The ZRO Token

Introduction

LayerZero is the messaging layer that connects blockchains. Today it carries ~70% of all crosschain stablecoin flow and has moved over $260B in value across 165 networks. If you have ever bridged USDT, USDC, PYUSD, USDe, or USDG between chains, you have probably used it without even knowing.

Zero is the Layer 1 blockchain LayerZero is launching for the workloads existing chains cannot carry: 24/7 capital markets, institutional clearing, and stablecoin payments at scale. DTCC, ICE, Citadel Securities, Tether, and Google Cloud are our day zero partners.

One token sits under both. Stargate, the largest application on LayerZero, already sends its revenue to ZRO, and when Zero launches, ZRO will capture the fees of the network beneath it and the exchange running on top, every market it clears, all flowing back through buybacks and burns. There is no second token and there never will be.

That permissionless infrastructure now supports a superstructure: interoperability, settlement, payments, and capital markets, all converging into one token. This post addresses the misconceptions around supply and unlocks, and maps how value accrues across the stack.

Supply 

Allocation and Circulating Supply

ZRO's total supply is 1 billion. 514M is unlocked. The remaining 486M vests across the LayerZero Foundation, strategic partners, and core contributors. 

The LayerZero Foundation had an original allocation of 383M tokens, of which 250M were unlocked at ZRO's launch. The remaining 183M, including 50M repurchased from strategic partners in September 2025 are re-locked until Zero's mainnet launch. These tokens will be used conservatively to grow the LayerZero ecosystem, and there are no plans for a future airdrop.

The original TGE allocation included 40M tokens repurchased from FTX / Alameda Research. LayerZero Foundation returned those tokens to strategic partners as part of the legal settlement. The total strategic partners allocation is now 312M.

Institutional Holders

Alongside the Zero announcement, four of the most prominent institutions in capital markets have purchased ZRO, joined as strategic advisors, and are cobuilding Zero, with equity alignment in LayerZero Labs.

• a16z crypto, our lead investor since Series A+, bought out early investors for $55 million last year at a voluntary three-year lockup. Zero builds on a16z’s Jolt to deliver a breakthrough in zk proofs.
• Citadel Securities made a strategic investment in ZRO at fair market value.
• ARK Invest also became investors in ZRO, with Cathie Wood joining the LayerZero advisory board.
• Tether, issuer of USDT, made a strategic equity investment in LayerZero Labs and ZRO. USDT0, built on LayerZero, has facilitated over $70 billion in crosschain value transfer in under twelve months.
• Separately, 13 independent wallets accumulated 42.63M ZRO for $87.3M through open-market purchases.

Buyback Program

LayerZero entities have deployed $112.7M into ZRO buybacks since September 2025. Both in dollars deployed and percent of supply repurchased, ZRO has one of the largest buyback programs in crypto.

• LayerZero Foundation bought back 50M ZRO or 5% of supply from strategic partners in September 2025. This buyback removes supply from the investor unlock schedule. 
• Stargate revenue powers monthly open-market buybacks. To date, 1.9M ZRO have been bought back at a cost of $2.8M.
• LayerZero Labs made a discretionary open-market purchase in November 2025 of $10M.

Institutional purchases, Foundation, and Labs buybacks now represent 19.77% of total supply, all accumulated within the last 18 months.

Unlocks vs. Actual Sales

Headline unlock numbers overstate what actually hits the market. Contributors follow a separate, slower schedule based on individual joining terms so the figures below focus on strategic partners.

The Foundation buyback of 50M ZRO lowered the gross monthly Strategic Partners unlock from 15M to 12.7M and the Foundation holdings are re-locked until Zero mainnet.

As on May 31, 2026, 134.7M ZRO had been unlocked to investors since TGE. Of that, 85.9M (63.8%) is still held. Public market sales average 4.9M ZRO, or ~0.5% of total supply per month.

