I’ve always thought the problem with the financial system isn’t that it isn’t big enough, but that it’s too big and still running on outdated structures.

With more than $100 trillion in deposits, $27 trillion in agent bank prepayment funds, and tens of trillions of dollars in annual transaction volume.
With a system this massive, its coordination methods still often resemble patching up old machines.
Capital being locked up, delayed reconciliation, and multiple layers of intermediaries—these aren’t occasional issues, they’re system frictions.
So institutions are starting to focus on the chain, not because they’ve been persuaded by crypto, but because the old system is beginning to press against the efficiency boundary.
But banks won’t simply move their business to a standard public blockchain; they want privacy, they want control, they want verification, and they want it connected to liquidity.
Missing any one of these isn’t an option.
That’s also why I think @zksync 的 Prividium hasn’t been discussed enough.
What makes it compelling isn’t the concept, but its sense of realism: it doesn’t ask institutions to accommodate the chain—it makes the chain adapt to institutions’ real needs.
Data stays in a controlled environment, proofs are submitted to Ethereum—providing both privacy and open verification.
This isn’t just a technical compromise; it’s more like a signal that infrastructure design has matured.
What interests me even more, though, is the layer of network effects. Many people treat institutional adoption as one-by-one implementations—I’d rather see it as network growth.
Because each new institution isn’t just adding one more participant; it creates more potential connection relationships.
That’s why financial networks often end up winner-takes-all.
Connection density becomes a fortress wall—SWIFT is like this, and Visa is like this.
On-chain finance today might follow the same pattern.
And then there’s $ZK —its role is actually simple but important: it is ZKsync network’s only native asset. It’s a governance tool, and also the Gateway’s native gas.
In essence, it takes on the coordinating role within this network that’s gradually taking shape.
I like to understand it from this perspective, because it’s closer to the essence than market narratives.
Many still treat institutional adoption as news; I’m increasingly convinced this is more like financial infrastructure slowly swapping out its underlying layer.
And the most interesting thing about this shift is that it often starts out looking very quiet.
By the time everyone realizes it, it has usually already happened.