LayerZero Zero Blockchain Completes 21X Trading Pilot at 10,000 Order Matches Per Second

LayerZero's new Zero blockchain has completed a month-long trial with 21X AG, the first venue licensed under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime to operate both trading and settlement. The pilot ran 21X's order book on a private version of Zero and recorded 10,000 order matches per second, according to a joint release published on November 4.

@LayerZero_Core ($ZRO) said the result was up to 45x faster than a baseline built on layer 2 EVM networks. Matching and settlement were completed in a single onchain transaction, with no offchain matching.

What the Pilot Tested

21X is a Frankfurt-based venue. Law firm Bird & Bird reported that it was the first German firm in the EU to receive a licence to run a multilateral trading facility and settlement system for tokenized securities under the DLT Pilot Regime. The exchange opened in September 2025, according to a Stellar announcement.

The pilot focused on US equity tokens. A central limit order book is the mechanism that matches buyers and sellers at a trading venue. According to the release, many venues described as onchain match orders on private servers and post the results to a chain afterwards. Running the full process onchain often runs into infrastructure limits on how many matches per second it can support, the companies said.

The test used a private, permissioned instance of Zero. According to the release, this setup is designed to let institutions control who participates in the network and who can see the data, while staying compatible with the wider multichain ecosystem. Zero is EVM-compatible, so institutions can use existing tooling rather than rebuild for a specialised chain.

Limits of the Result

The figures come from the companies involved and were produced on a private deployment, not on a public network under live market conditions. The companies described the exercise as a baseline for further optimisation and said the 10,000 matches per second figure still had headroom. The 45x comparison is against what the release calls an EVM baseline, and the specific layer 2 setup used was not named.

The pilot does not change how 21X operates. Crypto Economy noted that the result is a technical performance test rather than the launch of a new production market on Zero. 21X's live exchange in Europe continues to run on its existing multichain infrastructure, and the company has not announced a move to Zero.

For tokenization, the trial speaks to a practical question: whether regulated trading and settlement can run fully onchain at the volumes institutions need. A private pilot result is an early data point on that question rather than proof of production readiness.

Sources

21X AG and LayerZero joint press release (PR Newswire)

Full text of the pilot announcement (Financial Content)

Bird & Bird on 21X's DLT Pilot Regime licence