ZKsync Says Institutional Finance Needs Infrastructure That Combines Privacy and Connectivity

"Public chains have a transparency problem, while private chains have a fragmentation problem. For institutional finance to expand on-chain, the industry needs new infrastructure that delivers both privacy and interoperability."

Marco Cora, head of the ZKsync Foundation, made the remarks at OFF 2026, or On-chain Finance Forum 2026, held at FKI Tower in Seoul's Yeouido district on May 15.

Cora said demand for on-chain financial infrastructure is rising rapidly as stablecoins and tokenized assets grow. JPMorgan and PayPal, among other major financial institutions, are issuing their own digital currencies, while companies are expanding their use of programmable money, he said. That points to clear demand for digital assets that can move quickly, cheaply and globally.

He said current infrastructure still poses limits for institutional adoption. On public blockchains, corporate transaction data can be exposed because of their transparent design, and permissionless structures can be difficult to align with regulatory requirements.

Private chains, by contrast, offer full control and security. But they are difficult to connect across networks, which limits scalability. Cora said many Hyperledger-based private chains were built, but real-world operating cases remained limited. Network fragmentation, he added, is a critical problem for financial infrastructure.

As an alternative, ZKsync presented a structure called Previdium. It uses zero-knowledge proofs, or ZKPs, to preserve privacy while establishing trust across networks.

Under that model, the data itself is not exposed externally. Only proof that rules were followed is shared, which, Cora said, allows privacy and regulatory compliance to be achieved at the same time.

The structure allows each institution to run its system independently while recording proofs on a neutral layer such as Ethereum, enabling interaction with other institutions. Its core feature is that data integrity can be secured without a separate intermediary.

Cora also pointed to real-world applications. In the U.S., the Cari project is building tokenized deposit infrastructure between banks, with early participating lenders holding about $700 billion in combined assets. If the network expands to 50 to 60 banks, total assets would exceed $7 trillion.

In the Middle East, Abu Dhabi-based ADI Chain is building infrastructure for a dirham stablecoin and expanding into global payments and asset management. Xsolla is also pursuing an on-chain settlement model designed to cut payment processing times from several days to seconds.

The existing financial system is built around settlement delays and high costs, Cora said. On-chain infrastructure can shift that model to real-time settlement, reducing costs and improving efficiency.

The key, he said, is not simply adopting blockchain in finance, but designing infrastructure that meets institutional requirements for privacy, regulation and interoperability. That model will become the standard for the future financial system.