The first problem was a gladiator. In a game Caleb Banister, Bryan Pellegrino and Ryan Zarick were making in 2020, a winning fighter would become an NFT. They wanted the fast, inexpensive action of the game on Binance Smart Chain and the resulting token on Ethereum. Between those two perfectly reasonable wishes lay a surprisingly awkward journey. The three built a bridge to move the asset themselves. The exercise made the risks of moving value between blockchains difficult to ignore. A game about gladiators had revealed a problem with the roads.
The origin has the pleasing scale of a good engineering story. There was no abstract declaration that the world needed an entirely new protocol. There was a product they were trying to make, a piece that did not fit, and the realization that other builders would run into the same obstruction. Their response became LayerZero, a system for sending messages between separate blockchains. Banister, one of its three co-founders, had spent much of his working life with the other two. The game was a new project. The partnership was old.
A lab named for the problem
Banister studied computer science at the University of New Hampshire, graduating in 2010. As a student, he worked as a software developer at the university's InterOperability Lab, writing test automation for broadband equipment. It is hard to resist the coincidence in that name. Years before the word became part of a crypto pitch, interoperability was quite literally on the lab door. The work then involved equipment and tests, the unglamorous discipline of getting devices to behave as expected in a network.
The lab also supplied two relationships that would shape his career. There Banister worked alongside Pellegrino and Zarick. They became friends and recurring collaborators, moving together through projects with very different labels. That history matters because LayerZero was not a group assembled for a fashionable sector. It was another problem taken up by people who had already learned how to build together. The founding photograph shows three men in dark shirts against a blank wall: Banister in a backward cap, Zarick in a hoodie, Pellegrino wearing headphones around his neck. It is a startup portrait with little attempt at ceremony.
After UNH came Coder Den, the mobile application studio Banister co-founded with Pellegrino. The work was different from broadband test automation: applications that people could hold in their hands, and clients who cared whether the finished software actually worked. Banister's career later passed through 80Trill, a venture concerned with writing and auditing smart contracts, and Minimal AI. These were ventures with overlapping collaborators, especially Zarick and Pellegrino. The names changed; the habit of tackling another technical field together remained.
One of the less obvious stops was poker research. In 2020 Banister, Zarick, Pellegrino and AI researcher Noam Brown described Supremus, a poker agent built from work on deep counterfactual value networks. The paper reports that their system beat a strong benchmark bot, Slumbot, by a large margin in their tests. The subject sounds distant from moving an NFT between chains. Yet it belongs in this story. It shows Banister and his collaborators trying to formalize a difficult problem, build a system around it, and publish enough of the method for other people to inspect.
“Professional Solidity dev living on-chain.”Banister's own LinkedIn description
The game that asked for another system
By the fall of 2020, their attention had turned toward an NFT game. The design split the work between two chains: gameplay where transactions were quicker and cheaper, ownership of the winning token on Ethereum. That split was part of the attraction. It was also where the game became a test of the underlying infrastructure. Moving the token across chains meant using a bridge, and the founders were uncomfortable with the security tradeoffs they encountered. Rather than keep treating each transfer as a one-off engineering problem, they began working on a general way for applications to communicate across chains.
They started writing what would become LayerZero in early 2021. Banister, Zarick and Pellegrino appear together on the first technical paper, dated October of that year. Its central idea was message delivery. If an action is committed on one chain, an application on another should be able to receive the corresponding message with a way to verify it. The original design described an oracle supplying a block header and a separate relayer supplying proof of a transaction. Their independence was the paper's key assumption. This was protocol plumbing: the kind of work a user should never need to see when a product works well.
chain A
checked together
chain B
That distinction is easy to lose under the word “bridge.” A bridge usually makes people think of carrying an asset from one place to another. LayerZero's first paper aimed lower in the stack. It presented a communication primitive on which many kinds of applications could be built, from an exchange to a lending product. The ambition was broad, but the object was precise: a valid message between chains. In the team's formulation, developers could then decide what that message meant for a particular application. Their gladiator might have been the first troublesome passenger; the road was intended for much more traffic.
A signature in the engineering record
Public accounts of LayerZero tend to give most of the microphone to Pellegrino, its CEO, and to Zarick, its CTO. Banister's contribution appears in a different set of places. His name is on the first protocol paper and on the later LayerZero paper published in December 2023. The project's original code repository also thanks him among the core developers who built its endpoints. Those are specific, durable records. They say more about engineering participation than an imagined personality sketch could.
The 2023 paper revisited the protocol's design. It described immutable endpoints, verification modules that could be added, and infrastructure that applications could configure. The description is less conversational than an interview, but its significance is practical. When a system links independent blockchains, choices about verification are also choices about what users must trust. The later work laid out a modular framework in which applications can select the security and cost arrangement suited to them. Banister's name appears among five authors, beside Zarick, Pellegrino, Isaac Zhang and Thomas Kim.
This is one reason the old laboratory connection feels like more than a tidy anecdote. At UNH, Banister worked on testing whether networked equipment did what it was supposed to do. At LayerZero, the questions are different in scale and stakes, but the vocabulary still turns on systems, communication and verifiable behavior. One should not pretend a broadband test and a blockchain protocol are the same task. The continuity is in the attention they require: an output matters only if another system can receive and rely on it.
The business around the protocol grew quickly. In March 2022, the founders launched Stargate, an application built on LayerZero to move funds between blockchains. The company announced a $135 million financing round that month, and the founders appeared together in press coverage. Such numbers can flatten a story into a funding chart. The more revealing chronology begins much earlier, in the lab and the smaller ventures, where a working relationship had time to acquire its own methods. The money arrived after the trio had already followed a stubborn technical question far beyond its first game.
What the name still asks
The work continues beyond that first design. In 2026 LayerZero introduced ATLAS, a market infrastructure project, and the company described a wider network spanning many chains. Those are developments of the organization, not evidence of a particular personal role for Banister in those releases. His clearest public trail remains the co-founder credit, the technical bylines, and the acknowledgments in the code. That is enough to see the outline of a builder whose career moved across products while keeping familiar collaborators close.
In the public record, there is no tidy scene in which Banister steps forward to announce a grand personal mission. What survives is more concrete: a degree, years of shared projects, his spare description of himself as a Solidity developer, and his signature on work other engineers can read. The evidence makes him interesting in a way a polished founder myth would not. He has moved from a campus lab to mobile applications, from poker algorithms to blockchain infrastructure, and each turn left something that could be built, tested or debated. Even the earliest LayerZero design makes sense as a continuation of that habit. It treats communication between independent systems as a problem that deserves rules precise enough to implement.
There is a small joke embedded in the whole journey. The men who met at an InterOperability Lab later built a company devoted to interoperability. But the coincidence alone would make a thin biography. What gives it weight is the long detour: mobile apps, smart contracts, poker AI, a gladiator game, and then a protocol meant to make separate chains exchange messages. Banister's story is less a sudden conversion to crypto than a series of attempts to get difficult systems to work with one another. The gladiator was an unlikely messenger. The message turned out to travel much farther.