A single entity accounts for 37.9% of all unlocked ZRO sold in the open market to date and has sold more than 80% of their unlocked position. Their remaining position unlocks at 2.05M per month, or ~0.17% of monthly trading volume.

Excluding that seller, all other investors averaged 3.0M ZRO per month in open market sales with 73.9% of their unlocked tokens still held. Evidently, actual open market sales track well below the unlock schedule.

Demand

Every token is built on a view of where the world is going. ZRO's first one was simple: there would be many chains, no single winner, and the value would accrue to whatever connected them. That view was right: today LayerZero moves value across 165 chains. The next one is bigger. Permissionless money and permissionless markets are both expanding fast, and Zero sits where they break into the rest of finance.

The Two Waves

Every time a new technology breaks a ceiling, it unlocks a market that didn't exist before. Solana collapsed the cost of issuing a token from dollars to pennies, and the memecoin economy that followed drove network revenue to a peak of $819M a quarter. Hyperliquid opened perpetuals to everyone, and suddenly, weekend traders were setting the price of oil and gold.

Blockchains create a globally auditable trust layer, open to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Those three properties, open access, global reach, and markets that never close, have set off two waves of financial infrastructure, and both are still growing.

The first wave was money. In six years, stablecoins went from nothing to $320 billion, because they move dollars instantly, across borders, at almost no cost. The economics are staggering too, Tether cleared more than $10 billion in profit in 2025, which is why every major institution is now launching one.

Those dollars became the foundation for the second wave. Once you could move money onchain, you could build markets on it. Uniswap let anyone trade with no middleman. Hyperliquid let anyone become the exchange. Together they already clear trillions a year.

Permissionless venues now clear single-digit percentages of daily volume in gold, silver, and oil, enough that the institutions running those markets can no longer ignore them. The assets came onchain. The institutions haven't, yet.

Money and markets are two of the largest waves finance will ever see. Zero is our conviction on what closes the distance.

Who Is Building On Zero

All the technology in the world means nothing without adoption on the other end. The groups that define today's markets are building tomorrow's on Zero:

• DTCC custodies over $100 trillion in assets and processes nearly $4 quadrillion volume annually. It has experimented with blockchains earlier, however, got limited by costs and throughput. Zero fixes that.
• ICE is preparing its global clearing infrastructure for 24/7 markets and tokenized collateral. Michael Blaugrund, VP of Strategic Initiatives, has joined the LayerZero Advisory Board. 
• Citadel Securities routes 35% of all U.S. retail stock trades. They are designing the execution environment institutional on-chain markets require, and have made a strategic investment in ZRO.
• Tether will support the expansion of its products to Zero and integrate Zero into its Wallet Development Kit. They have also made a strategic investment into LayerZero Labs and ZRO.
• Google Cloud is partnering with Zero so AI agents can make micropayments and trade resources instantly.

It is perhaps the first time that these institutions are simultaneously evaluating the same blockchain infrastructure.

LayerZero Adoption

Zero wants to onboard global finance, and the protocol supporting it already dominates the interoperability layer that makes that possible. LayerZero supports hundreds of applications across 165 blockchains. It has processed 160M messages and moved $260B in lifetime value, roughly 80% of all crosschain volume.

Its adoption spans:

• ~70% of all crosschain stablecoin flow including USDT, USDT0, PYUSD, USDG, USDe
• 300+ tokenized equities and real-world assets through Ondo and Centrifuge
• Major DeFi protocols: Ether.fi, Pendle, Ethena
• Institutional issuance infrastructure operated by Paxos, Fireblocks, Fidelity, BitGo, and others.
• 20+ L1/L2 gas tokens as OFTs, including WBTC, Bittensor (TAO), Tron (TRX), Sei (SEI), XRP (XRP), Mantle (MNT), Aptos (APT), and Plasma (XPL)

The design of the protocol is verification-agnostic. Security is outsourced to a marketplace of 71 Decentralized Verifier Networks spanning enterprise operators (Google Cloud, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, Deutsche Telekom), issuer-run DVNs (PayPal, Ondo, USDT0, BitGo, WBTC), client-diverse adapters (Chainlink CCIP), and crypto-native and ZK providers (Nethermind, P2P, Polyhedra, Lagrange). The protocol is immutable, a properly configured application can drop reliance on LayerZero Labs entirely.

