Banks have spent years circling blockchain. The interest was always cheaper settlement, programmable treasury operations & 24/7 liquidity but the infra that could deliver those things inside a banking environment did not exist in a form institutions could deploy without taking on enormous compliance risk.

The partnership announced on March 25, 2026 between BitGo & ZKsync is a direct attempt to change that combining institutional custody with a privacy-preserving permissioned blockchain to give banks a complete stack for tokenised deposits, built to sit entirely within existing regulatory frameworks.

• What the Two Sides Each Bring
• How Tokenised Deposits Actually Work in This Model
• What Makes This Different From Stablecoins
• Where This Sits in the Broader ZKsync Strategy

What the Two Sides Each Bring

The partnership works because the two companies solve different parts of the same problem.

BitGo is one of the oldest institutional custody providers in the digital asset space, twelve years of operation, zero security incidents, roughly $104 billion in assets under custody & approximately 4,900 institutional clients including some of the largest banks & asset managers in the world. When a bank needs to hold digital assets or issue digital liabilities, BitGo is the layer that handles the wallets, the key management & the regulated custody infrastructure. It is the part that banks already understand & trust.

Source: ZKsync

ZKsync's contribution is Prividium, the permissioned, privacy-preserving blockchain built by Matter Labs specifically for regulated financial institutions. Prividium runs inside a bank's own controlled environment. Transactions are processed privatelyand only zero-knowledge proofs leave that environment to be anchored on Ethereum. No transaction data is ever exposed on a public network. Regulators can be granted selective disclosure access. The bank retains full control over who participates.

Together the two layers give a bank something it could not build alone in any reasonable timeframe: a production-ready, compliance-first system for issuing, transferring & settling tokenised deposits with enterprise-grade throughput, near-instant finality, & full KYC/AML built into the protocol itself.

A big step forward for the digital assets industry and U.S. banking.

ZKsync × @BitGo partner to deliver a production-ready solution for tokenized deposits, combining secure custody with private, compliant blockchain settlement.

Built for banks. Ready for deployment. pic.twitter.com/SBQQXHmEya— ZKsync (@zksync) March 25, 2026

The technical specifications that ZKsync published alongside the announcement are worth noting. Settlement happens in approximately one second. Fees sit below $0.001 per transfer. The system supports atomic settlement, meaning both sides of a transaction either complete simultaneously or neither does across chains. And the team cites a 30 to 50 percent improvement in liquidity utilisation through instant collateral repledging, which matters significantly for treasury operations where efficiency is a constant pressure.

How Tokenised Deposits Actually Work in This Model

A digital token that represents a bank deposit, backed one-to-one by fiat held in the regulated banking system. It stays on the bank's balance sheet. It carries the same customer protections & FDIC-style safeguards as the underlying deposit. It does not exist outside the banking system in any meaningful sense.

What it gains by being tokenised is programmability & speed. Smart contracts can execute treasury rules automatically. Transfers that currently take a business day can settle in seconds. Payments can be structured with conditions attached, executing only when both sides of a transaction are confirmed. The bank does not give up control or compliance to get these capabilities but it does get them while keeping everything it already has.

The operational flow: Banks issue tokenised deposits on Prividium. A clearing layer manages fungibility and net settlement across participants. corporate wallets hold those deposits alongside other assets, smart contracts handle the treasury logic. Settlement happens in seconds rather than days. The entire process runs inside the bank's permissioned environment, with Ethereum providing the security anchor through ZK proofs.

Chen Fang, BitGo's Chief Revenue Officer, put it plainly: financial institutions need infrastructure that brings blockchain efficiency into existing banking models without compromising control, security, or regulatory alignment.