Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅)

Co-Founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. @LayerZero_Core 💎🙌

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

A global casino is not enough

When I first got into this space, it was for the promise of something that gave every single person on the planet an escape hatch. It gave them the option to escape the traditional system of intermediaries and gatekeepers, of corruption, of misplaced trust, of denial of access. It promised to give us nothing more than the simple ability to own what we own. That what’s yours is… yours, and no one can take it from you or deny you access.

Beyond my wildest dreams in 2011 (or frankly even in 2024), this has gone from an escape hatch to an escape raft, not for the individuals but for the system as a whole. In the 15 years since I discovered crypto, we’ve seen more corruption than I care to count, banks fail, currencies fail, and even the best of each batch wildly outperformed by this little mathematical experiment called Bitcoin. The image of a decentralized system used by many, owned by all that expands beyond any given jurisdiction, globally available, globally owned, has become increasingly relevant every day as it has outperformed every global asset and is now valued in the trillions.

In proving this, the wool was removed from our eyes, and we saw more than just electronic cash, a trustless system bound by math expanded far beyond ‘digital gold’. It became clear that much of the future world, from lending and savings to identity and contracts, could be housed in the same system. Like most new frontiers, though, the dreamers were the minority.

"First come the dreamers, then the bankers, then the salesmen, then the sharks, then the desperate, and then the thieves."
- Landman

And piece by piece, a better system came to mean a better casino. ‘Fast finance’ regardless of the risk, ‘open access’ even if the contracts were upgradable. Scaling via centralization or multisigs, whatever tradeoff could be made for the incremental millisecond to speed up consumer turnover. Social tokens are hailed as the future of community, and memecoins as the future of investing.

We’ve lost sight of what we set out to build, and we’ve lost sight of why it actually matters. One by one, the dreamers fell, disillusioned by the misguided focus on scaling via trade-offs or pulled by the token grant to lend their name and credibility to keep building a better casino.

Now, don’t get me wrong, at my core, I am a libertarian, and I appreciate the value of free markets. Each of these things should be able to exist; that is the cost of free systems, just as hearing an opinion I don’t value is the cost of free speech. Somewhere along the way though, the dreamers drank the poisoned wine and came to believe that the end we got was the end we set out for. Like the worst possible case of Stockholm Syndrome, they either convinced themselves that what they did was good or quit the game entirely in disgust.

Let me remind you why I am here and what this space has meant to me.

I grew up in rural New Hampshire in about as peaceful a time and environment as possible. Despite that, I have seen my former profession banned for profit from Las Vegas lobbyists, payment processors unilaterally cancelled, I’ve been debanked, and I’ve been forced out of multiple homes due to uncertain or outright hostile regulation. I’ve seen the economy blow up, and I’ve had my financial institutions blow up. I’ve watched conmen take billions from those who trusted them. And compared globally, I am one of the lucky ones.

We deserve a better system and a freer world.

There is no reason why someone should not own their own money, have a basic right to privacy, or be trapped in a failing currency or a corrupt system.

Zero is a response to what we want to see in the world and what the world has not given us. Zero is a response to those dreamers who let their vision die, or convinced themselves that 15 tps was enough to serve the rich, and left the rest to multisigs. Zero is planting a stake in the ground, picking the torch back up, and marching forward with the ideals we came here for.

Zero will propel our values into the world, not because we hope the existing financial system shares them, but because these principles are so powerful they cannot be ignored. We set out not to replace a single piece of the stack or to capture the tiny fraction captured to date. We set out to change the entire system. A new backend. Globally distributed, globally owned. Permissionless and censorship-resistant. A system open to all. A better system, where mathematical proofs reign supreme.

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

https://t.co/vVPUwJ2BSl

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@mohitonx @zaheerebtikar @santiagoroel @YanLiberman No, scammer

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

Great teammate (@zaheerebtikar), great opposition (@santiagoroel, @YanLiberman)

🤝

[Catrina @dotcuriouscat]

Is a generalizable L1 still investable in 2026?

Moderated a debate at the @SeliniCapital Summit on one of the most contentious topics in crypto.

Proposition for “L1s are still investable” are @PrimordialAA of @L1Fxyz and @zaheerebtikar of @Plasma; opposition are @santiagoroel and @YanLiberman of @Delphi_Digital.

