
@overlayerfi is integrating @LayerZero_Core's Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard to migrate its Overlaid Assets into an omnichain infrastructure, a move designed to remove the liquidity bottlenecks and supply constraints that come with operating across Layer 2 silos.
What the OFT Standard Does The OFT standard works through a burn-and-mint mechanism. This removes the need for wrapped assets or chain-specific liquidity pools, which are common sources of fragmentation in traditional bridging setups.
For Overlayer, the practical effect is straightforward: market participants will be able to issue an asset on @Ethereum and move it to 160+ other supported networks without hitting chain-specific supply limits or managing separate liquidity pools on each chain.
LayerZero's Position in Cross-Chain Infrastructure The choice of LayerZero reflects its growing dominance in the interoperability space.
The standard has attracted a broad range of adopters. For Overlayer, building on an infrastructure of that scale reduces execution risk and opens access to a large existing network of chains and users from day one.
The migration also sidesteps a structural problem that affects many DeFi protocols operating across multiple Layer 2 networks: liquidity fragmentation. When assets are siloed by chain, depth is split across venues, making it harder to execute trades efficiently or maintain consistent pricing. By unifying supply under the OFT model, Overlayer avoids having to manage that complexity independently.
Sources:
LayerZero's OFT Standard Accounts for 87% of Cross-Chain Transfer Volume (Crypto Briefing)
OFT Standard Documentation (LayerZero)
LayerZero OFT Standard Surpasses $290 Billion in Cross-Chain Volume (The Block)
After facing rejection at $1.30 days ago, LayerZero has faced strong downward pressure. In fact, ZRO dropped below the long-term moving average 200-day EMA, hitting a low of $1.04.
At press time, LayerZero was trading around $1.80, up 1.48% on the daily charts. Over the same period, the altcoin’s trading volume plunged 35% to $38 million.
Amid these losses, LayerZero [ZRO] has underperformed all other major crypto assets. According to CMC data, ZRO is the worst performing asset among top 100 tokens , plunging 13% on weekly charts.
Selini Capital deposits 2 million ZRO worth $2.18 million Interestingly, even with the market leaning to the downside, institutional investors have increased spending substantially. Nazoku reported that Selini Capital deposited 2 million ZRO worth $2.18 million to Binance.
2d ago, Selini Capital received 2.1 million ZRO from the multisig wallet 0x907. This multisig wallet had received 8.5 million ZRO from LayerZero two years ago.
These deposits to exchanges could mean several things. Firstly, Nazoku observed that the deposit could mean that these tokens finished the lock up period and deposited to Binance to sell.
So far, the wall has deposited well over 4 million ZRO to exchanges to sell and still holds another 4 million tokens.
Can LayerZero whales come to the rescue? Interestingly, although LayerZero has seen some losses, traders on the spot are holding firmly. According to Coinglass data, Spot netflow has remained positive for four consecutive days.
Source: CoinGlass At press time, Netflow was around -$203k, suggesting more ZRO have left exchanges the past 24 hours. However, most of those buys came from whales.
In fact, Spot Average Order Size data from CryptoQuant showed big whale orders emerging between $1.1 and $1.0, making these price levels key whale zones.
Source: CryptoQuant With the Spot netflow holding negative while whale orders are visible, it suggests these whales have been mostly accumulating. Historically, when whale demand holds steady, it has strengthened market structure, clearing a way for some gains.
Can $1 support hold? ZRO is currently facing intense bearish pressure. In fact, the altcoin’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) formed a bearish crossover and fell to 58.
While RSI made a bearish move, it still holds within bullish zone , suggesting that bears are yet to fully retake the market. If the pressure persist, the RSI will drop below 50, thus confirming this bearish trend.
Source: TradingView Currently, LayerZero is testing the $1 support level, and trend continuation will see this level lost. In doing so, the altcoin will likely drop to EMA20 around $0.94.
To invalidate this bearish outlook, LayerZero must close above its long-term moving average around $1.2.
Final Summary Selini Capital deposited 2 million ZRO worth $2.18 million to Binance. LayerZero dropped 13% on weekly charts becoming worst performing token among top 100 on CMC, as bears eye a drop below $1.
DVN and Executor Services to Be DeprecatedCross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero is pulling offchain support from 15 low-activity chains as part of an operational cleanup that takes effect over the next 30 days.
The affected chains named in the announcement include EDU Chain, Meter, Shimmer, Cyber, Silicon, Sophon, Bitlayer, Degen, Arbitrum Nova, and Cronos zkEVM, among others.
