Unchained How Zero Blockchain Cracked 2M TPS Without Sacrificing Decentralization
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Feb 10, 2026 
Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, is building the Zero blockchain to scale without centralization. He discusses fixing storage, rethinking ZK as compression, execution and networking breakthroughs, and how heterogeneous nodes, force-inclusion and institutional partnerships enable 2M TPS and tiny fees.
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Neither Centralization Nor L2s Solve Scale
- Pellegrino rejects both centralized big-node scaling and L2 stacking on a centralized base as inadequate.
- Zero targets decentralized, permissionless systems at global scale with millions of nodes.
QMDB: Log-Based Verifiable Database
- QMDB (published paper) is 100x faster than prior verifiable DB formats like NOMT for state.
- That storage improvement unlocked 3M+ updates per second in practice.
EVM Throughput Can Be Vastly Improved
- FAFO execution shows an EVM can reach million-TPS on a single node with EVM overhead kept.
- Execution and storage improvements compound to make high single-node throughput feasible.