Author: Thejaswini M A Translator: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

When people talk about competition, they always think of "survival of the fittest." What comes to mind is an endless all-round game, where the strong one uses its advantages to squeeze out its opponents and finally emerges as the winner.

But now I begin to question, does the long-term survival of the ecosystem really follow this set of rules? At the beginning of the 20th century, the naturalist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin put forward a completely different view in his evolutionary works on mutualism and symbiosis. He found that species that survived extreme climate change relied on a sophisticated model of collective cooperation. In the long process of evolution, cooperation with each other is far more powerful than fighting alone. The real “fittest” are those who know how to work together to build a stable and shared system to cope with the unknown environment.

This rule applies to all fields. Nowadays, all encryption projects are repositioning themselves, and those protocols that have survived the industry winter are also making key decisions for future development.

Some development teams have returned to their original aspirations and adhered to the core concepts of absolute censorship resistance and complete decentralization; some teams have added centralized management and control mechanisms to ensure the basic operation and solvency of the project; and some projects have gone all out to build an exclusive ecosystem and gather internal liquidity into an independent second-tier network.

ZKsync has made another choice - moving towards collaborative symbiosis and targeting traditional banks for development.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicts that by 2030, the tokenized asset market will climb to US$10 trillion to US$16 trillion, fully migrating to the blockchain track. At present, all major mainstream banks have launched relevant pilot projects, and some institutions have moved from the testing stage to formal implementation. The currently finalized infrastructure plan will determine the circulation path of trillions of funds and the control of the underlying links.

ZKsync is a strong competitor for this set of financial underlying links. Even if you no longer pay attention to the second-tier network after the last bull market, it is still necessary to understand its trends.

Why do banks get involved? Why choose ZKsync?

ZKsync used by traditional financial institutions is different from ordinary encryption users. Deutsche Bank is connected to Memento ZK Chain - a private authorized layer 2 network built on ZKsync's Prividium enterprise suite.

Prividium is an exclusive product launched by ZKsync for institutions. It supports private transactions, permission control, built-in compliance tools, and all transactions will eventually be settled on the Ethereum main network. After comparing the five major blockchain ecosystems, Memento finally selected ZKsync. With the help of this plan, the capital deployment cycle has been shortened from the original two to three months to two to three weeks.

The core reason why banks favor ZK technology is that this technology can prove that transactions are authentic and effective without leaking private information. When banks complete transaction verification, they do not need to disclose sensitive data such as the name of the transaction party, the amount, and the underlying assets. This architecture not only allows banks to independently control the scope of data visibility and protect business confidentiality, but also meets regulatory requirements and is highly consistent with Wall Street's operating model.

Currently, the Tradable platform has US$1.7 billion of private credit assets deployed on ZKsync, with institutional position yields ranging from 8% to 15.5%, and nearly 30 related positions. In October 2024, the Buenos Aires city government quietly migrated the entire digital identity system to the ZKsync Era network. The government credentials of the city's 3.6 million residents are secured through encryption technology, and the relevant data cannot be tracked by the municipal department. The city also became the first city in the world to implement this application.

As of the end of 2025, the global private credit market has reached US$3.5 trillion, and Tradable’s market share is less than 0.05%. The tokenized credit track is still in the growth stage and is expected to occupy a larger market share in the future. It can be seen that there is still a huge gap between the existing asset volume on the chain and the scale of the entire traditional market.

For corporate risk control teams, they face three choices: an independent network completely controlled by themselves, a corporate alliance network linked by contracts, or a public network governed by the community.

Comparison of three types of mainstream institutional networks

Since 2019, JPMorgan Chase has built a private blockchain through its Kinexys department. The system is completely controlled internally and connects with partner institutions such as BlackRock and Siemens to handle repurchase transactions, cross-border payments and asset settlement businesses. The platform's servers and ledgers are operated and maintained by JPMorgan Chase and are completely isolated from the public network. Network fees and system upgrades are all executed in accordance with internal rules. Token holders have no right to intervene, and governance rights are completely in the hands of the bank.

But the data exposed its shortcomings: after five years of operation, Kinexys’ average daily transaction volume is about US$5 billion, while JPMorgan Chase’s overall daily average payment scale is as high as US$10 trillion, and its blockchain business only accounts for 0.05% of the total internal payment volume. Banks with absolute control have failed to promote the large-scale implementation of blockchain business, and full control has not solved the core problem of difficulty in implementation.

Another representative is R3 Corda. This alliance network brings together more than 200 financial institutions. All rules are agreed upon through a contract before going online. Functional iterations require the signature and confirmation of all members. Since the first transaction was launched, all major banks have had equal say. Its tokenized real-life asset settlement scale has exceeded US$10 billion, and the average daily transaction volume has reached one million.

The above two types of platforms are competitors of ZKsync. ZK has unique advantages that cannot be replicated by the two: it ensures data privacy while being publicly verifiable, and the settlement layer is independent of any single enterprise. Once the operating entity of the private alliance chain is shut down, the assets on the chain will immediately be paralyzed; while the assets on ZKsync are ultimately anchored to the Ethereum main network, and there is no risk of unilateral shutdown by the operator. This underlying independence is the core differentiating advantage of ZKsync, but it also brings new contradictions: institutions must face the uncertainty caused by external community governance.

