Exclusive Interview with LAYERZERO Head of Strategy Irene Wu | KBW2023

that's a great question I'll start by saying that since we raised that round our team has tripled in size I remember we were just 25 people mostly Engineers hacking in a small room and now we're more than 60 people and many of our greatest Engineers are from the APAC region and I think for me personally and for our founding team we really believe that the APAC region is what has carried crypto throughout all these years and even uh has demonstrated more experimentation uh from the Trad fine Enterprise side than most other regions and so we have a lot of reverence for uh APAC involvement in crypto and expanding here is a natural next step and so there will be some announcements over the next few months about a physical presence in the space but then also some collaborations with uh really uh established entities that are interested in digital assets in Asia [Music] I would actually say that the Paramount concern for layer zero and how we built the protocol was security and I spoke about this during our talk the underlying design principles that guided how we architected the protocol all uh find their origins in commitment to security and how we achieved a balance between security and scalability and decentralization was through this modular design that involved immutable endpoints but then this open and permissionless layer of validation which any developer can use to price their security along a line of uh cost and and security and so scale is is certainly a part of that and for us uh deploying endpoints on many chains has been uh a seamless part of our engineering growth last year we were on 12 chains and today we're on 45 well today I teased an upcoming announcement uh which is our close collaboration with magic Eden next week we will also be sharing a very large partnership announcement and then in the subsequent months a lot of developers will get to experience the uh R&D work that we've been doing to make the cross Trin development experience even easier and uh I think that those Milestones will be really integral to how the whole Omni chain space multiplies over the next 2 to 3 years I think Enterprise and traditional Finance is not going away anytime soon I think regulatory changes uh are not actually deterring experimentation from these powerhouses and so uh welcoming these new entities in and welcoming the liquidity that they bring as well will be really important um at the same time defi will be the lifeblood of of crypto and so these two uh trains moving at the same time will be bringing us in the direction of the next bull market how ler Zer plays a role in all of this is we are the only interoperability protocol that's purpose-built to serve the interoperability design needs of both decentralized Finance applications and also uh institutions like Banks and trading firms so that modularity will enable a unification of omni chain across these two very disperate camps def and traditional Finance