In other words, the core protocol itself remains intact, but operators relying on LayerZero Labs' own infrastructure on these chains will lose those routes once the transition is complete.
Stargate Users Urged to Act Before DeadlineThe deprecation also has direct consequences for Stargate users.
The move reads as routine housekeeping rather than a retreat from the protocol's core, since the affected chains carried minimal volume to begin with. Still, anyone holding assets on the named networks should treat the 30-day window as urgent.
Sources:
LayerZero Official Support Update | CryptoAdventure: LayerZero DVN and Executor Deprecation | AMBCrypto: LayerZero Chain Wind-Down Details
LayerZero’s [ZRO] price surged by 14.42%, as trading volumes picked up, further bolstering demand as ZRO closed in on the $1.20 key resistance level. At the time of writing, ZRO was trading around $1.16, and volume rose 15.46% to about $115.9 million.
The simultaneous increases in price and volume strengthened the recovery’s participation profile during the latest price rally. Buyers, therefore, supported the move with expanding activity rather than relying solely on the thin-market price appreciation.
More importantly, the volume surge coincided with the highest movement of ZRO off its recent lower trading range. This participation helped to expand market participation as price neared the technically significant zones.
Rising leverage adds fuel to ZRO Derivatives traders increased their exposure as ZRO rallied, with Open Interest (OI) climbing 15.75% to $126.33 million at press time.
The rise mirrored a token’s price rally and also brought leveraged involvement behind the recovery. Fresh positioning, therefore, accompanied the rally rather than declining as traders reduced their exposure.
Historically, a rising OI during rising prices generally strengthens the bullish derivatives backdrop across the provided data. Moreover, with increasing leverage, the markets become more sensitive to price reversals.
A sharp rejection may cause leveraged traders to rethink their positions taken in the most recent expansion. Currently, however, increased participation is in line with the overall recovery process.
Therefore, continued OI expansion alongside stable prices would keep derivatives support firmly behind ZRO’s recovery attempt.
Source: CoinGlass Top traders lean heavily toward longs Binance top traders added to the bullish sentiment by showing a clear bias towards long positions. Among the traders tracked, 79.75% were long and 20.25% were short as of writing.
The Long/Short Ratio extended to 3.94, indicating significant bullish sentiment. Such positioning also supported the rising OI while providing a solid derivatives base for ZRO’s 14% gains.
However, the heavy, long concentration introduced another consideration as the price extended sharply higher. When buyers lose the upper hand in the current advance, crowded positioning could add risk to the downside.
However, traders kept a clear bullish stance, and did not sell off during the rally. Hence, positioning in derivatives was supportive, but further gains would become more dependent on price confirmation of their conviction.
Source: CoinGlass Channel breakout changes ZRO’s technical picture ZRO’s price structure delivered the clearest confirmation after breaking above the descending channel that had guided its prolonged decline since March.
The price also broke back above the $1.00 level, marking a previous resistance point as a support level. The breakout pushed ZRO higher to $1.255, the immediate resistance level on the daily timeframe chart.
Beyond there, the $1.545 level represents another significant area of action before the larger $2.00 supply zone. Notably, the RSI, however, had already surged to 81.23, indicating the indicator was well inside the overbought zone.
The high reading raised the likelihood of exhaustion in the near future after the breakout. Still, overbought conditions alone cannot invalidate the newly improved technical price structure.
Holding above the $1.00 support level would preserve the breakout, while $1.255 would determine whether buyers could extend the recovery further.
Source: TradingView Final Summary ZRO’s channel breakout strengthened its recovery as trading and leveraged participation expanded. Overbought RSI raises pullback risks, but $1.00 remains crucial for the breakout.
Cross-chain interoperability provider LayerZero will withdraw off-chain support for 14 low-activity chains, including Arbitrum Nova.
In its latest statement, the firm said that its DVN (decentralized verifier network) and Executors, collectively responsible for off-chain communication between different chains, will be deprecated for the 14 chains.
The affected networks include Cronos zkEVM, Degen, Skale Europa, Superposition, Shrapnel, and more. As a result, some assets, including stablecoins (USDT and USDC) across these chains, could be stranded if not moved before the full shutdown.
According to LayerZero, the off-chain support will be axed in 30 days (by September).
Source: X Since July, LayerZero has flagged over 30 chains with low activity, including the recently shut BounceBit. Although the move is positioned as operational efficiency, security risk and competition seem to be key reasons behind the aggressive shift.
Chainlink CCIP traction threatens LayerZero LayerZero has massive financial backing, including top-tier VC firms such as Sequoia Capital, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Binance Labs, and Coinbase Ventures.