Value Capture

All of that demand is worth nothing to ZRO unless the token is built to capture it. The test is simple: when the network grows, does the token grow with it?

ZRO is the only asset, and all economic value generated by Zero, LayerZero, and Stargate flows back to it. 

LayerZero Fee Switch

Every LayerZero message pays DVN and Executor fees to independent operators. The fee switch, when activated through governance, applies an additional protocol fee whose proceeds buy back and burn ZRO.

Three fee referendums have been held, and approval has exceeded 96% in all three. Turnout varied: 10.96% in December 2024, 13.01% in June 2025, 3.71% in December 2025. Since the second referendum, the Foundation has implemented a dynamic quorum model with a floor at 20%.

Stargate Revenue

Stargate is the largest application built on LayerZero, a crosschain transfer protocol across 80+ blockchains. 100% of revenue flows to ZRO buybacks across three business lines:

• Bridging and Fast Swaps. Fees on crosschain transfers and swaps. 
• LZ Assets. Deployment, yield, and transfer fees for stablecoin and RWA issuers including Paxos (USDG0), PayPal (PYUSD0), and Agora (AUSD0). 
• Hydra. Liquidity management fees on USDC, USDT, and ETH.

In August 2025, the Stargate Protocol was acquired for $120M, the effective cash cost was just $25M, as the Stargate treasury had  $95M in assets. For 6 months, the Stargate revenue was split 50/50 between ZRO buybacks and veSTG holders. That split ended in March. Starting April 2026, 100% of Stargate revenue goes to buying ZRO. Q1 2026 volume was somewhat softer with lower activity across crypto, but OFT adoption and new chain integrations will compound growth in the future.

LayerZero Labs

Labs is the commercial services business alongside the protocol. Labs develops the tools that enable LayerZero protocol, Stargate, and Zero blockchain to grow and thrive.

Labs operations are symbiotic with LayerZero. Each business line drives revenue while directly growing volume through the protocol:

• Executor and Gas Abstraction. Every crosschain message requires gas on the destination chain. Labs operates the offchain infrastructure that delivers it, generating per-transaction margins. 
• Chain Integration Services. Commercial deals to deploy endpoints and connect new blockchains. 
• Value Transfer API. Basis points on any-to-any token movement, powering wallet flows, treasury rebalancing, and stablecoin settlement for integrators. 
• Console. Annual subscriptions purchased by issuers and tokenization platforms to manage and monitor complex crosschain operations at scale. 

LayerZero Labs funds all development of LayerZero and Zero through offchain operations and has never had to sell a token to fund itself. In fact, Labs is able to deploy a portion of its operating earnings into open-market ZRO purchases periodically. The first deployment was $10M in November 2025. Future deployments will scale with Labs profitability and are not on a fixed cadence.

Zero

When Zero launches, ZRO is what you stake to secure the network, what you spend as gas to use it, and what governs it. 

Every fee the network produces flows back to the token: trading fees from the markets zone, payment fees from payments, priority fees and MEV from general compute, all of it through buybacks and burns.

And Zero does not start from zero. It is bootstrapped from LayerZero's network and its assets, so every OFT and application on the mesh reaches it on day one.

All Roads Lead to ZRO

LayerZero spent six years building the network that connects all of crypto, $260 billion in value moved across 165 blockchains. Zero is the next step, bringing institutions on chain with the best execution, global liquidity, and settlement in one ultra performant environment. ZRO captures the layer every venue is built on rather than any single venue's success.