The opposition team won by just a smidge - but the topic prob deserves much deeper mindshare. If I were to architect a longer session, it’d be to answer each of the questions

1. Do L1s deserve a different valuation rubric from DeFi (mostly on financials) to capture “qualitative” fundamentals such as security, culture/community, privacy, censorship resistance, etc.?

2. Does a chain have value if it’s widely used but practically free? Sure, TCP/IP never had a value accrual mechanism — but if there were a TCP/IP token, would it trade at 0?

3. Do we still have a revenue hockey-stick story for L1s? Are we still early or at this point it's hopium

4. Is the “crypto premium” here to stay, or valuation converging with public equities? If so, let alone L1s, what else are investable in crypto outside of high-velocity defi?

5. Will generalizable L1s survive the increasing app-chain / verticalized-chain meta?

6. Who and where are the net-new buyers of L1 tokens?

And of course, a phenomenal summit as usual ⚡️

[a16z crypto @a16zcrypto]

“It feels like the world is going to forget that pre-stablecoins was even a thing.”

Stablecoins are already moving hundreds of billions of dollars through the financial system.

@PrimordialAA of @LayerZero_Core says demand is only accelerating.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@0xfabs @LayerZero_Core An absolute pleasure sir 🫡

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

💪 @usdt0_to is crushing

[zerolore @zerolore]

I have to admit, it’s been pretty cool watching crosschain activity pick back up after the challenges of Q1 and Q2.

@USDT0_to alone:

- Yesterday was the highest volume day since April: $221M
- Third consecutive week of growing weekly volume
- Crossed $100B in total volume moved
- $854M moved in the last 7 days

The headlines come and go. The infrastructure people actually rely and build on stay. Higher.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@0xVetzo Still on track for this fall yes

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

LayerZero 86% marketshare in June and growing

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

June by the numbers.

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

June by the numbers.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@sebaudet26 Sorry to hear this @sebaudet26, 7 years well served 🫡

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

LayerZero is live on Robinhood Chain.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@lobsfan1 Fall

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

Looks like we finally get to see the results of Blue Lock 🇯🇵

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

That first goal, sheesh. Truly the goal of an egoist.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@ndTlMHS2t1t2ROc I promise I will be fully on top of comms leading into Zero launch

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

🔥

[USDT0 @USDT0_to]

$100,000,000,000 in 525 days.

The fastest to move $100B between networks.

And yet, just the beginning.

Tether, everywhere.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@ndTlMHS2t1t2ROc You ever watch DBZ? Weird time right before a big launch, trying to avoid saying too much but also don’t want to say nothing. Powering up atm

[LayerZero @LayerZero_Core]

USDT0 is the fastest project in history to reach $100B in stablecoin transfer volume between networks.

525 days. 6.5M wallets. $100B moved for less than a cent per transfer.

Next will be trillions, everywhere.

[zerolore @zerolore]

Today @USDT0_to passed $100B in transfer volume.

I still remember when crypto was convinced that we would all end up on one chain. But look at the world around us. Do people live in one country, use one bank, trade on one exchange, or build in one ecosystem? No.

That’s why we took the other side of that bet and built from the end state we saw as inevitable - finance spread across many networks, the same way human demand shows up in different ways and places.

Demand does not follow clean architecture diagrams. It shows up in Lagos, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Singapore, New York, on new chains, inside old institutions, in apps, and now between machines. The mistake would have been letting this future inherit the limits of the system we were trying to improve.

@Tether brought the most trusted dollar and the oldest store of value onchain. Two assets people already understand and use because they solve real problems. Our job at @USDT0_to is to help them reach their final form by enabling them to move everywhere demand appears.

Thank you to @paoloardoino and the @Tether team for building the assets the world already trusts, and to @PrimordialAA and @LayerZero_Core for understanding how much bigger the market gets when those assets are set free. Above all, thank you to the ecosystems that took the first bet with us.

The first $100B proved our thesis. Now? Higher.

Tether, everywhere.

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

@rookie_of_Ph @Polymarket Time to dust off the cape

[Bryan Pellegrino (臭企鹅) @PrimordialAA]

Absolute killers, have done such an amazing job to date. Love to see it

[fomo @fomo]

We have raised a $75M Series B from @IndexVentures and @usv, with continued support from @benchmark!