Recap of key points on why ZRO is one of the most asymetric bet in the 3 articles: - Started in 2021 by chad founders - Leader of the cross chain messaging vertical - Didn't really lose market share after the KelpDAO incident - Integrated 100+ chains, found low-level bugs, realize could build something better - Started with the approach "what if zk is solved" and improved on storage, execution, spreading block data and proving. - 2mm tx/s per zone, interoperable zones, start with markets, payments / privacy, evm - Markets zone (ATLAS) is matching, clearing, settlement and risk in one system - Headless exchange, trading venues bring users and own the experience; market creators define what trades: perps, spot, stocks, commodities, bonds, predictions; market makers quote prices - LayerZero does not compete with the venues it serves - Open ATLAS is for crypto-native apps / open to anyone. Institutional ATLAS for permisioned - One all-in trading fee. The venue receives a rebate of 20% to 65%, by tier based ZRO staked, on volume, or on both - Having matching, clearing, settlement and risk in one system allows exchanges to make more $ by dollar traed - capacity at launch set to 200k/s on Atlas. median latency of 965 microseconds from order to answer, and 2.6 milliseconds at the 99th percentile, faster than any other crypto venue by orders of magnitude - DTCC (114 trillion of securities in custody) "investigates" whether Zero can scale its tokenization service and its collateral chain - ICE (owns NYSE & six clearing houses) is exploring Zero for trading, clearing, settlement and capital formation - Citadel Securities (35% of US retail stock volume) bought ZRO and will "evaluate" uses in trading, clearing and settlement - Open ATLAS has four named launch partners: Bullish, GTE, DefinedFi and TrueNorth. - 20 teams are building front-end for Atlas - 5 of the worlds largest exchanges deep in testing but expected 2-3 of those to deploy pending regulatory hurdles - Payment zone has Google Cloud exploring micropayments between AI agents and Tether said in Feb "micro-payments at an unprecedented scale" - LayerZero's stated target of $0.000001 fee per txn - Bryan has shared in recent podcasts that privacy was a core focus of the payment zone. - Likely for agentic micropayments use cases to grow in the coming years and be a more central narrative - Supply overhang for ZRO is smaller than the unlock schedule suggests - Institutions and buybacks took 19.77% of supply, 197.7 million ZRO, in 18 months - Of the 134.7 million ZRO unlocked to investors by 31 May, 63.8% had not moved - More ZRO has been bought back and locked up than sold into the market - Foundation bought 50 million ZRO from early investors, off-market, at about $2.00, and re-locked them. - LayerZero Labs bought $10.0 million on the open market, and Stargate revenue bought $2.8 million. The Foundation's 183 million ZRO stay locked until Zero's mainnet - a16z bought at about $2.36 in April 2025, locked until about April 2028. Thirteen institutional wallets bought 42.6 million ZRO at $2.05. Citadel Securities, ARK and Tether bought "at fair market value" on a day ZRO traded at $1.77 to $1.84. - Bryan has said almost all of the 2026 purchases are locked or vesting - CoinGecko shows 399 million ZRO circulating. Outside the Foundation, Labs, the team, investors who have not sold and the institutional buyers, I estimate about 200 million - Every fee the network produces will flow 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 - Stargate revenue: buys ZRO every month. About $3.3 million last 12 months. - Messaging fee switch: off after four votes. Worth at most $3.5 million a year at September's fee level - ATLAS trading fees: 75% of fees after the venue rebate buy and burn ZRO. - Gas, priority fees and MEV on Zero: flow to buybacks and burns - All-in-all massive improvement to ZRO tokenomics with the launch of Mainnet & Atlas - The edge: assets and collateral from day one - collateral on Solana, a trade on ATLAS, settlement on Canton. interoperability is LayerZero DNA. - stablecoins and tokenized stocks are spread across issues and chains - using collateral better is worth a lot - major clearing houses held about $1.04 trillion of initial margin at the end of 2025. US futures brokers hold $442.7 billion of customer funds - LayerZro has bootstrapped third-party chains in the past (Plasma, Robinhood Chain). It has relationship with most issuers. Can scale flows quickly. - ZRO priced as 32nd chain by mcap. - Atlas business will command exchange multiple - Total rev figures will be very different depending on Atlas scale mainly, and other secondary rev areas - Tokenized stocks growth + perps growth is big opp for LayerZero to scale volume rapidly as volume caps expands and restrictions soften with partners - ZRO at its July low looked like Solana at its December 2022 low - Solana fell 96.9%, from $260 to $8.00. ZRO fell 90.6%, from $7.55 to $0.707 - Sixty-seven days after its low, Solana was 2.6 times higher. ZRO is 3.0 times higher - FTX label, exploit, departures, future upgrade on the horizon, lots of event based similarity - Improved scale & throughput --> new use cases - No one really believed in Solana at the lows, and no one really believe in ZRO at the lows - Asymetric returns - Need to temper expectations around launch - Volume will likely scale progressively, still regulatory limit (caps, permissioned pools) - "buy the news" or "sell the news" tbd short term - long-term, pocket aces