TL;DR
- 21X AG and LayerZero completed a pilot running 21X’s onchain central limit order book on a private instance of Zero using U.S. equity tokens.
- The test reached 10,000 matches per second, up to 45x the L2 EVM baseline, with matching and settlement in one transaction.
- The pilot used no offchain matching and preserved EVM compatibility, but remained a technical test rather than a production migration of 21X’s regulated venue.
21X AG and LayerZero completed a month-long technical pilot that ran 21X’s fully onchain central limit order book on a private-permissioned instance of Zero using U.S. equity tokens. In the official announcement, LayerZero said the test reached 10,000 order matches per second without offchain matching. The pilot tested whether regulated-market infrastructure can execute institutional order flow entirely onchain at substantially higher throughput, extending experimentation around real-world asset tokenization from issuance into trading and settlement.
21X Tests Institutional Order Flow on Zero
The pilot benchmarked 21X’s order book against common public and private EVM networks used in capital markets. Zero delivered up to a 45x performance improvement over the L2 EVM baseline, while matching and settlement occurred within the same transaction. The result shows that 21X’s existing onchain trading model can operate at materially higher throughput on Zero’s architecture, complementing the firm’s broader regulated tokenized-securities infrastructure.
Unlike venues that match orders on private servers before posting results to a blockchain, 21X’s central limit order book is designed to perform matching directly onchain. The company already operates that model in production in Europe for regulated financial instruments. The Zero test preserved the fully onchain execution approach while measuring whether it could handle institutional-scale order flow, a capability closely related to LayerZero’s ATLAS market infrastructure for matching, clearing, settlement and risk.
The deployment used a private-permissioned instance of Zero rather than the public network. LayerZero said this configuration gives institutions control over network participation and data visibility while preserving compatibility with the broader EVM and multichain ecosystem. Zero is EVM-compatible end to end, allowing institutions to use existing tooling instead of rebuilding for a specialized chain. The design targets institutional control requirements without abandoning compatibility with wider blockchain infrastructure, fitting alongside LayerZero’s institutional tokenization network.
21X continues to operate its live multichain infrastructure separately from the Zero pilot, meaning the test does not represent a migration of its production venue. LayerZero described the month-long exercise as a baseline for further optimization and said the 10,000-matches-per-second result still had headroom to increase. The pilot demonstrates a technical performance result rather than announcing a new production market on Zero, keeping the distinction between testing and live deployment clear in this test as 21X develops regulated onchain securities markets.