And the bet was simple: bridge the fragmented liquidity across various blockchains. But the KelpDAO’s $292M hack, one of the largest DeFi exploits in 2026, triggered a massive fallout.
The exploit stemmed from LayerZero’s recommended “1-of-1” DVN setup, which doesn’t give enough verification before large minting or fund transfers are approved. Since the same loophole can be used with low-adopted reserve assets, Aave has stopped supporting most of them, including ghost chains.
In fact, several projects have since migrated from LayerZero to rival Chainlink CCIP (Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol). Notably, the Wyoming state government, BitGo (WBTC), and Nethermind have migrated from LayerZero to CCIP.
Chainlink’s Zach Rynes estimated that a total of $15B has been migrated from LayerZero, underscoring the expensive lesson for LayerZero for the KelpDAO fallout.
Notably, after the exploit, LayerZero bridged volume dropped 4x from nearly 400K ETH to about 100K ETH.
Source: DeFiLlama As such, LayerZero’s aggressive move to wind down support for over 30 chains may be viewed as a strategic play to reduce its security risk exposure. By extension, it’s meant to counter Chainlink CCIP’s growing competition after the KelpDAO exploit.
But whether that’s enough to stop its top projects from migrating to Chainlink remains to be seen.
Final Summary LayerZero to withdraw support for 14 chains by September. Chainlink CCIP has attracted over $15B in assets migrating from LayerZero since the KelpDAO hack.
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With over four years of experience in covering and tracking the financial markets, Sneha Agrawal is a dedicated Crypto Journalist and Editor with passion for researching and writing the crypto pieces. She is currently leading the Block of Fame, here at CoinGape. She likes to keep track of political, legal and financial happenings all around the world - without which she deems her day incomplete. Apart from her Journalistic endeavours, she is a solo traveler, museum goer, and a keen reader of books.
The Kelp DAO bridge exploit did not just steal $292 million. It triggered the largest infrastructure migration in DeFi history, and the math shows LayerZero may never recover the lost ground.
Summary
Publicly announced migrations from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP have reached approximately $15 billion in total value, led by BitGo moving $7.4 billion in WBTC, Mantle shifting its $2.5 billion Super Portal, and Lombard transferring over $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets. The April 18, 2026 Kelp DAO bridge exploit drained 116,500 rsETH worth $292 million through a forged cross-chain message that exploited a single-verifier configuration, with the attack later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. LayerZero’s Decentralized Verifier Network model allows applications to select as few as one verifier to validate cross-chain messages, while Chainlink CCIP requires a minimum of 16 independent node operators per lane plus a separate Risk Management Network. Wyoming’s Stable Token Commission became the first U.S. public entity to abandon LayerZero, selecting Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive multi-year infrastructure for the Frontier Stable Token on August 18, 2026. LayerZero’s ZRO token has fallen to a market capitalization of roughly $302 million, down from an all-time high near $7.47, as Nethermind became the latest infrastructure provider to exit its verifier role and join Chainlink as a node operator. On April 18, 2026, an attacker forged a cross-chain message on a LayerZero-powered bridge and walked away with 116,500 rsETH. The tokens were worth $292 million. Within hours, the stolen assets had been deposited on Aave as collateral to borrow $190 million in WETH, spreading stress across lending markets and freezing rsETH pools on both Aave V3 and V4. It was the largest DeFi exploit of the year. But the money was only the beginning of what LayerZero lost.
Four months later, the damage ledger reads differently. BitGo, the custodian behind the largest bitcoin-backed token in decentralized finance, has moved $7.4 billion in WBTC to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. Kraken, Mantle, Lombard, Solv Protocol, Virtuals, Re, and the state of Wyoming have followed. The cumulative value of announced migrations now approaches $15 billion. Nethermind, one of LayerZero’s own verifier network operators, has ended its role and joined Chainlink as a node operator. The question is no longer whether cross-chain infrastructure is becoming a winner-take-all market. The question is whether LayerZero can stop the bleeding.
The exploit that broke trust The Kelp DAO attack was not a smart contract hack. It was a sophisticated assault on off-chain infrastructure that began six weeks before the theft, when an attacker socially engineered a LayerZero Labs developer on March 6, 2026, harvesting session keys and pivoting into LayerZero’s RPC cloud environment. From that position, the attacker poisoned internal RPC nodes and launched a DDoS attack against external nodes, feeding false data to a single verifier that was the only checkpoint standing between the attacker and $292 million.
