LayerZero, Keeta enable tokenized bank deposits across Ethereum, Solana and Base

LayerZero and Keeta have partnered to enable regulated commercial bank money to move across public blockchains, as the two companies seek to expand institutional settlement infrastructure beyond closed banking networks.

In a statement shared with The Block on Thursday, LayerZero said the partnership combines its omnichain interoperability protocol with Keeta's compliance-native infrastructure, enabling institutions to move bank-grade money across the Keeta Network, Ethereum, Solana, and Base for treasury and payment operations. 

According to the statement, the rollout is anchored by Keeta stablecoins, a new category of tokenized commercial bank money backed by commercial bank deposits held through Bivo, a U.S.-licensed financial technology platform with access to U.S. payment rails and a partner-bank network.

Unlike traditional stablecoins that rely on a mix of reserves, Keeta stablecoins represent actual commercial bank deposits and allow the issuing institution to retain full contract authority at every step through LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Token Standard.

LayerZero said Keeta stablecoins will be available later this month in U.S. dollars alongside the euro, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi, British pound, Canadian dollar, Mexican peso, UAE dirham, and Hong Kong dollar.

Cross-Chain Settlement Infrastructure

Keeta, a Visa Direct payments network partner, is building blockchain infrastructure for regulated financial institutions and recorded a verified 11.2 million transactions per second during a public stress test conducted with Google's Spanner engineering team, according to the statement.

As part of the partnership, the company is also integrating LayerZero as an anchor within the Keeta network.

"The future of institutional money isn't a walled garden," Keeta CEO Ty Schenk said. He added that Keeta was built to allow regulated bank money to move freely across chains rather than remaining siloed in closed networks.

The announcement adds to LayerZero's institutional interoperability footprint. The protocol supports more than 170 public blockchains and is used by PayPal, Bridge, Ondo Finance, and dozens of other digital asset applications to distribute assets across networks.

Also, the partnership arrives after an April 18 exploit drained roughly $292 million in rsETH from Kelp DAO's cross-chain bridge. LayerZero later attributed the attack to North Korea's Lazarus Group and ended support for single-verifier Decentralized Verifier Network configurations while raising its default verification thresholds.