21X AND LAYERZERO TEST ONCHAIN TRADING AT 10,000 MATCHES PER SECOND There’s an important development behind this result, particularly for the future of tokenized securities. To understand why, you first need to understand how an exchange matches trades. When someone wants to buy a stock and another person wants to sell, the exchange needs to match their orders at an agreed price. This is handled by a system called a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB). In many trading platforms, order matching happens on private servers, while the blockchain is used to record or settle transactions afterward. @tradeon21x takes a different approach. Its European trading venue is designed to perform order matching and settlement entirely onchain, without relying on an offchain matching engine. Now, in a month-long pilot with @LayerZero_Core, 21X tested that trading model on a private-permissioned deployment of Zero. The reported results were notable: ⊹ 10,000 order matches per second. ⊹ Up to 45x higher performance compared with the Layer 2 EVM baseline used in the test. ⊹ Matching and settlement completed within the same transaction. Another detail worth understanding is Zero’s private-permissioned setup. Institutions can control who participates in the network and who can access its data, while retaining EVM compatibility. This allows them to use familiar Ethereum development tools rather than rebuild their infrastructure for an entirely different environment. What Make This Concerning: Tokenizing a stock is only one part of bringing financial markets onchain. The infrastructure must also support the actual mechanics of an exchange: receiving orders, matching buyers and sellers, and settling trades efficiently. This is where the pilot becomes significant. It explores whether fully onchain order matching can achieve the throughput required by more demanding financial markets. There is one important qualification: the 10,000 matches per second were recorded on a private-permissioned deployment. This is not proof of equivalent performance on a public Zero network, and 21X has not announced that its entire live exchange has migrated to Zero. The outcome is still meaningful: the challenge is no longer just putting financial assets onchain. It is building trading infrastructure that can process them at institutional scale. This is my opinion based on the data I’ve reviewed, not financial advice.