The critical vulnerability was a configuration choice. Kelp DAO’s rsETH bridge ran with a 1-of-1 DVN setup, meaning a single Decentralized Verifier Network node operated by LayerZero Labs was the sole validator of cross-chain messages. No second verifier existed to disagree. When the attacker compromised the data feeding that lone verifier, the Ethereum contract released funds based on a token burn that never happened on the source chain.
BREAKING: Curve Finance halts LayerZero infrastructure out of precaution after rsETH LayerZero hack, affecting CRV bridging on multiple chains and crvUSD fast bridge pic.twitter.com/UwNvfxBew9
— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 19, 2026 Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and independent security researchers all attributed the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, specifically the TraderTraitor cluster. The attackers routed approximately $175 million in ETH through privacy rails, while Arbitrum managed to lock $71 million in ETH linked to the exploit.
The damage did not stop at Kelp DAO. The attacker deposited 89,567 rsETH on Aave V3 as collateral and borrowed $190 million in WETH against assets that were now backed by nothing. Aave was forced to freeze rsETH markets on both V3 and V4 to prevent further contagion. The liquidation of the attacker’s positions took weeks, with Aave completing the final rsETH liquidations only after the token’s price had been severely disrupted. DeFi United launched a recovery plan for affected holders, but the full scope of secondary losses across lending markets, liquidity pools, and derivative positions linked to rsETH has never been comprehensively tallied.
What followed was a blame war. LayerZero initially pointed to Kelp DAO for choosing the risky 1-of-1 configuration. Kelp DAO fired back that the single-verifier setup was LayerZero’s own default. For three weeks, LayerZero prioritized a technical post-mortem over clear communication, an approach its own leadership later admitted fell short. On May 9, LayerZero publicly acknowledged it “made a mistake” by allowing its own verifier network to secure high-value assets in a risky configuration.
By then, the exodus had already begun.
The migration ledger The departures did not arrive as a wave. They arrived as a cascade, each one making the next more likely.
Kelp DAO itself moved first, shifting rsETH to Chainlink CCIP while the dispute with LayerZero was still active. Solv Protocol followed in early May, moving more than $700 million in tokenized bitcoin infrastructure. Kraken announced on May 14 that Chainlink CCIP would become the exclusive bridge infrastructure for kBTC and all future wrapped assets. The next day, Lombard migrated over $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets, including LBTC and BTC.b.
By mid-May, the total had crossed $4 billion. Then it accelerated.
Virtuals Protocol migrated $700 million in VIRTUAL tokens to enable cross-chain payments for AI agents. Re selected Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive bridge for reUSD, backed by $475 million in protocol TVL. Yuzu Money transferred $54.5 million. On July 9, Mantle announced the migration of its Super Portal, co-developed with Bybit, covering $2.5 billion in MNT tokens. The portal was temporarily suspended during the migration window of July 9 to 15.
Then came the largest single departure. On August 4, BitGo announced it would move WBTC, the biggest bitcoin-backed token in DeFi, from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP. The migration covers $7.4 billion in assets and makes Chainlink CCIP the default infrastructure for all future assets BitGo issues. That single announcement nearly doubled the cumulative migration total.
On August 18, Wyoming’s Stable Token Commission finalized its migration, making the Frontier Stable Token the first state-issued stablecoin in the United States to run exclusively on Chainlink CCIP under a multi-year contract. Wyoming cited concerns about LayerZero’s “disclosure practices and operational security.”
The running tally now approaches $15 billion across at least ten named protocols and one sovereign state entity.
The architecture gap that made it possible The exodus is not simply about one exploit. It reflects a structural difference in how LayerZero and Chainlink CCIP approach cross-chain security, and the Kelp DAO hack made that difference impossible to ignore.
LayerZero V2 uses a modular architecture centered on Ultra Light Nodes and configurable Decentralized Verifier Networks. Each application chooses its own set of DVNs and specifies a threshold for how many must agree before a cross-chain message is validated. The design is flexible. It is also, as the Kelp exploit proved, flexible enough to be fatal. A 1-of-1 setup is cheap but means a single compromised verifier can authorize fraudulent transactions. Costs scale with the number of required verifiers, creating a direct tradeoff between security and expense.
Chainlink CCIP takes a different approach. Every cross-chain lane is secured by a minimum of 16 independent, Chainlink-operated node operators. A separate Risk Management Network monitors for anomalous activity and enforces value-based rate limits on each lane, acting as a circuit breaker that caps potential losses even if the primary validation layer is compromised. The system is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified.
The practical difference is who bears the security burden. Under LayerZero’s model, each application team must understand verifier economics, select trustworthy DVNs, and set thresholds that balance cost against risk. Under CCIP, the baseline security is embedded in the protocol itself. As BitGo’s announcement made clear, the new setup lets the issuer retain direct control over token contracts, transfer limits, and cross-chain settings without needing to manage a verifier stack.
