This report shares 25 data points from 2025 that explain how interoperability accelerated crypto.

It covers six trends that define the year:

1. Tokenization
2. Stablecoins
3. Interoperability
4. Blockchains
5. Value Transfer
6. Research

Tokenization

“What exactly is tokenization? It's turning real-world assets—stocks, bonds, real estate—into digital tokens tradable online. Each token certifies your ownership of a specific asset, much like a digital deed. Unlike traditional paper certificates, these tokens live securely on a blockchain, enabling instant buying, selling, and transferring without cumbersome paperwork or waiting periods.” – Larry Fink, BlackRock 2025 investor letter

One of the most significant trends in 2025 was the acceleration of the “tokenization of everything”—the idea that any unit of value that can be packaged as a token should be. While the LayerZero protocol is not directly involved in the act of tokenization itself, which is handled by the issuer, it plays a central role in distribution. LayerZero is used by companies to issue, expand, or connect assets across any type of blockchain.

This year alone, saw LayerZero used in multiple places at the tokenization stack. For instance, Fireblocks embedded LayerZero into its tokenization engine to enable secure deployments of institutional assets on 150+ blockchains, the state of Wyoming issued a stablecoin on seven blockchains, both Ondo and Dinari, two RWA platforms, utilized LayerZero to distribute tokenized stocks across multiple blockchains, and XAUT0 launched, making tokenized gold compatible across Solana and Ethereum. 

But enough of the qualitative, let’s get to the quantitative. 

1. The Growth of OFT Adoption

2. Chain Coverage for Assets

3. Asset Velocity and Demand

4. New Asset Class Growth: Stocks

Stablecoins

“Stablecoins are now an established and fast-growing part of the financial landscape. 
Putatively, stablecoins were originally intended to facilitate holding and trading cryptocurrency. 
But their proliferation has been aided by providing users with a stable store of value, a means 
of payment, and the ability to move capital quickly, irrespective of territorial borders.” 
– Governor Stephen I. Miran / Board Member of Federal Reserve

Stablecoins are widely regarded as crypto’s first “killer app.” Once a niche product used primarily 
as collateral in lending protocols and swaps on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), stablecoins have evolved into being recognized by financial institutions as a potential disruptor to power all global payments and settlements.

Today, they are a $300B+ asset class powered by a wide variety of entities– from crypto-native companies like Tether to onchain applications like Sky, Ethena, and Frax and fintech incumbents
like PayPal.

While their importance is undeniable, scaling stablecoins across the most active and promising blockchains, among a subset of the hundreds that exist today, remains a critical challenge. 
For stablecoins to materially disrupt traditional payment and settlement rails, they must exist ubiquitously across every chain where meaningful financial activity occurs – which is LayerZero’s role here.

5. Stablecoins That Move With LayerZero

6. USDT0's Growth

7. PYUSD's Growth

Interoperability Adoption

“You can think of the LayerZero protocol as a series of pipes that deliver messages between blockchains, transport layer infrastructure that runs below the cities…At its simplest, it means that developers can build products that interoperate with more chains to reach more users, and that those users can more easily move value from chain-to-chain. At its wildest, it means that developers can choose to build products that use different chains for different features, and that users never have to think about which chain they’re on.” – Packy McCormick, Not Boring

If something can be tracked on a ledger, crypto rails increase its velocity and reduce reliance on intermediaries. Interoperability pulls the crypto ecosystem together and an integrated money network. It is all of crypto, without the limits of a single blockchain. 

With interoperability now default in most products, the question is no longer if an asset should expand to many chains or how an app should expand, but what building on many blockchains can unlock. In other words, blockchain connectivity is no longer the challenge. It’s the accelerator.

8. Applications Built on LayerZero

9. Value Movement Across Borders

10. Global Asset Availability

11. Historical Message Activity

Blockchains

“Pretty much all transactions will settle on blockchains eventually, and that all money will be digital.” – Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters

In the early days of blockchain proliferation between 2020 and 2022, each new chain seemed fixated on becoming an isolated winner, locked in a zero-sum race for users and liquidity.

By 2025, that mindset has begun to shift. Crypto increasingly recognizes that different chains serve different niches, from DeFi and IP management to specialized VMs for apps. And all of them, old and new, benefit from being connected.

In a similar manner to the way the internet is a “network of networks,” the “crypto stack” is quickly becoming a network of blockchains, each optimized for certain domains yet connected via standardized messaging – interop and LayerZero.

12. Blockchains Unified As One

13. Capital Mobility

14. Transaction Activity

15. Token Expansion

Value Transfer

“If you asked me to think of a larger shift in how the world works than literally the transition of MONEY and the entire global financial system I’m not sure I could think of any. We’re talking about a truly once-in-a-generation shift of how the world’s population has access to money and all financial instruments and a transition from a top-down authoritarian structure to an open financial system with bottoms up available to every connected person on the planet.” – Bryan Pellegrino, LayerZero Labs CEO

Value transfer is one of the clearest demonstrations of what interoperability unlocks.

When assets are no longer constrained by a single chain, capital can flow to wherever demand exists. In earlier years, cross-chain movement was limited by liquidity, accessibility, tooling and integrity. In 2025, that changed. Message-based transfer emerged as a scalable, reliable primitive for moving value across blockchains at internet speed through the OFT Standard.

The result of this adoption is not just higher volume, but a fundamentally different cost and time profile for global value movement — one that begins to resemble software rather than finance.

16. OFT versus Bridges

17 + 18. Capital Velocity

19 + 20. Transfer Value Efficiency

Research

In 2025, LayerZero released four new open-source primitives that exemplify a commitment to enabling crypto to solve problems at real-world scale. QMDB delivers a 6x improvement in database performance, while FAFO achieves over 1M TPS at 91% lower cost than state-of-the-art sharding approaches. vApp introduces a new application model for building verifiable systems, and ZeroOS represents a Linux-style moment for ZK, unifying fragmented tooling behind a shared abstraction. What makes crypto better, makes LayerZero better.

Let’s dive into the primitives we’ve shipped here.

21. Quick Merkle Database

22. Fast Ahead of Formation Optimization

23. Verified Applications

24. A Universal Modular Library OS for ZKVMs

Wrapping Up

25. Bonus Stats

Conclusion: The Invisible Infrastructure

“The Internet was not designed as a single network, but as a way to interconnect many different networks. The success of the Internet comes from its ability to let independent networks interoperate while still evolving independently.” — Vint Cerf

If 2025 was the year interoperability moved from thesis to reality, then 2026 will be the year it becomes invisible. We began the year explaining why digital borders needed to be crossed; we end it with those borders having been effectively dissolved by hundreds of builders and billions in value moved.

The metrics in this report—from 173% growth in OFT adoption to the 1 million TPS performance of FAFO—suggest that the so-called "crypto bubble" has finally popped, not by bursting, but by expanding to encompass the world's most critical financial rails. We are no longer building a "pond" of speculation; we are building the plumbing for a global, borderless, and instantaneous ocean of value.

2025 was the year of acceleration. 

2026 will be the year of ubiquity.