Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention. Here we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: It's great to have you Dom. Beautiful office that layers here as here in New York. First and foremost, I'm very keen to share with our audience a little intro about yourself and how did you get into web3? Were you previously in web2? How has been your experience so far? Earlier0, what are you really excited for?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I appreciate you having me on today in terms of my career, getting into web3, etc.
Studied finance, was initially going to go tradfi, ended up at a venture fund in the web 3 side in worked there for about 2 or 3 years, learned a lot of great things, met a bunch of great people. From there I was introduced to the team at Layer zero, found it extremely interested and knew that they were solving some pretty cool problems and so joined the team back in January 2024. Been with the team for just over a year now. Initially was focusing on BD and operations for the entire org, mainly focused on Defi. From there I took on leading our community. So obviously layer zero has a large community with roughly 300 to 400 applications that are built on us and so aligning builders and making sure that we maximize their impact in the space is what I've been focusing on.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Now that's fascinating. And let's go into when you're working at the fund, were you an analyst and was it a web 2 fund or web 3 specifically?
[00:01:43] Speaker C: Yeah, so it was a boutique venture fund based in London, uk.
We had a variety of teams. I was focused on the Web3 side as prior to joining the team I was trading equities as well as crypto which provided me a lot of insights on just generally the space, DeFi, etc. And so came on as an analyst focusing on research and strategy for the company as well as the portfolios that we've been working with.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: I think that's really interesting, especially we're doing equities in the Web3. You must have saw Web3 is super exciting. This is the future. Let me leave traditional equity world and jump into this.
[00:02:19] Speaker C: Correct. Yeah, I wish I spent more time trading crypto than equities, but hey, it got me to where I am today, so I'm not mad about it.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah, fascinating. And I remember layer zero made headlines at the time when they raised over 300 million, was a very high project and I must guess you've seen some potential there. What triggered you to be like, okay, this is the future I need to work at this company?
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Yeah. For context. Layer 0 has been around for three years now. I saw them in the earlier days, didn't look too much into it. But after spending some time researching and understanding actually how the protocol works and what they're looking to pursue in the future of crypto and adoption, it made complete sense. And I think what the technology has unlocked for the space and what it will continue to unlock is extremely exciting. And so for me to be able to take part in that was something that seemed like a no brainer.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: And you putting your analyst hat we have about 10 million crypto projects out there.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: What do you think that in 2025 makes a great crypto project that people should go work for, should go put on their investments on because there's so much noise out there?
[00:03:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it depends on what you're interested as a person. But that being said, when it comes to looking at the landscape of all these companies and what they're doing right or what they might not be doing right as well, it's important to understand what the founder and the general vision of the company is looking for. Right. A lot of people can get caught up in short term noise or maybe excitement or narratives. And having a foundational vision for the company that you're looking to build and make impact in is extremely important. And so when I understood the vision that Brian and our other co founders saw when building Layer zero, I guess you can feel that the commitment and the excitement when they are spending their lives building on these things. So in terms of when I am looking at projects and what actually makes it push the needle for the space, it comes down to the founder's vision. I guess the unlock that it will bring compared to what Web2 might have in its current place and I guess the people that are involved with it, whether it's the team, the community that they've built, etc.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. Even myself as a VC in the space, I just skip that the pages in the deck and go to the team, who are the builders, who are the founders and then going to the mission vision, where do they want to go, where do they want to take this? Because you need them to be driven, but also a great pedigree, great background. And I actually before we dive into Layer zero, I want to share with our audience some key statistics that pulled from multiple Sources. As of March 2025, LayerZero has processed over 130 million cross chain messages. Secured over 50 billion transactions volume across 70 blockchains, making one of the largest interop protocols out there. Protocols has onboarded 200/ applications including major DeFi platforms like Uniswap, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, securing over 70 billion in total assets in total value locked layer zero has also raised 250/plus million in venture funding from investors such as A6 and Z Sequoia PayPal Ventures reaching over $3 billion valuation. So you guys are already unicorn.
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Yeah, it's been a wild couple of years to say the least. And at the end of the day we have a vision to power all of crypto and make sure that we are moving the space forward and unlocking what potentially is not there today. And stats are all great. I think that job's not finished. It's one day at a time here, but it's been pretty cool to see the adoption of our token standard, the OFT or Omnichain fungible token standard come into market and see major players like Athena, WBTC, PayPal's, Pyust, all these asset issuers and larger companies choosing these standards because of the technology behind it and the future that we're building for. It's a lot of work and still plenty to do. But excited about the future and I.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Want to really dive into the technicalities in partnerships. But. But before we do that for our audience, we might have people that don't really understand what layer zero is. And all these are. It's so abstract. Can you explain layer zero to a five year old? What would you say?