LayerZero has responded by removing support for 1-of-1 DVN configurations and announcing plans to move most routes toward stricter 5-of-5 verifier setups. Whether that is enough to reverse the migration trend is an open question. The 5-of-5 model increases costs for applications and still leaves the selection of verifiers in the hands of each deployer, a responsibility many teams have now decided they would prefer not to carry.
The math on LayerZero’s revenue loss This is the arithmetic nobody has published, and it tells a story more damaging than any headline.
LayerZero currently takes a 0% protocol fee on cross-chain messaging. All messaging fees flow to the DVNs and Executors that secure and deliver messages. Revenue for the broader LayerZero ecosystem comes from three potential lines: messaging fees if the fee switch is activated, Stargate swap fees, and fees from the Zero L1. ZRO buybacks are funded by a Stargate ecosystem allocation routed to the LayerZero Foundation.
The fee switch has not been activated. The LayerZero Foundation runs an immutable voting contract that enforces a public on-chain referendum every six months, and token holders have not yet voted to turn it on.
Here is what the math looks like. LayerZero accounts for an estimated 57% of all cross-chain volume, with over $100 billion in cumulative value transferred across its rails. The Chainlink CCIP migration wave represents roughly $15 billion in bridge TVL that has either migrated or is in the process of migrating. That is not transaction volume. That is the base layer of assets that generate recurring cross-chain messaging fees every time they move between chains.
Consider the arithmetic protocol by protocol. BitGo’s $7.4 billion in WBTC is the single largest wrapped asset in DeFi. Every time WBTC moves between Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, or any other supported chain, it generates a cross-chain message. Under LayerZero, that message produced fees for DVN operators and Executors. Under Chainlink CCIP, those same fees flow to Chainlink node operators. Mantle’s $2.5 billion in MNT tokens bridges regularly between Mantle L2 and Ethereum mainnet. Lombard’s $1 billion in LBTC and BTC.b moves between Corn, Berachain, Rootstock, and other networks. Solv’s $700 million in SolvBTC bridges across four chains. Virtuals’ $700 million in VIRTUAL tokens crosses between Base and other networks to power AI agent payments.
Add Kelp DAO’s rsETH, Re’s $475 million reUSD, Kraken’s $330 million in kBTC and future wrapped assets, and Yuzu Money’s $54.5 million. The aggregate is not a static number. It is a flow generator. Each dollar of bridge TVL produces messaging revenue proportional to how frequently it moves between chains. Wrapped bitcoin products, which rebalance and settle constantly, are among the highest-frequency bridge users in DeFi.
The lost fee revenue accrues not to LayerZero today, since the fee switch is off, but to the future value of ever activating it. Every migration shrinks the denominator of what a fee switch would be worth. Every departure makes it harder to argue that ZRO holders should vote to activate fees, because the remaining transaction base may not justify the cost to users.
ZRO’s market capitalization has fallen to roughly $302 million, down from an all-time high near $7.47 per token. The top 100 wallets control 87.39% of supply. A June 2026 unlock released 25.71 million ZRO worth approximately $23 million, adding sell pressure to an already declining token. The price has dropped 38.87% in the past month alone.
The uncomfortable conclusion: LayerZero’s revenue potential is being hollowed out before the revenue engine is even switched on. The migrations are not just a loss of current activity. They are a structural reduction in the protocol’s future earning capacity.
When verifiers walk The Nethermind departure on August 19 adds a dimension that goes beyond TVL. Nethermind is not a token project moving its assets to a different bridge. It is an Ethereum core engineering firm that was operating a DVN node for LayerZero, validating cross-chain messages as part of the security infrastructure itself.
Nethermind ended its LayerZero verifier role after what it described as an “extensive infrastructure review” and joined Chainlink as a node operator and strategic technology provider. The company did not publish the review or identify a specific LayerZero flaw. It did not disclose the migration’s cost or timeline. What it did do was move from being part of LayerZero’s security layer to being part of Chainlink’s.
JUST IN: S&P Global’s stablecoin stability assessments (SSAs) are now available onchain through Chainlink DataLink, bringing $1.2T+ in indexed assets to DeFi pic.twitter.com/tl1hxOcqXn
— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 11, 2026 The significance is structural. LayerZero’s security model depends on a diverse, high-quality set of DVN operators. When one of those operators not only leaves but joins the competing protocol, it signals something about the relative attractiveness of operating infrastructure for each network. If the Nethermind departure prompts other DVN operators to reassess their positions, LayerZero faces a potential reinforcing loop: fewer high-quality verifiers make the network less attractive to applications, which reduces fee revenue for remaining verifiers, which makes the network less attractive to verifiers.
