LayerZero CEO Clears the Air: ZRO Token Will Power Zero

A week after announcing its ambitious new blockchain “Zero,” Bryan Pellegrino, Co-Founder and CEO of LayerZero, has stepped in to address growing speculation around the role of $ZRO. His message was direct: there will be no new token for Zero and $ZRO is the only asset.

Pellegrino explained that $ZRO will sit at the center of Zero’s entire economic design. It will function as the staking asset securing the network and also serve as the gas token used to pay for transactions. Beyond that, every major revenue stream generated within the Zero ecosystem will flow back to $ZRO.

This includes excess priority fees created during state contention, tips and MEV-related fees, trading fees from the Markets Zone, payment fees from the Payment Zone, and future LayerZero messaging fees once the protocol’s fee switch is activated.

In essence, Pellegrino stated that all economic value produced by Zero, LayerZero, and Stargate will accrue directly to $ZRO.

“We’re building Zero with an ambitious goal: to provide permissionless infrastructure for a better world. We’ll see you at the mainnet this fall,” he said.

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What Is Zero?

Zero was unveiled last week as a new blockchain built in collaboration with Citadel, ICE, and Google Cloud. The project introduces what LayerZero calls the first multi-core world computer, designed to overcome the scaling limits of traditional blockchains.

Unlike Ethereum or Solana, where every validator processes every transaction, Zero separates execution from verification using zero-knowledge proofs. This creates two validator types:

• Lightweight Block Validators that can run on consumer hardware
• Higher-performance Block Producers

This architecture aims to process up to 2 million transactions per second per Zone, using new technologies such as QMDB for storage, FAFO for parallel compute scheduling, Jolt Pro for real-time ZK proving, and SVID for high-throughput networking.

Why This Matters

Traditional blockchains face a scaling dilemma. Networks like Ethereum prioritize decentralization but struggle with high fees. Others like Solana increase performance but require expensive validator hardware, reducing decentralization.

Zero claims to offer both scalability and decentralization through a heterogeneous validator design.

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