Hello,
In this episode, I sat down with Alex Gluchowski, CEO of Matter Labs, to ask why every major bank is now quietly building on a blockchain.
Banks do not trust each other.
That sounds obvious, but it is the most important reason blockchains matter to financial institutions. A bank trusts its own systems. It may trust its auditors. It may trust a counterparty after months of legal work. But it does not want to trust another bank’s server just because both are part of the same network. The whole point of blockchains is that they scale trust. That’s what banks want.
But what banks want comes with strings banks can’t accept.
For years, crypto people have framed the value of blockchains around decentralisation, public verifiability and permissionlessness. These are useful words from a technological standpoint, but they often make the conversation abstract. The simpler question is: can the rules of a financial system be enforced without trusting the people running the system?
That question becomes even more important when the assets are private.
If a public chain breaks, many people can see it. Traders, analysts, security firms, and rival teams are all watching the same ledger. A strange mint, a broken limit or an unusual movement in supply can trigger alarms because the data is visible. Public blockchains create a market for monitoring.
Private networks do not have that luxury. If the failure is hidden, it can silently spread.
This is the uncomfortable problem banks face as they move towards tokenisation. They want privacy, but they also want stronger guarantees. They want assets to move faster, but that can’t happen if they must build bilateral trust with all counterparties. They want the benefits of shared rails without turning the financial system into a giant group chat between bank servers.
Is there a solution that gives you the best of both worlds? Private execution with public-grade enforcement.
This is what ZKsync’s Prividium does. Tokenised deposits will be the starting point for most banks. Over time, this can expand into wholesale settlement, clearing, foreign exchange, securities, and more complex financial contracts.
The conversation explores the tension between what crypto offers and what institutions need. The episode lays out what makes a blockchain a blockchain, why public verification matters, where private networks fall short, how tokenised deposits may evolve, and why ZKsync is now betting on institutional finance.
Thinking about trust as infrastructure,
Saurabh Deshpande