LayerZero’s move toward 5-of-5 verifier requirements could intensify this dynamic. More required verifiers means more operators must be recruited and retained per lane, at a time when at least one prominent operator has concluded the opportunity lies elsewhere.
A state government takes a side Wyoming’s decision deserves its own examination because it represents something new in the cross-chain debate: a sovereign entity making an infrastructure choice based on operational security rather than token economics.
The Frontier Stable Token launched in January 2026 as the first fiat-backed, fully reserved stable token issued by a U.S. public entity, backed by U.S. dollars and short-term Treasuries. The Commission supports FRNT across eight networks: Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Hedera, Optimism, Polygon, and Solana.
The original cross-chain infrastructure was LayerZero. The migration to Chainlink CCIP, finalized on August 18, was driven by what the Commission called concerns about LayerZero’s “disclosure practices and operational security.” The contract is exclusive and multi-year. LayerZero has been fully deprecated. The Commission said it conducted a full assessment of its cross-chain provider and concluded that the operational security standards did not meet the requirements of a public financial instrument.
FRNT is not a large-cap token. Its significance lies in what it represents: a government-issued financial instrument choosing one cross-chain protocol over another on the basis of security review, not developer preference or token incentives. The Commission’s eight-network deployment across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Hedera, Optimism, Polygon, and Solana means Chainlink CCIP now secures a sovereign stablecoin across a wider network footprint than most private-sector tokens manage.
This matters because government adoption of cross-chain infrastructure creates a different kind of lock-in than protocol adoption. When BitGo migrates, it can theoretically migrate again. When a state government signs a multi-year exclusive contract, it creates a precedent that other public entities may follow. If federal stablecoin legislation advances and other states issue their own stable tokens, the Wyoming precedent positions Chainlink CCIP as the default choice for government-grade cross-chain infrastructure.
The LINK token rose approximately 3% to trade near $9.67 on the announcement. The market read it as confirmation of a trend rather than a one-off event.
Winner-take-all dynamics in cross-chain infrastructure Cross-chain messaging has network effects that tilt toward consolidation. The more assets and protocols that use a given infrastructure, the more liquidity flows through its lanes, the more node operators are incentivized to secure it, and the more attractive it becomes to the next migrating protocol. The reverse also holds: as assets leave a network, remaining participants bear a proportionally larger share of security costs while enjoying fewer network benefits.
LayerZero’s position entering 2026 was dominant. It accounted for an estimated 57% of all cross-chain volume, peaking at 76% in Q2 2025. Over $100 billion in cumulative value had crossed its rails. The Kelp DAO exploit did not break LayerZero’s code. It broke the market’s confidence in LayerZero’s security model, specifically the principle that applications should be responsible for configuring their own verification thresholds.
Chainlink’s response has been to offer a model where security is not optional and not configurable downward. Sixteen node operators per lane, a separate monitoring network, rate limits, SOC 2 compliance. It is more expensive per message. It is also the model that $15 billion in assets have now chosen.
The question for the second half of 2026 is whether this becomes self-reinforcing. If LayerZero’s 5-of-5 verifier mandate increases costs to levels comparable with CCIP, applications face a choice between two similarly priced systems, one of which has been accumulating institutional migration momentum for four months. If the fee switch referendum fails because the remaining transaction base no longer justifies activation, ZRO’s value proposition weakens further, potentially driving additional departures.
There is also the matter of developer mindshare. LayerZero’s OFT standard embeds protocol-specific code into token contracts, creating what critics call vendor lock-in. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Token standard, by contrast, is designed to let issuers retain full ownership of their token contracts and swap providers without redeploying. For teams that have already experienced one forced migration, the standard that makes the next migration easier holds obvious appeal.
Cross-chain infrastructure may not be a natural monopoly. But the $15 billion exodus suggests it has strong winner-take-most characteristics, and the current trajectory favors the protocol that made security non-negotiable.
What to watch LayerZero’s next fee switch referendum. If token holders vote against activation because the remaining transaction base cannot justify the cost to users, it will confirm the revenue hollowing thesis and likely accelerate departures.
DVN operator retention. Whether additional verifier network operators follow Nethermind to Chainlink will signal whether LayerZero’s 5-of-5 mandate can attract enough high-quality validators to function as designed.
