Cross-chain protocol LayerZero just received investment from Tether, announced new products Zero, with Cathie Wood serving as an advisor

Cross-chain protocol developer LayerZero has recently announced a series of major updates: on one hand, the stablecoin giant Tether’s investment arm announced a strategic investment in LayerZero, highlighting that its technology has become the infrastructure foundation for on-chain homogeneous assets like USDt0/XAUt0. On the other hand, LayerZero is expanding its advisory team to include heavyweight figures from traditional finance such as Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest.

The team also officially launched a new product called Zero, which focuses on splitting execution and verification using ZK proofs, aiming to shift blockchain from a single-core, homogeneous architecture toward a horizontally scalable multi-core world computer.

However, investors should note that this type of infrastructure often lacks mechanisms to tie protocol revenue to tokens. The protocol itself may be solid, but the profits are often taken by shareholders rather than token holders.

Tether Strategic Investment in LayerZero

According to Tether’s announcement, Tether Investments has made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, emphasizing that this move supports “interoperability infrastructure that has been validated in real markets and is ready for production.” Tether also mentioned that if this interoperability capability is combined with its Wallet Development Kit (WDK), it could serve as the underlying layer for payments, settlements, and custody, further extending into agentic finance, enabling AI agents to have autonomous wallets and conduct large-scale, low-friction transactions with stablecoins.

In the announcement, Tether specifically highlighted that LayerZero’s interoperability framework has been used by Everdawn Labs over the past year to promote USDt0 and XAUt0, and within less than 12 months of launch, facilitated over $70 billion in cross-chain value transfers.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino also elevated the narrative to “AI agent micro-payment economy.” He stated, “LayerZero’s interoperability technology allows digital assets to transfer instantly across any transmission layer and distributed ledger. This enables digital assets to serve the nearly limitless expansion of agentic AI economies. Agentic economic entities will need these underlying primitives to coordinate and orchestrate micro-payments at unprecedented scale.”

Cathie Wood, ICE Executives, and Former BNY Mellon Digital Asset Head Join LayerZero Advisory Board

LayerZero also announced the formation of a new advisory board, including:

• Cathie Wood: Founder, CEO, and CIO of ARK Invest

• Michael Blaugrund: Vice President of Strategic Planning at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), parent company of NYSE

• Caroline Butler: Former Head of Digital Assets at BNY Mellon

Zero: Decoupling Execution and Verification with ZK, Focused on a Multi-Core World Computer

LayerZero’s latest product, Zero, is positioned as a “decentralized multi-core world computer.” Its core proposition is that existing blockchains are generally limited by single-threaded, homogeneous architectures because all validators must download and re-execute the same transactions. Zero uses ZK proofs to decouple execution and verification, dividing the network into two roles: high-performance Block Producers responsible for block creation and proof generation, and low-threshold Block Validators that only need to verify proofs.

Zero’s narrative directly challenges Layer 2 solutions: instead of pushing users to external systems, it advocates for a single chain that can horizontally scale, allowing different applications to operate in parallel like modern CPU multi-processing. It claims that ultimately, it can provide a decentralized infrastructure alternative capable of competing with centralized cloud providers like AWS.

This article about LayerZero, a cross-chain protocol that just received investment from Tether, launching the new product Zero, with Cathie Wood as an advisor, first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.