Traditional finance has an astonishing scale, but its underlying infrastructure still remains on a fragmented old path, with low efficiency and high costs, making people shake their heads.

According to the BIS three-year survey in 2025, the global foreign exchange market processes about 9.6 trillion USD daily on average. Cross-border payments exceed 150 trillion USD annually. The flow of these massive funds should be efficient and smooth, but still relies on intermediaries, manual reconciliation, and prepayment arrangements across jurisdictions. The result is that a large amount of capital is idle in various accounts, just to maintain basic trust.
Moving this system onto the blockchain is not simply a technical replacement, but a fundamental change in the logic of capital flow: settlement time is shortened from days to near real-time, capital is no longer locked by multiple independent ledgers, and coordination work shifts from multi-party disputes to a shared unified system.
However, institutions will not easily move their core business onto any chain. They have four non-negotiable conditions that must all be met: transaction details must be strictly confidential and not publicly visible; the execution environment must be fully controlled by themselves, complying with regulatory requirements; results must be verifiable through mathematical proof, without relying on any operator’s trust; and there must be true connectivity, capable of directly interfacing with counterparties and liquidity.
Most solutions on the market will at least get stuck on one of these four requirements. But @zksync’s Prividium is precisely designed around these four core needs.
Prividium is a permissioned ZK Chain using a Validium architecture. All execution processes and data stay in the institution-controlled off-chain environment, with only zero-knowledge proofs and state commitments on-chain on Ethereum. In simple terms, it’s a closed loop of “private execution → zero-knowledge proof → Ethereum final settlement.” This way, sensitive business processes remain private throughout, but the final results can be mathematically verified and confirmed on the public network. The trust costs of multiple intermediaries are directly eliminated, and the system itself becomes the only trusted source of truth.
More practically, it supports selective disclosure: regulators and auditors can see necessary information, while counterparties have no access to extraneous details. Privacy and transparency are both achieved.
Compared to traditional models and the effects after Prividium’s on-chain deployment, the difference is very clear.
In traditional mode: multiple ledgers operate independently, manual reconciliation confirms layer by layer, capital is fragmented across different accounts, and settlement often takes several days.
In Prividium mode: there is only one verifiable unified state, with mathematical proof ensuring correct execution, enabling direct real-time settlement, and significantly improving capital utilization efficiency.
Real adoption is already steadily progressing, and implementation cases are becoming more solid.
Cari Network: initiated by five regional banks in the United States, these banks collectively hold over 600 billion USD in deposits, currently building a bank-led tokenized deposit network based on @zksync’s Prividium.
BitGo: has completed institutional custody integration, providing compliant custody support for the entire system.
Deutsche Bank: is building its own Memento ZK Chain based on the same technology stack.
ADI Chain: has also officially partnered with First Abu Dhabi Bank to operate.
Currently, more than 35 financial institutions are actively evaluating and verifying this model. The more participants, the more natural the network effect becomes. Each additional institution adds a new possible settlement path, and liquidity gradually accumulates like a rolling snowball.
This is not about overthrowing traditional finance, but upgrading it with a more efficient, transparent, and safer underlying infrastructure. From the old system relying on fragmented trust, to a new paradigm based on shared mathematical verification, @zksync Prividium is bringing this step concretely to institutions.