Looking back at human financial history, every infrastructure upgrade has been accompanied by the brutal reality of winner-takes-all.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, SWIFT expanded from 239 banks to over 11,000 through network effects; Visa, leveraging the same dynamics, transformed from a regional card organization into a global payment network.
Today, as we stand at the 2026 milestone, we are witnessing the on-chain institutional settlement moment of SWIFT.
Currently, the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) market size has approached $29 billion, and the global stablecoin supply exceeds $300 billion.
Major institutions are making architectural decisions that they will not reconsider for a decade.
At this stage, network effects exhibit astonishing compound growth characteristics: ten institutions can create 45 possible settlement corridors, while one hundred institutions can form nearly 5,000.
Each new participant not only increases the number of connections in the network but also invisibly raises the cost for the next institution to choose a competing pathway.
In this competition, @zksync has demonstrated a strong architectural moat.
Privacy is the fundamental constraint for regulated banks adopting on-chain infrastructure; any system exposing holdings or strategies will be turned away.
ZKsync addresses this pain point through zero-knowledge proofs at the architectural level, combined with institution-controlled execution, cryptographic finality, and atomic cross-chain composability, forming an insurmountable barrier.
Currently, Deutsche Bank’s Memento platform, ADI Chain, and Cari Network, which connects five U.S. regional banks (with total deposits exceeding $600 billion), have completed production-level deployment on ZKsync.
Additionally, its underlying proof system, Airbender, ranks first in eth_proofs, with a single ERC-20 transfer costing as little as approximately $0.0001.
Once architectural decisions for financial infrastructure solidify, they tend to last for decades.
Just like the transition from ISO 20022 to FedWire, early path dependencies will determine the future ecosystem landscape.
With its architectural advantages in privacy and finality, ZKsync is turning its current lead into the settlement standard for the next ten years.
History is always astonishingly similar, but each reenactment has its unique technological backdrop.
Do you think that, compared to how SWIFT solved the pain points of cross-border telegraph communication, ZKsync faces greater difficulty in solving institutional data privacy and compliance issues?