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Sure, there's a bunch of ways that we go about explaining layer zero. I completely understand when it comes to interop and this side of the space it can be very complex and confusing. And if I'm explaining to a five year old you have two different cities, these two different cities in context of crypto are different blockchains. These blockchains don't have any highways, they don't have bridges, they have no infrastructure that allows for information or people to move from one city to another. And so what Layer zero has done is built a solution that allows for assets, information or people to move from one city to another. And that's probably a very top level example. But it should get the job done.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: I think it makes a lot of sense is the bridges between these countries that are very isolated.
[00:07:14] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: And myself, I've been in the blockchain space for over 10 years and feels there's a lot of friction and I wanted to ask you, what do you think that's broken about blockchains today and how does layer zero can fix it?
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Sure. It comes back to what we just highlighted on and right. We've seen a proliferation of chains, yet all these different chains are in isolated environments and there's no way for them to have native communication. Whether it's passing data state or value from one network to another, there was needed a solution. And so what layer zero has done is, has allowed for this massive unlock for all these chains and future chains to come out to enable applications to seamlessly let assets and value flow.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Do you think it's fair to say that blockchain world without layer zero, it's a very isolated world where countries don't trade between each other.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: I won't go so far as to say that we're at the country level, but that being said, I do agree. At the end of the day, we view Interrupt as an extremely important solution for crypto to reach the levels and the scale that we are all working towards. And so with solutions like layer zero and just general message passing from these 120 chains that we currently connect allows for applications and builders to really excel at whatever they are looking to build.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Is this the beginning to the end of having so much friction just to move an asset from one chain to another?
[00:08:44] Speaker C: It's funny you say that. A narrative that we've been pushing in market is that interoperability solved. And so what that means is that from our point of view, the infrastructure at the foundational level has been laid. Interoperability between these networks is solved in the fashion that 120 chains can seamlessly allow tokens data state to move from chain to chain seamlessly. And so what we're excited about is the end of the discussion of this friction into what comes next. What's next? Now that Interrupt is solved, let's see applications really push the boundaries and continue to test new ways to move this space forward. Makes sense. Yeah.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Early on you mentioned Omni chain application. What is this and how will this change how we use crypto?
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah. So when it comes to Omni Chain, it was the vision that there is all these chains, but with the power of layer zero and general message passing, the user shouldn't have to think about one chain when they're operating it on. They're moving from asset to asset. Right. Like it should be completely abstracted and all that. There is just this omnichain, just one chain. And so in terms of what an Omni Chain application looks like, it means that an application can live natively on four different networks, whatever they choose. If I have an ecosystem that's been built on mainnet, but I see that there's Monad and Vericain that are extremely exciting new ecosystems, new users, etc. By leveraging layer 0 and utilizing OmniChain applications, you have the ability to extend this ecosystem and community that you build from mainnet to other environments very easily.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: In terms of how bridges work, why do bridges often fail and how does Layer zero Stargate can solve that problem?
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Yeah, so I guess like for context, layer 0 is a general message passing protocol. We allow a variety of applications to be built on top of the actual transport layer that is Layer zero. The first application that was built at Layer zero was Stargate, which is a liquidity network bridging solution for any users to be able to move ETH, USDC and USDT from chain to chain. Currently they support 50, I believe, as of right now, where bridges were at three years ago is a very daunting space. You would send funds and hope for the best. So what Stardeo was able to unlock is that having the three pillars being unified liquidity, instant, guaranteed finality, and lastly was native assets. And so having these native assets being deployed across These networks, leveraging Layer 0's messaging, allowed for these ecosystems to thrive in a secure manner. Where we've seen a variety of bridging hacks, layer 0 and Stargate intention are the only bridging and messaging protocols that have yet to be exploited. And coming back to this idea of the bridging trilemma, and knowing that when you are confirmed on source, your funds will arrive at destination, knowing that liquidity will flow seamlessly in a uniform manner from all chains that Stargate is deployed on. And then the last pillar being this idea of native assets, which layer 0, as at the earlier days believed that there just would not be some sort of wrapped asset expansion, that people are going to want the asset that they have. There's no IOUs. And so by having this in place, we've seen large scale adoption. Sergey has reached a billion and a half tvl. It's one of the most, if not the largest bridge solution in market and we're excited to continue to see it grow.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Do you think the fact that there's been so much hacked in this space, smart contracts being broken, and the fact that Stargate has come in and solved that and is bringing more security, can we now have institutional adoption and retail coming in?
