LayerZero Labs Canada Inc.

LayerZero Labs Canada Inc. (founded 2021, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is the team behind LayerZero, the world's dominant omnichain messaging protocol by cross-chain volume. Co-founded by Bryan Pellegrino (CEO), Ryan Zarick, and Caleb Banister — three computer science researchers who were college roommates at the University of New Hampshire — LayerZero was conceived after the founders experienced the friction of moving an NFT between Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum while building a blockchain game. Their insight was that blockchains, like apps on a smartphone, cannot share data or communicate without dedicated infrastructure. LayerZero is named "Layer Zero" because it provides a foundation below all application layers on all blockchain networks. The company reached a $3 billion valuation in April 2023 after raising $120 million in Series B — achieving this in 18 months from $0. Total funding raised is $318 million across six rounds from 53 institutional investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia Capital, Christie's, Tiger Global Management, PayPal, and Bond Capital, with the most recent round of $55 million closing April 17, 2025. LayerZero V2 launched January 29, 2024, introducing modular security via Decentralized Verifier Networks (DVNs) — allowing each application to configure its own independent security stack (e.g., requiring Google Cloud, Chainlink, and Polyhedra to all attest before a message finalizes) rather than inheriting a single shared trust model. The ZRO governance token launched via airdrop in June 2024 (85M tokens to 1.28M wallets after aggressive Sybil filtering). On-chain governance for protocol fee parameters went live June 2025. By September 2025, LayerZero processed $293M in daily transfers across 132+ blockchains and controlled approximately 75% of cross-chain bridge volume. In 2025, major RWA deployments using LayerZero included: USDT0 (Tether's omnichain USDT, $70B+ in under 12 months), PayPal PYUSD expansion (Tron, Avalanche, Sei), Ondo Finance's 100+ tokenized stocks bridge, Dinari tokenized equities, Wyoming's stablecoin across 7 chains, Fireblocks embedding LayerZero into its institutional tokenization engine for 150+ blockchain deployments, and XAUT0 (tokenized gold cross-chain). LayerZero has also announced "Zero" — a new institutional settlement blockchain backed by Citadel, DTCC, and ICE, targeting 2M TPS with a fall 2026 launch target.