Crypto In America LayerZero CEO Brian Pellegrino on Interoperability, Stablecoins, and Bringing TradFi On-Chain
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Apr 1, 2026 Brian Pellegrino, Co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs and former pro poker player turned entrepreneur. He talks about discovering insecure cross-chain bridges, building trust-minimized interoperability, the 700% traffic surge on LayerZero, integrating stablecoins with institutions, and pitching a new high-throughput L1 to TradFi players.
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Wrapped Assets Shift Risk Forever
- Bridges that mint wrapped assets force perpetual trust in intermediary contracts and caused most major bridge losses.
- LayerZero's approach was to keep native assets and have asset issuers retain control, so users hold canonical tokens on each chain.
Build Interop Like TCPIP With Immutable Core
- Treat core interoperability like TCP/IP: make the base protocol immutable and let higher layers opt into improvements.
- Use immutability to build long-term trust while offering optional libraries for incremental features.
Interoperability Demand Comes From Institutional Flows
- LayerZero's volume scaled from experimentation to real institutional flows, hitting $38B in one month and now ~$15–20B monthly.
- Large transfers (hundreds of millions to nearly $1B) come from exchanges, market makers and institutions using native-token paths.