The problem began with a gladiator. Bryan Pellegrino and two old friends were building a blockchain game in 2020: fighters would compete, one would win, and the victor would become a digital collectible. The fights ran on Binance Smart Chain. The prize was meant to live on Ethereum. Between those two simple sentences sat a stubborn technical gap. Getting the winner from one network to the other required a bridge the team had to build for itself. For a game, that was irritating. For people moving money, it looked like a serious weakness.
The friends were Ryan Zarick and Caleb Banister, whom Pellegrino had known since their days in a computer network research lab at the University of New Hampshire. They could have treated the transfer as one more awkward feature and moved on. Instead, they pulled at the loose thread. What if blockchains had a general way to send each other messages? The answer became LayerZero Labs, the company Pellegrino co-founded and now leads from Vancouver.
It was an unusual destination for someone whose first durable profession was winning at cards. But the path makes sense if you look at the question that keeps recurring in his work: when a system sets the rules, where is the hidden constraint?
The boy who wanted a bigger map
Pellegrino grew up in Danbury, New Hampshire, a small town where much of the population seemed to be family. Games were part of the household rhythm. His father drove for UPS, and Friday and Saturday evenings became time for Risk, Monopoly, Stratego and cards with the family. Pellegrino liked winning, and he was willing to stay at a table long enough to get there. At 15, he began playing online poker through an account his father had set up.
He studied computer science at the University of New Hampshire and worked alongside Zarick and Banister in the networking lab. At 19, a study abroad term took him to Budapest. In a hostel elevator, he met Melanie, a French architecture student who would become his wife. Poker followed him abroad. He earned enough playing online to try it full time, gave himself six months to see whether it worked, and left university before graduating.
For years, the gamble worked. He played online for long hours and traveled with Melanie through roughly 80 countries. The luggage could include a full desktop computer tower, which made for strange conversations with customs officers. He finished second in a World Series of Poker event in 2012 and accumulated more than half a million dollars in World Series purses. The schedule was punishing, but the game still offered a clear measure of whether he was improving.
Then success made the table smaller. By 2014, he could win, but the best competition had become harder to find and the repetition easier to feel. He later described the problem with a short sentence: “I was just trying to be the best.” After every hand came another hand. He wanted a problem whose solution might matter when the cards were put away.
The detours were the training
The next few years were a restless tour through games and data. After the United States shut down major online poker sites in 2011, Pellegrino worked at the fantasy sports company BuzzDraft and became its CEO before it was acquired. He and Melanie eventually settled in Vancouver. There he built a machine learning tool designed to predict baseball performance pitch by pitch, selling it to several Major League Baseball clubs in early 2016. One of the calls he remembers came from Billy Beane, the baseball executive whose faith in statistics had already become a story of its own.
The choice of baseball had an almost comic practicality. Pellegrino said he disliked the sport, but it had useful data. The problem interested him more than the pastime. He kept reading about Bitcoin and Ethereum, and soon another inconvenient process caught his attention: launching a cryptocurrency required too much technical fluency for many would-be builders. With Daniel Chen, he started OpenToken in 2018 to make that work easier. The project changed direction, and Pellegrino moved on.
He also returned to the first game in a new form. In 2020, he and Zarick and Banister joined AI researcher Noam Brown on a paper about Supremus, a poker-playing system. It was a reunion of old collaborators around a hard technical puzzle. The work was about algorithms and regret, but it also linked the skills Pellegrino had spent years practicing to a research problem that could be shared, tested and built upon.
By the time the gladiator game arrived, the three had a shared history of taking technical problems seriously and the trust to keep working when a small experiment uncovered a large missing piece. A prize moving between two chains sounds like a narrow problem. The underlying question was much wider: if every blockchain is its own world, how do those worlds tell each other what happened?
on BNB Chain
becomes an NFT
reach Ethereum
The awkward transfer pointed the team toward a general messaging layer.
A message, then a company
They began writing LayerZero’s code in early 2021. Its purpose was to let applications send information between blockchains without each app inventing its own route. The team published a white paper that year, and in 2022 launched Stargate, an application for moving assets across chains. In its first ten days, Stargate handled more than $250 million in transfers. It was a visible demonstration that a general protocol could support a practical product.
There was an equally human route from code to company. When 0xMaki left SushiSwap, Pellegrino sent a direct message and brought him into LayerZero. A boastful tweet about the team they were assembling caught the eye of Sequoia partner Michelle Bailhe. She replied, and a conversation followed. In 2022, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $135 million funding round. The origin of that financing was less ceremonious than a pitch competition: one message led to another.
Pellegrino's poker past did not make every business decision a wager to be won. Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who had seen him across a negotiating table, recalled that Pellegrino stated his constraints plainly instead of using the tactics a skilled heads-up player might have deployed. The point is revealing. He knew how to read an opponent; in this setting, he chose to build a working relationship.
“All my life, I’ve just liked to work on hard problems.”Bryan Pellegrino
The work has also made the soft parts harder. On a 2026 podcast, Pellegrino talked about the decisions founders face as teams grow: whether early leaders still fit their roles, how to make changes around loyal colleagues, and how to keep standards high without pretending a playbook can settle every case. Poker offers probabilities. People remember how they were treated. The founder who once spent ten hours a day clicking through online hands now spends his attention on systems made of code and colleagues.
The wager gets larger
LayerZero’s first question was how separate chains could communicate. Its newer plans widen the frame. In February 2026, the company announced Zero, a blockchain designed around high performance and permissionless validation. In August it introduced ATLAS, a proposed backend for trading, clearing and settlement on Zero. These are announced projects, with their full claims still to be proved in use. They show where Pellegrino wants to take the company: from carrying messages between networks toward infrastructure for assets and markets operating across them.
The shift also brings him into rooms far removed from online poker. LayerZero has announced work involving financial institutions and asset issuers, including a 2026 partnership with Centrifuge for tokenized assets. Tether announced a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs in February. Pellegrino speaks about payments, markets and the plumbing required to make them work across networks. The vocabulary is different from a poker table, though the urge to find the weak rule in an elaborate system is familiar.
Vancouver remains home. Years ago, he and Melanie chose the city after traveling with their young son and weighing where to raise a family. The place offered a life beyond the next tournament. Pellegrino has described word games in the car with his children and cards with his oldest son. There is affection in that repetition. The game at home can simply be a game.
His professional game is still open. LayerZero’s messaging network has to earn trust each time a developer uses it. Zero and ATLAS will have to face the ordinary friction between ambitious designs and real markets. Pellegrino seems drawn to precisely that distance between a clean idea and an obstinate world. A winning gladiator once failed to cross a digital border easily. He and his friends built a company around the question it raised. The next question is how many borders their answer can make less troublesome.