Strategic shift: bid farewell to retail investors and fully embrace institutions

Before fully betting on the institutional market, ZKsync launched an incentive program called Ignite to subsidize DeFi protocols to run on the network. With the strategic adjustment, the plan was officially terminated, and the activity on the chain also dropped along with the incentive policy. Meanwhile, the original network ZKsync Lite, which launched in 2020, has permanently shut down. The Matter Labs team has been releasing relevant signals since December 2025 and will determine the shutdown date at the end of February 2026. Platform funds can be withdrawn permanently, and no previous institutional business has been deployed on the network.

The market changes are very obvious: Aave, the leading DeFi lending protocol, decided to close its trading market on ZKsync Era after a community vote. The core reason comes from revenue data - Aave only generated $714 in fees within 30 days of the network, while revenue on the Base chain reached $300,000 during the same period, and the Ethereum mainnet made as much as $7.7 million. The community believes that ZKsync Era has failed to form an effective product-market match, and has set a rule: if new projects want to join in the future, the annual revenue must reach a threshold of US$2 million.

Looking back at the high point of the market, ZKsync Era’s DeFi lock-up value once reached hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, the total lock-up volume of its public DeFi ecosystem is only about $15 million, while the lock-up scale of mainstream second-tier networks for retail investors generally remains at the billions of dollars level.

This also leads to a core question: Should the second-layer network be positioned as an ecological position for retail encryption, or a traditional financial link relying on Ethereum settlement? This positioning determines the direction of the entire ecology.

Matter Labs CEO Alex Glukhovsky announced a roadmap this year, clearly shifting his focus to building high-end infrastructure for traditional finance. Product iteration also confirms this direction: first, it launched the Prividium private suite to create an isolated private transaction environment for banks; then it launched a bank-specific tool suite, and worked with institutions such as Cari Network to connect with large regional banks. Therefore, the departure of retail DeFi projects such as Aave has long been expected by the development team.

Cari Network, founded by the former head of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, plans to launch a pilot next quarter with five regional banks with a combined deposit base of more than $600 billion. If the pilot goes well, the massive transaction volume brought by banks will completely offset the impact of the departure of retail projects; once the pilot fails, ZKsync will only be reduced to a set of corporate experimental projects with acceptable technology and lack of practical applications.

Governance Difficulties: The Game between Institutions and Community

In early May 2026, ZKsync officially launched the v31 version protocol upgrade through community governance voting. This upgrade focuses on realizing native cross-chain interoperability between ZKsync chains, and is compatible with the Ethereum first-level settlement architecture and expands system adaptability.

According to the DAO voting results, a unified handling fee of 10 ZK tokens will be charged for all cross-chain interactions within the ZKsync ecosystem. For banks, fluctuations in handling fees are the norm, and network gas fees, cloud computing power costs, and foreign exchange spreads will all fluctuate. More importantly, the entire set of fee rules and billing mechanisms can be revised by the community governance forum without notifying the settled institutions in advance.

Currently, the ZK Nation community forum has begun to discuss issues such as node fees, staking rules, and customized pricing for certification verification. Once these issues are voted on, they will directly change the costs and rules of all cross-chain businesses of Deutsche Bank, Tradable and other institutions, and the relevant discussions are all open and transparent and can be reviewed by anyone.

This is in sharp contrast to JPMorgan Kinexys and R3 Corda: the former is fully controlled by the bank, while the latter relies on pre-signed contracts to constrain rule changes.

So why do banks still choose ZKsync? The core advantage is still privacy + independent settlement: ZK technology can complete transaction announcements while keeping core data confidential; even if Matter Labs does not perform well, the network will continue to operate based on Ethereum, and assets will not be frozen. But choosing this system means that banks must accept that there is no single owner of the network, and governance rights are jointly held by all community members who participate in voting.

The current price of ZK tokens is approximately $0.01, a drop of 96% from the all-time high of $0.3285 in June 2024. According to the current currency price, a cross-chain handling fee is about US$0.1; at the historical high, the fee was about US$3.28. Token price fluctuations can be dealt with, but having the community vote to determine the rules will make long-term financial planning for companies full of uncertainty.

In the second-layer network classification, L2Beat classified ZKsync Era as a level 0 network: the independent security committee can bypass the complete DAO voting and directly suspend and modify smart contracts. Mature Level 1 networks such as Arbitrum have eliminated such centralized intervention mechanisms. For enterprise risk control teams, the emergency shutdown function is an important means to prevent contract vulnerabilities. However, ZKsync's security committee is independent of the traditional enterprise structure, and control is not in the hands of partner institutions.

In addition, Sygnum tokenized some of Matter Labs' corporate treasury assets and connected them to Fidelity's liquidity funds; Fidelity later also launched institutional money market funds on the network. The project party uses its own assets to drive ecological activity and create benchmark cases, but the interests of this model are highly related to the founding team.

The core authority of the overall infrastructure is still in the hands of the independent safety committee. In the event of an emergency, the organization can skip regular procedures, temporarily modify contracts, and freeze functions. Established banks are always in a dynamically changing governance system, rather than the fixed cooperation agreement framework of traditional enterprises.

Final test

ZKsync bets its future on regulated traditional financial institutions. Such institutions have never participated in token speculation, nor are they active in governance forums. However, once a bank selects the underlying infrastructure, it often develops it for a long time and is difficult to replace. This type of cooperation model has high barriers to entry, but is extremely sticky.

ZKsync will either become the first benchmark project to successfully connect the crypto industry and traditional banks, or it will become another example: proving that traditional finance will eventually choose to build its own system and leave. The final outcome may be decided in the next 18 months.

Throughout the history of the industry, many projects have top technologies, but fail in governance models and long-term operations. For ZKsync, this big test about governance and ecology is still continuing.