Federal stablecoin legislation and state token adoption. If other U.S. states issue stable tokens and follow Wyoming’s precedent of selecting Chainlink CCIP, cross-chain infrastructure becomes a regulated-market standard rather than a protocol-level choice.
Kelp DAO recovery fund outcomes. Aave has completed liquidation of the attacker’s final rsETH positions, but DeFi United’s recovery plan for affected holders will test whether the ecosystem can absorb a $292 million loss without lasting contagion.
LayerZero monthly active transaction volume. The raw number of cross-chain messages processed per month, compared with pre-exodus baselines, will be the clearest measure of whether the migration wave has stabilized or is still accelerating.
Is LayerZero still safe to use after the Kelp DAO exploit? LayerZero has removed support for 1-of-1 DVN configurations and is moving toward stricter 5-of-5 verifier setups. The protocol’s code was not broken in the exploit. The vulnerability was a configuration choice that allowed a single verifier to validate high-value transactions. Applications using multiple independent verifiers face a meaningfully different risk profile than Kelp DAO’s original setup.
How much total value has migrated from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP? Publicly announced migrations total approximately $15 billion as of mid-August 2026. The largest single migration is BitGo’s $7.4 billion WBTC, followed by Mantle’s $2.5 billion Super Portal and Lombard’s $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets. Smaller migrations from Solv, Virtuals, Re, Kraken, and Yuzu Money account for the remainder.
What is the difference between LayerZero’s DVN model and Chainlink CCIP’s security? LayerZero allows each application to choose its own set of Decentralized Verifier Network operators and set a threshold for how many must agree. Chainlink CCIP requires a minimum of 16 independent node operators per lane and adds a separate Risk Management Network that monitors for anomalies and enforces rate limits. The core difference is whether security configuration is the responsibility of the application or the protocol.
Who was behind the Kelp DAO exploit? Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and independent security researchers attributed the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, specifically the TraderTraitor cluster. The breach began on March 6, 2026, when an attacker socially engineered a LayerZero Labs developer to harvest session keys and gain access to the RPC cloud environment.
Why did Wyoming choose Chainlink CCIP for the Frontier Stable Token? The Wyoming Stable Token Commission cited concerns about LayerZero’s disclosure practices and operational security. The Commission selected Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive, multi-year cross-chain infrastructure for FRNT, fully retiring LayerZero. FRNT is the first fiat-backed stable token issued by a U.S. public entity.
What happens to LayerZero’s revenue if migrations continue? LayerZero currently takes 0% on messaging fees, with all fees flowing to DVNs and Executors. Revenue potential depends on activating a fee switch through a token holder referendum. Each migration reduces the transaction base that would generate fees if the switch is activated, structurally reducing the future value of ZRO.
Has LayerZero lost its dominant market share in cross-chain messaging? LayerZero accounted for an estimated 57% of all cross-chain volume entering 2026, peaking at 76% in Q2 2025. The $15 billion in migrations represents a significant reduction in the asset base generating cross-chain messages through LayerZero, though exact market share figures for mid-2026 have not been published.
Could the migration trend reverse? LayerZero’s move to 5-of-5 verifier requirements and the deprecation of insecure configurations address the specific vulnerability exploited in the Kelp DAO attack. However, reversing the trend would require migrated protocols to switch back, which involves smart contract upgrades, governance votes, and reputational risk for teams that publicly cited security as their reason for leaving. Multi-year exclusive contracts, like Wyoming’s, make reversal structurally impossible for some participants. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Crypto assets are volatile and carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making any investment decisions. Published Aug. 20, 2026.
The state's move from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP marks the first time a U.S. government entity has swapped cross-chain providers over security concerns, highlighting a broader $15 billion institutional exodus.
When a state government treats its blockchain infrastructure with the same scrutiny as a traditional banking core, the industry has moved past the era of experimental protocols. On August 18, 2026, the Wyoming Stable Token Commission finalized the migration of its FRNT stable token from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP. This is not merely a technical upgrade; it is the first instance of a U.S. public entity explicitly swapping cross-chain infrastructure on security grounds, signaling that blockchain connectivity is now a sovereign-level concern.
The catalyst for this shift was the April 2026 exploit of Kelp DAO, which resulted in the theft of approximately $292 million in rsETH. Crucially, this was not a failure of smart contract logic, but an infrastructure compromise. Attackers linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group successfully targeted two internal LayerZero RPC nodes while simultaneously executing a DDoS attack on external nodes. By exploiting a 1-of-1 DVN verifier configuration, the attackers were able to forge cross-chain messages. The incident, which contributed to a broader $605 million in DeFi losses that month, exposed the fragility of relying on centralized infrastructure components for cross-chain communication.