[00:12:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I think in terms of flare Zero Security is number one and we have been in market for three years, we have been battle tested and institutions are not going to come into crypto without knowing that the solutions that they're looking to use are trusted. And so I do believe that as institutions continue to come on chain, Layer zero and Stargate are definitely positioned to be supportive there.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: I think it makes a lot of sense. Is there a particular use case that most people don't think about when it comes to Layer zero and you're really excited about?
[00:13:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's a lot. Right. And we've seen value transfer being at the forefront of a lot of layers. There are messaging and just general interoperability discussions where I think we as a company are very excited to see is the non value transfer of cross chain communications. We currently I think are sitting at roughly 60% of the messaging volume being value transfers. But that number is continuing to decrease, which is interesting because as we launch new primitives, new ways to leverage Layer zero messaging, people are able to send state or pull state from different networks if they want to facilitate a cross chain governance vote. That's been something that we've continued to see more and more players come in and leverage as well as. And the APE chain team made a pretty cool implementation which involved this thing called shadow NFTs.
As apes have a lot of lore on mainnet, but there's the new APE chain. They can still leverage layer zero, which is this data primitive allowing for authentication of these asset ownership from mainnet to apchain to still be reflected, to still be able to participate, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I think in general there's a lot of use cases that are still untapped and where we do see value transfer being at the forefront, I'm excited to see on the non value generation transfer side.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: I think it's very exciting actually was use case that I never imagined asides from just sending these messages with value. Yeah, especially what the APE team is doing.
[00:14:36] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: If every blockchain app start using Layer zero tomorrow, how would the industry change?
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Yeah. I'm grateful to say that we've seen a large demand from all these applications to leverage Layer zero to some capacity and we continue to see the adoption on that side grow in terms of what it looks like with the entire industry leveraging Layer zero's messaging, it completes a universal experience where the end user does not have to know where their token lives, where the application initially deploy contracts, etc. Which is it completely unlocks seamless connectivity. And I think that also powers other apps and networks to continue to push the space forward where we you need to differentiate yourself. And by the user having the ability to move across all these chains, they're going to go to the place with the most interesting applications or the most usable experience, et cetera.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Many teams are working on cross chain tech. There's few competitors out there, I don't want to mention them.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: But if there's one thing that makes LayerZero stand out in the market, what would that be?
[00:15:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's a few things that come to mind. First and foremost is immutability. So Layer zero prides itself on three pillars. Immutable, censorship resistant and permissionlessness. And by having these core contracts be immutable, we fully allow for the application layer to proliferate in whatever capacity they want. The Rails need to be immutable and that's what we took the stance on. That's the way that we believe that crypto should continue to move forward. In terms of just general differentiation, I think that not only are we the only messaging protocol or bridging solution that has not been exploited, but also we have seen the most adoption and that stands true to the response we've seen in Mark. And I believe that builders are going to choose the solution that makes the most sense, whether it's going to be the one that allows them for the best expansion across the most chains, or whether it's going to be the strongest customer experience.
We allow for all of that and I think that at the end of the day we want to make sure that developers have the best time building with Layer zero and we'll continue to do.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Some in the community argue that layer 0 is not fully trustless. Is there anything you would say to those by trustless? What do you mean in general? That we can't be fully trusted in terms of transactions, messaging and relays? That there could be too much centralization?
[00:17:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say that's false. One, as I mentioned, immutable core contracts are in place for that reason. And so there is no shipping upgrades that potentially have malicious code, etc. So that's one portion to this. Also in terms of the security side, we believe in application on security. So what that means is that we have a pretty much a verifier marketplace that allows for any application or asset issuer to be able to choose a quorum of verifiers. If they want to run their own, they're happy to do so if they want complete veto rights access.
But at the end of the day the protocol is completely permissionless and you can choose to configure your security at the application level, it makes sense.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: If there is a misconception that people have about Layer zero, what do you think that is the biggest one?
[00:17:53] Speaker C: Layer zero is not a bridge.
