LayerZero (ZRO) Surges 22% to Four-Month High as Citadel and ARK Back New “Zero” Blockchain

LayerZero’s native token, ZRO, has defied the broader crypto market downturn, surging nearly 22% in the past 24 hours to reach a four-month high. The rally comes as the overall cryptocurrency market continues to face selling pressure, with total market capitalization falling more than 2% after a $19 billion wipeout the previous day.

Despite the risk-off sentiment across major digital assets, ZRO climbed to an intraday high of $2.42 on Binance during early Asian trading, a level last recorded in October 2025. At the time of writing, the token was trading around $2.27. Trading volume has spiked significantly, jumping over 410% to approximately $491 million in 24 hours, placing LayerZero among the top-performing altcoins on CoinGecko’s daily gainers list.

The price surge follows LayerZero Labs’ announcement of its new blockchain network, Zero. Designed to overcome long-standing scalability challenges in decentralized systems, Zero introduces a heterogeneous architecture that separates transaction execution from verification using zero-knowledge proofs. This approach removes the traditional replication requirement and enables the network to scale up to 2 million transactions per second per zone, with transaction fees reportedly as low as $0.000001. The mainnet launch is scheduled for fall 2026.

Institutional backing has further fueled investor optimism. Citadel Securities and ARK Invest have both made strategic investments through ZRO purchases. ARK founder Cathie Wood will also join LayerZero’s advisory board. The company is collaborating with major institutions, including DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, and Google Cloud, to explore tokenized securities, 24/7 trading infrastructure, and AI-driven micropayments. Combined with Tether’s recent investment, this growing institutional support has strengthened confidence in LayerZero’s long-term ecosystem and interoperability vision across 165+ blockchains.