Banks have spent over a decade trying to make blockchain work for institutional payments. The problem was that no existing architecture could simultaneously offer privacy, compliance and interoperability on the go. ZKsync's Prividium, developed by Matter Labs, is the attempt to finally solve all three at once.

The announcement came at the DC Blockchain Summit 2026 in Washington D.C., where Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski introduced Prividium alongside the launch of the Cari Network: the first real world deployment of this infrastructure, involving five US regional banks and targeting full production rollout later this year.

• The Problem Banks Could Never Get Around
• What a Prividium Actually Is
• Cari Network and the Tokenised Deposit Distinction
• Who Is Already Involved and Where This Goes

The Problem Banks Could Never Get Around

Public chains like Ethereum expose everything by default. For an institution that cannot afford to reveal its trade positions, client balances, or counterparty relationships, that is simply not workable. Private chains solved the visibility problem but created a different one instead: liquidity trapped inside closed environments with no way to move across banks without bringing in intermediaries and the risk that comes with them.

Source: Zksync

Consortium chains tried to sit in between but never fully delivered on any of the three requirements. The result is that most institutional blockchain activity over the past decade stayed in pilot territory, without ever making it to production at scale.

This is the gap Prividium was built to close. Each bank gets its own private execution environment with full data sovereignty, while all settlement flows through Ethereum mainnet via zero-knowledge proofs. The bank controls its own data completely. Ethereum provides the finality and the ZKsync Elastic Network connects every Prividium to every one natively, without bridges.

The trade off that kept regulated institutions on the sidelines no longer has to exist.

What a Prividium Actually Is

A Prividium runs on a bank's own servers. Transactions are processed privately within that environment and never published to any public chain in readable form. Instead, the system generates a zero-knowledge proof(a compact cryptographic output that confirms all transactions are valid without disclosing what they actually are).

That proof is what gets posted to Ethereum. Regulators can be granted selective read access to verify compliance without any data being visible to competitors or the publicand this is how the architecture delivers privacy and auditability at the same time, rather than treating them as opposites.

On the performance side, the system supports over 10,000 transactions per second at sub-second latency, with proving costs under $0.0001 per transaction. It is fully EVM-compatible, which means banks can use existing Solidity toolinghttps://etherworld.co/tag/banks/ without rebuilding from the ground up.

Inter-bank transactions across different Prividiums settle atomically: either both sides of a trade go through, or neither does. Gluchowski described the end state at the DC Blockchain Summit as Ethereum becoming the functional equivalent of SWIFT or Fedwire, except open, neutral, and cryptographically enforced rather than built on institutional trust.