LayerZero's Alex Lim says moving tokens is solved and trading is next
LayerZero's Asia head says assets have outgrown the venues that trade them, as stablecoins pass $300 billion and tokenized assets near $40 billion.
- Alex Lim said on Oct. 8, 2026, that cross-chain transfers are largely solved and LayerZero is moving into trading infrastructure.
- Stablecoins reached $303.1 billion and tokenized real-world assets $39.25 billion on Oct. 16, DefiLlama and RWA.xyz data show.
- The SEC's Sept. 17 exemption covers only one model of on-chain stock trading, Commissioner Hester Peirce said.
Alex Lim, head of Asia-Pacific at LayerZero, says moving assets between blockchains is largely solved, and the next problem is where those assets trade.
He makes the case as stablecoins worth $303.1 billion circulated on Oct. 16, 2026, according to DefiLlama.
Lim set out his view on stage at TOKEN2049 in Singapore on Oct. 8, 2026, in a keynote titled "From Better Money Technology to Better Markets Technology". LayerZero runs messaging infrastructure that links blockchains.
Assets grew faster than markets
Lim's starting point is the growth in on-chain dollars and assets. Stablecoins rose from about $5 billion in 2020 to more than $300 billion, he said, and DefiLlama's Oct. 16 figure of $303.1 billion bears out the current level.
Tokenized real-world assets grew from almost nothing to about $40 billion in five years, he said. Distributed tokenized assets stood at $39.25 billion on Oct. 16, according to RWA.xyz.
Regulators have opened a first door to on-chain trading.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's Sept. 17 Innovation Exemption lets approved venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks for five years. Commissioner Hester Peirce said the order "addresses one particular model for trading securities onchain," in a statement on the exemption.
'Basically solved'
Lim said LayerZero's first job is done. "We think that the value transfer work or the interoperability is basically solved," he said.
"We currently process anywhere from 80 to 85% of the entire cross-chain movement of 800 plus assets," Lim said.
He said LayerZero connects more than 170 blockchains. Those are company-reported figures, and we did not find an independent dataset that measures cross-chain share across all bridges.
Distributed tokenized assets are concentrated. Ethereum held $16.9 billion of the $39.25 billion and Avalanche $13.1 billion on Oct. 16, according to RWA.xyz, so moving assets between those chains still matters.
He was frank about the industry's past. "Crypto and blockchain for a long time was this piece of technology looking for problems to solve," he said.
The gap between assets and venues
Lim's new thesis is about market structure. "We realized that there's such a huge gap between how fast these assets are growing" and where they trade, he said.
He compared two decentralized exchanges: Uniswap took about six years to reach $1 trillion in annual volume, he said, while Hyperliquid, launched in late 2023, reached $3 trillion in about two years, his figures.
"Hyperliquid didn't build a faster matching engine that competes with New York Stock Exchange," Lim said; it built a different structure. Hyperliquid's own chain held $7.1 billion in stablecoins on Oct. 16, according to DefiLlama.
Zero and Atlas
LayerZero's response is Zero, its own blockchain for capital markets, and Atlas, a trading engine that venues can plug into.
Lim said Atlas combines risk, matching, settlement and clearing, and that venues keep 20% to 65% of the rebate on the trades they bring, 51% blended, company figures.
He said the engine runs at about 1 millisecond latency at 50,000 to 100,000 transactions per second. "These are not co-located, these are not tuned or custom hardwares," Lim said.
The check: LayerZero announced Zero on Feb. 10, 2026.
The announcement came with an investment from Citadel Securities, and Intercontinental Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange's parent, named among participants, Fortune reported. Fortune said NYSE adoption was hypothetical and that Zero was planned for September 2026. Lim said Atlas is due by year-end.
By the numbers
| Metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stablecoins on all chains | $303.1 billion | Oct. 16, 2026 | DefiLlama |
| Tokenized RWAs, distributed value | $39.25 billion | Oct. 16, 2026 | RWA.xyz |
| Stablecoins on Hyperliquid | $7.1 billion | Oct. 16, 2026 | DefiLlama |
| Chains LayerZero connects | more than 170 (company-reported) | Oct. 8, 2026 | LayerZero |
| LayerZero share of cross-chain movement | 80% to 85% (company-reported) | Oct. 8, 2026 | LayerZero |
The other side: one model, and theory versus practice
Peirce's statement is a limit as much as a door. The SEC exemption covers one model of on-chain trading and is temporary, so a regulated venue built on Atlas would still need to qualify under it or under future rules.
Fortune described Zero in February as largely theoretical, and critics have argued that exchange tokenization plans are more marketing than integration, by the same report.
Lim's performance figures are also company-reported, and we found no independent test of them.
What to watch: Atlas launch by year-end
The first signal is the launch. Lim said Atlas will go live by the end of 2026 in two forms, an open version and a permissioned one for institutions.
The second is design partners. If Intercontinental Exchange, Citadel Securities or the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. put real volume through Zero, the market-structure thesis moves from slides to trades.
The third is the SEC. Venues that apply under the Innovation Exemption will show which on-chain trading models regulators accept.
Lim framed it as a generational change: "we are now old enough to go through the next wave of the shift," from electronic markets to integrated ones.
What we do not know is how much trading volume Atlas has signed before launch.
How we reported this: Lim's remarks come from his Oct. 8, 2026, TOKEN2049 Singapore keynote, checked against the video's auto-generated captions. Market figures come from DefiLlama and RWA.xyz as of Oct. 16. Zero's announcement details come from Fortune's Feb. 10 report; the exemption from Commissioner Peirce's Sept. 17 statement. LayerZero's figures are company-reported.