Wyoming’s decision to migrate FRNT—a fiat-backed token whose income supports the state’s School Foundation Program—reflects a growing institutional intolerance for such risks. Anthony Apollo, Executive Director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, noted that the commission conducted a proactive security review, identifying specific concerns regarding LayerZero’s disclosure practices and operational security. For a public entity managing assets tied to state education funding, the risk profile of the underlying bridge became untenable.
This migration is part of a larger, $15 billion exodus of total value locked from LayerZero to Chainlink CCIP. Aave alone moved $7.2 billion; Lombard Finance shifted $1 billion in bitcoin-backed assets; BitGo, Solv ($700M), and Re ($475M) followed. The pattern is unmistakable: institutional capital is consolidating around infrastructure that prioritizes defense-in-depth over rapid, permissionless expansion. Chainlink CCIP’s architecture, which includes SOC 2 Type 2 certification, 16 independent node operators per lane, and native rate limits, offers a security model that aligns with the requirements of state-level issuers.
Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, emphasized that governments and other serious institutions require secure, reliable, and standard-setting infrastructure to move digital assets across chains at scale. This requirement is increasingly being codified into federal policy. The U.S. Treasury’s recent GENIUS Act NPRM frames stablecoins as critical payment infrastructure, a designation that necessitates a higher standard of operational resilience. When stablecoins are treated as payment rails, the cross-chain bridges that facilitate their movement are no longer just developer tools; they are systemic components of the financial system.
For FRNT holders, the transition has been smooth, with LayerZero confirming that holders remain unaffected, as reported by CoinDesk. But the broader implications for the LayerZero security narrative are harder to dismiss. The procurement calculus for cross-chain infrastructure has shifted: security credentials now outweigh deployment speed. The migration of a state-issued asset, backed by U.S. Treasuries, is a signal that institutional and government actors will increasingly evaluate cross-chain risk through the lens of verifiable, audit-backed standards.
The distinction between consumer-grade DeFi and sovereign-grade financial infrastructure is hardening. Wyoming’s move demonstrates that for public entities, the cost of a security failure is not just a loss of capital, but a loss of public trust and regulatory standing. By prioritizing infrastructure that meets rigorous, audit-backed standards, Wyoming has set a precedent that other jurisdictions will likely follow as they integrate digital assets into their own public financial frameworks.
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Another major LayerZero verifier just defected to Chainlink.
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Nethermind, the team behind one of Ethereum's most widely run execution clients, is shutting down its Decentralized Verifier Network (DVN) operations for LayerZero and joining Chainlink as a node operator, where it'll help secure the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Data Feeds.
What's the Scoop?The move: DVNs are the independent verifiers that authenticate cross-chain messages in LayerZero's security model, and Nethermind was among its largest. Now Nethermind is consolidating its cross-chain infrastructure work under Chainlink, taking on two roles at once: a node operator securing CCIP and Data Feeds, and a "strategic technology provider" building developer tooling and integration support to help institutions build onchain.The resumé: Founded in 2017, Nethermind runs one of Ethereum's core execution clients (CEO Daniel Celeda says it now powers more than a third of the network) with infra supporting over 16,000 validators and +$5B in delegated assets for clients including Lido, EtherFi, StarkWare, and Arbitrum.The backstory: The move follows an April exploit that drained $292M from Kelp DAO's rsETH bridge, which ran on LayerZero-powered infrastructure. Kelp itself migrated to Chainlink afterward. Fast forward to today, and Chainlink's CCIP has already picked up many billions in TVL from teams leaving LayerZero.What wasn't said: Neither company disclosed financial terms, a migration timeline, or any specific technical complaint about LayerZero. Nethermind's announcement points only to an "extensive review."
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The Wyoming Stable Token Commission, the issuer of the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), has reported that the State of Wyoming has migrated from LayerZero to take advantage of Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability.
The Commission noted that approximately $15 billion in assets have moved from LayerZero to Chainlink since April.
Wyoming has strongly supported the digital asset sector and is the first jurisdiction to enable “sovereign” stablecoins.
FRNT is currently available on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Ethereum, Hedera, Optimism, Polygon, and Solana blockchains.
The Commission initially used LayerZero but said that, after a security review, it decided to switch to Chainlink.
Anthony Apollo, Executive Director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, said that Chainlink was the only cross-chain protocol that met their security and reliability needs.
Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink co-founder, said the selection signaled that governments and “other serious organizations” need secure, reliable infrastructure.
Wyoming believes it is pioneering its stablecoin ecosystem, which will guide the rest of the United States.