So I think that it's very understandable that as I mentioned before, we see majority of our volume being through value transfer. But layer 0 is actually a messaging protocol that is at the transport layer where we allow and get excited for bridges to be able to use layer zero. But bridges are built on top of layer zero. Layer zero is not a bridge.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Okay, layer zero v2 is about to come out. What should developers be excited about?
[00:18:23] Speaker C: Layer 0v2 actually came out a year ago.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Oh, okay, my bad.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: But in terms of layers, yeah, it came out a year ago, but V2 brought a lot of very exciting things. I think one of the most important things to highlight was a completely modular security stack. So where in v1 we had the Oracle and relayer, the v2 configuration looked like a DVN and Executor model. So what? The DVN is a decentralized verifier network. This can be any sort of verification scheme, whether it's going to be something like our Polyhedra ZK Lite client, or it's going to be Google Cloud, etc. Etc. We have roughly 45 DVN partners right now, which allows for any application to choose, as I mentioned, a quorum that's going to participate in the attestation of a message from one chain to another. So yeah, DVNs executors completely decoupled from each other where the V1 model had the Relayer actually facilitating verification and execution that is now decoupled and from DVNs to executor, but we can talk about that.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Is there any applications that LayerZero plans on doing? Asides from crypto native apps into industries like finance or gaming, can you go into the more traditional world, the equities world?
[00:19:39] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. I think that we're excited to allow for all applications to excel and regardless of the vertical that they're in. Right. So Layer zero supports a variety of teams, whether it's going to be on the defi side, whether it's going to be on the enterprise side, financial services, gaming, etc, etc, and we've worked with a variety of fintech companies, PayPal, PYS, USD and so in terms of expanding into Web2, I think that we have built the rails for crypto to proliferate across all of Web two and Web three. And so when it comes to actually expanding maybe like backwards into Web2, I mean we worked with a variety of Web2 companies. We just had an event yesterday which was an endpoint event. Google, Paxos, PayPal, Revolut, a few other companies have come on and spoke with us and it's been great to see Pyust expand cross chain, Google being one of our verifiers, et cetera. And where I do think that Web2 will continue to be able to leverage layer zero, it'll be more for them coming on chain rather than going off chain.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Yeah, so it sounds layer is going to be the bridge to these web2partners is to going going to connect to the traditional world crypto and Web three out in the back end.
[00:20:51] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's exciting where we are right now and as more web 2 non crypto related companies come on chain and begin to explore, we're here to support them as much as the next. I think that there is no barriers we're looking to put up and for us to be able to allow for our partners to be able to Tap into the web 2 side and web 2 side that are looking for Tap into the web 3 like we are the blockchain company that's connecting all of web 2 and web 3.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: So you think 5, 10 years from now people will be using layer 0 without even knowing that's layer 0. Kind of like the Internet where you use HTTPs all the time but we don't even know it exists.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Correct.
It's something I'm very excited to see play its course.
We've worked with 300 plus partners. The adoption we've seen on stablecoins has been incredible. We power over 70% of stablecoins in market right now. And yeah, I think that in 5, 10 years the goal was always for people to not realize they're using layer zero. But we are powering all of crypto and so for that to come to life is something that we'll continue to work hard towards. But at the end of the day we want to see crypto move forward and win at the as a whole, wherever we play our part is great.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: If there's one thing that really excites you about Layer zero's future, what will be the message that you like to leave with our audience?
[00:22:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I think for those that have followed us for the past three years, we ship like no other and we really truly believe in what we're building and we will not sacrifice or be complacent. I think that we want to see crypto when and we will do whatever it takes to move our industry forward.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: And if people want to know the latest updates, get in touch with anyone at layer 0 to either build with layer 0. Where's the best way?
[00:22:37] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. In terms of like Updates, ecosystem announcements, etc. Best place is always Twitter. We are very active there in terms of speaking to our team. We take the approach of being as accessible as possible. Whether you want to add us on twitter, message us, etc. Email. There's also a developer assistance tool on our website. Plenty of ways to get in touch. We're always here. Happy to help. We just want to see builders connect all across crypto Build the bridges of the future. Absolutely appreciate it.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to the Chain Stories podcast where disruptors become trailblazers. Don't forget to subscribe to hear more inspiring stories from those who are pushing boundaries in digital assets brought to you by Dropout Capital, where bold vision transforms into reality. Check out our social media links down below and visit us online at Dropout Capital. And remember, the future belongs to those who dare to challenge the norm.
