If you only look at the surface, traditional finance is a highly mature system.

But just looking one layer deeper reveals that its efficiency issues have become impossible to ignore.
Global deposit scale exceeds 100 trillion US dollars, and in the cross-border settlement system, only the pre-paid funds of agent banks have long occupied about 27 trillion US dollars.
Statistics from the Bank for International Settlements show that the daily trading volume in the foreign exchange market is about 7.5 trillion US dollars.
These numbers collectively point to a fact: the capital scale is huge, but the liquidity efficiency is not high.
But the problem is not in the scale, but in the structure.
The current system relies on multiple layers of intermediaries to complete clearing and reconciliation, each layer adding time costs and capital occupation.
Settlement delays are not a technical issue but a result of system design, with funds scattered and locked in different account systems, forming large amounts of inefficient occupation.
On-chain models are important not because of their philosophy but because they offer a different way of execution.
Transactions are verified through cryptography, and settlement can be completed within the same logical layer, compressing the coordination process.
But institutions cannot directly migrate to existing public blockchains.
The reason is that banks need privacy protection, control over the execution environment, and must ensure all actions are verifiable, while also connecting with external liquidity.
These four conditions are difficult for traditional blockchain architectures to satisfy simultaneously.
But this is precisely the significance of @zksync. Through the Prividium architecture, transaction execution and data retention are kept within an environment controlled by institutions, zero-knowledge proofs are used to generate verifiable results, and settlement is ultimately completed on Ethereum.
In this way, privacy, control, verification, and connectivity are integrated into the same system. This is not just a technical optimization but a structural adjustment.
When the settlement logic shifts from multiple layers of intermediaries to programmable verification, capital no longer needs to be locked for long periods, coordination costs are significantly reduced, and system efficiency will experience a nonlinear improvement.
In this system, $ZK , as the only native asset, bears the governance function of the network layer, and also participates in the settlement process as the gas token of ZKsync Gateway.
It is not an added feature but a fundamental component of the entire network operation. From this perspective, on-chain transformation is not a choice but a result.
Once a more efficient execution method exists, migration is only a matter of time.