Crypto Is Rebuilding The Financial System — And Opportunities Abound — 1000x

Avi Felman sits down with Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, to talk about what happens when the largest institutions in finance start building on crypto rails.

Bryan traces LayerZero's path from an MEV shop and a shockingly bad bridge to a protocol that has moved over $300 billion lifetime across roughly 170 chains, with $150 billion in assets built on top and $10–15 billion moving every month. Then he gets into what's next: ZERO, a ZK-first chain built from the ground up at multiple millions of transactions per second, and Atlas, a trading environment with roughly 10-millisecond block times that folds settlement, clearing, matching and credit into a single stack — with DTCC, ICE and Citadel among the announced partners, and four to five of the world's largest exchanges already live on testnet.

They also cover the standards war LayerZero won, why a meaningful chain still rolls back every three to four months, DTCC's mandate to tokenize $100 trillion in assets, the fee switch, and how 75% of Atlas trading fees flow into buying and burning ZERO.

Plus: dropping out of computer science to play poker professionally, losing his career overnight to the 2011 online poker ban, and selling machine learning models to Billy Beane.

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(01:32) Poker, Bitcoin, And Selling Models To Billy Beane

(07:19) MEV, Broken Bridges, And Building LayerZero

(16:37 Winning The Standards War: Tether, PayPal, Ondo

(26:51) When Chains Roll Back

(30:54) Two Million Transactions Per Second

(36:07) Atlas, And TradFi's $100M Checks

(44:53) The Fee Switch, And Burning ZERO

(48:30) Tokenizing $100 Trillion

Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.