Interop. Zero. ATLAS
LayerZero’s Three Pillars
We built LayerZero on a unique insight we had incredible conviction in just over 6 full years ago – that the world of settlement ledgers would be multi-polar, and that the core asset base would rapidly expand.
That has proven true on every possible level and we are still just scratching the surface. Stablecoins have grown 63x from $5B -> $320B since 2020, and are projected to be $3T by 2030. RWAs were not even a real asset class in 2020 ($16M worth of gold). They’ve grown 2,000x in the past 6 years to more than $33B and still have a holder-base on the order of just 1M people, which is just now starting to rapidly accelerate.
And all of this used to happen on a single chain. Today the asset base, trading volume, and payments flows continues to diversify further year after year.
The past six years of our business has been built around this pillar, and a bet that asset expansion and tokenization will continue to be one of the most powerful forces in finance. We’ve put our blood, sweat, and tears into making this acceleration more possible, more seamless and we will continue to bet our time and resources on being the most critical piece of infrastructure supporting this expansion.
Now we’re finally ready to talk about our other two core pillars, why we built Zero, and what we plan to do with it.
We now have an incredibly rapidly expanding asset base, one that’s expanding faster, not slower than ever before. This is an asset base that’s globally accessible, continuously available, and includes an increasingly large number of assets with sufficient depth and liquidity to build meaningful markets around.
The second core pillar of LayerZero comes from our deep conviction that the demand for global markets will continue to expand. We believe that in order for that to happen we need technology that is as performant as existing platforms and can meet the regulatory requirements of the world's largest markets.
Our embodiment of this belief is ATLAS. We have spent the past year working closely with the largest financial institutions in the world to create a platform that does exactly this. Millions of messages per second (NYSE-scale), microsecond latency, and built to serve both institutional and open markets globally.
We are building ATLAS to do for global markets what interoperability and the OFT standard have done for global money.
Our third core pillar is a fundamental belief that AI is going to reshape our entire world faster and at a larger magnitude than anybody could have possibly imagined. It’s clear to anybody now that agents are going to outnumber humans by a thousand-fold. It should also be clear to anyone that what this does to the world of commerce, finance, information, and the rails of the internet and payments we know today will be completely transformative.
In order for blockchains to be able to scale to 10s or 100s of millions of TPS, there are a bunch of critical bottlenecks that need to be solved in storage, DA, replication of compute, network throughput, and many more.
We’ve spent the last 3.5 years systematically dismantling each of these bottlenecks, and published the basis for each in February. We are building the only architecture in the world that is built for true global agentic scale. 100M+ TPS, agents as first-class citizens, native payment rails, and the world’s fastest blockchain.
These are the three pillars that underpin all we’re doing at LayerZero, and they reflect our view of how we plan to help reshape the world.