ZKsync's Bank Bet: Does the ZK Token Capture the Upside?
ZKsync can help a bank keep its customers’ balances private while using a blockchain. I can see why banks want that. I’m less convinced it makes ZK a good buy.
I’d wait. At around 1.7 cents when I wrote this, ZK had a market cap of roughly $190m and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of about $360m.
All figures below are US dollars. That market cap values the tokens; it isn’t cash backing them or a stake in Matter Labs.
ZK’s all-time high was around 32 cents, leaving it roughly 95% below its peak. I get why that chart looks tempting. But returning to that price would imply nearly $7bn FDV at the current supply cap, so the old high isn’t my price target.
Why ZK has been rising
ZKsync recently announced Airbender Prime. The team says a single high-end NVIDIA GPU proved 99% of thousands of consecutive Ethereum blocks in under 10 seconds each, including witness preparation. Even the slowest finished within 12 seconds.
A prover supplies cryptographic evidence that computation followed the rules. Making that cheaper and faster helps other parties check the work without repeating it.
Vitalik congratulated the team, then called for more work on security and formal verification. He wasn’t endorsing the token.
The rally was already running. Binance’s daily candles show a gain of about 40% over a few days, followed by a pullback, before the announcement.
CoinGecko showed ZK up about 30% over the week and nearly double over the month. Airbender and Vitalik helped explain the attention, but I can’t separate their effect from earlier institutional expectations and trading momentum.
And Airbender’s post-quantum design doesn’t make every ZKsync chain, bridge and wallet quantum-safe. The benchmark is the team’s test, not an independent security audit.
What ZKsync actually sells
Matter Labs develops ZKsync. The project has been running since 2020, with Era following in 2023. ZK began trading in 2024.
The names can get confusing:
| Product | What it does | What I need to trust |
|---|---|---|
| ZKsync Era | A public Ethereum rollup for applications; publishes state data to Ethereum and uses validity proofs | Proofs and bridge contracts, plus current operators and upgrade powers |
| ZK Stack and ZKsync OS | Software for running additional chains; new chains use the newer OS execution environment | The particular chain’s operators, settlement, data availability and configuration |
| Prividium | Private, permissioned chains for institutions, with proofs anchoring state updates to Ethereum in the documented Ethereum deployment | The institution also controls access and keeps transaction data off-chain |
| Airbender | Proving technology used in the newer stack | Correct execution rules, proof implementation and verification |
Prividium lets institutions keep data in their own infrastructure and control access. Proofs help counterparties verify computation, but the bank still controls the data and who can transact.
The Besu extension also supports permissioned settlement infrastructure. I’d check each deployment before assuming it settles directly on Ethereum.
The licensing story has changed too. Prividium’s permissioning engine became open source, while the repository separates that code from proprietary apps, tooling and managed services.
Matter Labs can sell those services. That doesn’t guarantee a compulsory software fee, much less income for ZK holders.
The banks are evidence of interest, not token revenue
Cari selected Prividium for its bank-governed deposit network. It has raised over $30m from banks and named 6 design partners, including SouthState.
Banks putting money in gets my attention. But I couldn’t verify current production deposit balances, recurring payment volume or revenue reaching ZK holders.
The $600bn-plus figure in project materials is the banks’ combined deposits. It hasn’t all moved onchain. A tokenized deposit remains a bank liability, and any qualifying deposit insurance doesn’t cover ZK.
The other announcements need the same care:
- BitGo: custody and tokenized-deposit partnership; no disclosed token-holder earnings.
- UBS: tokenized-gold proof of concept on a validium testnet.
- Deutsche Bank/Memento’s DAMA 2: institutional tokenization architecture; customer balances and ZK revenue aren’t established by deployment.
- NexBridge: an MOU for Japan, rather than a completed bank rollout.
The latest quarterly report says private atomic interoperability is on Matter Labs-operated mainnets, with customer upgrades still underway. ERP and treasury integrations aren’t available yet; ISO 20022 integration is still a proof of concept.
What does a ZK holder receive?
ZK holders can delegate votes on protocol upgrades and token programs. They don’t own Matter Labs or automatically receive its licensing income.
Era uses ETH for gas. Account abstraction allows other payment arrangements, but more transactions don’t require every user to hold ZK.
The token-utility proposal describes routing protocol fees and enterprise proceeds into ZK purchases, burns and rewards. There has been implementation work: a token-burn upgrade, followed by Fee Flow contracts.
Fee Flow lets participants pay a set amount of ZK to claim accumulated fee assets. The received ZK goes to a splitter, initially set to burn 100%.
I checked the deployed contracts. They’re configured to burn all the ZK they receive, but I found no fee-splitting events since deployment. The setup events were there.
That check covers these contracts, not every possible buyback wallet. The Q3 report also says they’re awaiting governance activation: the original Gateway fees were removed from v31, and private interoperability pricing is still being developed.
