Privacy Tools Are Rising Behind Institutional Adoption, Says Zksync...
At the same time, banks and financial institutions have been exploring zero-knowledge (ZK) systems that enable private transaction flows on blockchains, a technology known for transparency and immutability.
Gluchowski first encountered Bitcoin in 2014 while working in the startup world but shifted his focus during the initial coin offering era when Ethereum’s smart contracts enabled new use cases. The scalability problem, and ZK-proofs in particular, drew him into building Matter Labs, the developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 network ZKsync.
Crypto bull cycles in recent years highlighted long stretches of speculation, dominated by trends that have little connection to real-world utility.
“We have had a weird obsession with non-productive assets for a long time in crypto, and it was clearly not sustainable,” Gluchowski said, adding that the consumer side of crypto’s growth has hit a plateau.
“It’s night and day. No one wanted to touch crypto before — it was a taboo topic. Now the attitude is more like, ‘We need to embrace this technology, or we’re going to be outcompeted,’” Gluchowski said.
The renewed attention to Zcash (ZEC) is the most visible part, but the more consequential driver comes from institutional requirements, he said. Banks, asset managers and corporates cannot settle transactions on transparent public ledgers without exposing internal flows, counterparty details or treasury operations on a public ledger.
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Earlier enterprise blockchain experiments ran into exactly this problem. Financial institutions deployed private chains using frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric or Corda to keep data internal, but those networks remained cut off from the broader liquidity and settlement infrastructure forming around public blockchains.
“If you build a completely private chain, it’s not going to be connected to anything,” Gluchowski said. “It’s a slightly better version of a database, but it does not give you connectivity to public capital markets.”
He claimed that the model now taking shape in the Ethereum ecosystem attempts to resolve that trade-off. It pairs locally operated private chains with ZK-proofs, allowing institutions to keep transaction data internal while still proving to the public network that the system is operating correctly. The public chain does not see the specifics of a transaction, but it can verify that no rules are being broken.
Source: CoinTelegraph
