Zero Just Made Blockchains 100x Better | Bryan Pellegrino & Raz Zarick

Bullish:

• $LAYERZERO - LayerZero has achieved 80%+ market share in cross-chain messaging with $138B in volume, positioned to capture value from institutional adoption and their new Xero blockchain.

  • “We had to grind our way from zero market share to 80 plus percent market share to hundreds of billion dollars”

    Bryan·1:35:23

  • “We did 138,000,000,000 last year across Layer Zero. At one point, I think in November, did $38,000,000,000 which was 5.5 times Western Union, 2.5 times Wise”

    Bryan·1:08:30

  • “We have 100,000,000,000 plus dollars of assets built on top of us, hundreds of billions of dollars moving across us”

    Bryan·36:56
• $STABLES - Stablecoins are becoming the dominant payment rails with massive profitability - Tether is one of the most profitable companies per employee globally.

  • “Tether and Hyperliquid are literally the two most profitable per employee or per headcount companies on the planet”

    Bryan·41:54

  • “Tether making 10 to $15,000,000,000 a year is just not going to be ignored”

    Bryan·44:58

  • “The world has kind of now started to reshape itself around stablecoins”

    Bryan·1:27:54

  • “Tether is one of the largest holders of US debt in the world and the largest non sovereign holder of gold in the world”

    Bryan·25:15
• $INFRA - Blockchain infrastructure is moving to ZK-based architectures that eliminate computational replication, representing a generational leap in efficiency.

  • “How do you compete on price when you're spending 10,000 times more on compute than we are? Just because you're duplicating It doesn't make any sense”

    Raz·1:17:30

  • “I think long term, this is the approach that everything will kind of go towards. There's just no reason to have replication of this compute everywhere”

    Raz·1:17:04

  • “This is the last blockchain architecture for sure. This is where things are going”

    Raz·4:35
• $CITADEL - Citadel is actively building on Xero blockchain to capture 24/7 market opportunities, positioning to own the next chapter of global permissionless markets.

  • “Citadel is certainly one of the smartest guys in the room. So if they see an opportunity to run markets '20 fourseven, '3 65, I just saw no, they paid like 1,000,000,000 to get retail flow. They'll move if the money is there”

    Santi·46:07

  • “I think the fact that Citadel and some of these larger institutions are building zones is very instructive”

    Santi·1:13:37

  • “We want to own what the next chapter is. So if the world is moving to global permissionless markets in 20 fourseven markets and they're trading across all asset classes and all of that, I want to be front and center in owning that”

    Bryan·44:22
• $ICE - Intercontinental Exchange is investing heavily in crypto data infrastructure, recognizing the value of alternative market data.

  • “Intercontinental Exchange brought a $2,000,000,000 check-in the poly market, largely driven because of data. That's their express. The data itself is valuable and fascinating and they have a huge business through data”

    Bryan·1:25:21

Bearish:

• $LAYERTWO - Layer 2s don't actually inherit security from Layer 1s as claimed, representing a fundamental architectural flaw that will be obsoleted by unified ZK architectures.

  • “layer twos inherit the security of the layer one. He was just like, that's just fundamentally not true”

    Bryan·3:46

  • “Just like an L2 doesn't inherit the security of the layer one. It's a sovereign blockchain that posts its data there”

    Raz·21:28

  • “You're interacting in a layer two that doesn't have fraud proofs that introduces way more security. You're better off not working within crypto because you have a bunch of degradation the minute you go to a decentralized system”

    Santi·1:31:20
• $TRADFI - Traditional financial infrastructure is fundamentally obsolete compared to blockchain rails, with institutions that don't adapt facing disruption.

  • “The financial system predates the internet and all of these current workflows, T plus three, T plus five, all the friction that exists in the system, A, was not built for the world of AI”

    Santi·1:24:14

  • “blockchains are just better in the same way that you go from pen and paper ledger to a centralized computer database. Like, a blockchain is just that next leap. And so if you stay behind and use the pen and paper, someone's gonna eat your lunch”

    Raz·1:34:25

  • “the ones that stay behind and are conservative and don't wanna embrace the new technology... the ones that don't will be left behind”

    Raz·1:34:17