The staking pilot distributed about 5m ZK in its first season. Its mint-funded reward budget doesn’t establish revenue from paying customers.
Where the revenue stands
Era collects transaction fees, but the trend is rough. I added up DefiLlama’s daily fee history and its separate revenue series:
| Period | User fees, rounded | After tracked Ethereum costs, rounded |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | $25m | $7.5m |
| 2025 | $1m | $0.5m |
| First 9 months of 2026 | $200,000 | $190,000 |
DefiLlama’s revenue calculation subtracts Ethereum settlement costs. It doesn’t deduct proving hardware, staff or the rest of the business expenses, and it isn’t income paid to ZK holders.
A chunk of the earlier activity was airdrop farming: people swapping and bridging in the hope of free tokens. Fees sank as that boom faded, though we can’t pin the whole decline on farmers leaving.
Transactions also got cheaper after Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. That’s good for users, but Era earns less per transaction.
Today’s visible users include traders on SyncSwap and Koi, and borrowers on Aave and Venus, alongside wallets and bots moving funds. Users, bots or sponsoring apps pay Era’s gas fees. The apps collect their own trading or lending fees separately.
Recent DefiLlama figures were small too:
| Metric | Observed value | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| DeFi TVL | About $15m | Capital in tracked DeFi protocols |
| Stablecoin supply | About $36m | Tracked stablecoins on Era |
| DEX volume, 24 hours | About $800,000 | All tracked Era DEX trading, not ZK trading alone |
| Chain fees, latest day | About $500 | Daily gas fees |
| Chain fees, 7 days | About $4,200 | A week’s gas fees |
| Chain fees, 30 days | About $14,000 | A month’s gas fees |
L2BEAT showed about $320m of value secured and fewer than 1 user operation per second. Value secured differs from DeFi TVL, and operations aren’t unique people.
DefiLlama also showed around $1.2bn of RWA active assets. These can be permissioned investment records rather than liquid trading capital, as Tradable’s documentation illustrates. They don’t back ZK or count as its revenue.
Annualizing the monthly chain fees gives about $170,000. The token’s FDV is roughly 2,000 times that gross fee pace, before settlement, proving and operating costs, or any payment to holders.
The same dashboard showed around $65,000 of daily app revenue. That belongs to applications running on Era; it isn’t automatically ZKsync’s revenue or money owed to ZK holders.
Prividium’s commercial business is another question. A governance-forum response explains that managed-services revenue pays Matter Labs, while network fees would follow a separate governance-controlled route. I couldn’t find disclosed recurring sales or profit figures for Prividium in the quarterly reports I reviewed.
So I can measure a small public fee business. I can’t yet put a reliable revenue figure on the bank opportunity, or show that it funds recurring ZK purchases and burns.
Meanwhile, TPP-18 authorizes about 800m ZK over a year for Matter Labs’ work. Future minters can be revoked; authorization doesn’t mean every token has been minted or sold.
I couldn’t establish current consolidated cash runway or enterprise profits. Historical fundraising and the original token allocation don’t answer that.
The competition and risks are concrete
I’d compare ZKsync’s bank offering against these alternatives:
| Alternative | Why a customer might choose it | What ZKsync must prove |
|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum chains / Orbit | Custom chains, configurable data availability, fees and access controls | Its proof and privacy package saves enough integration work; private chains aren’t unique to ZKsync |
| Optimism / Superchain | A standardized Ethereum-compatible stack and shared chain infrastructure | A bank needs Prividium’s confidential workflow enough to choose it over a standard rollup stack |
| Starknet | Another validity-proof system, with its own Cairo development environment | Superior end-to-end product and developer experience, beyond a prover speed comparison |
| Polygon CDK / Agglayer | Custom chains and cross-chain connectivity, including atomic operations | Institutions prefer its private coordination and commercial package |
| Canton | Privacy and synchronized transactions between institutional applications | Ethereum settlement and integration benefits outweigh a competing institutional network’s relationships and different trust model |
Production integrations and relationships could matter more than GPU speed. But banks can negotiate fees, run open-source code themselves or use several networks.
L2BEAT still rates Era Stage 0, with centralized operators, restricted proposers and an emergency upgrade path without an exit delay. That’s its maturity assessment, not a security guarantee.
The airdrop incident involved a compromised administrator minting about 110m unclaimed ZK. It wasn’t a failure of the rollup’s validity proofs.
Matter Labs has also announced EraVM’s retirement, with transition work due to begin within 6 months of that announcement and later guidance for smart-contract positions. Era’s minimum withdrawal execution delay is now 24 hours.
Faster proving doesn’t remove that delay, bridge bugs, administrator powers or private operators’ control over data. Bank procurement and regulation can slow adoption too.
I’d watch trading liquidity as well. When I checked Binance’s ZK/USDT book, there were only about $200,000 of buy orders within 2% of the midpoint, and roughly $160,000 on the sell side.
Those orders can disappear. I’d check the live book, exchange custody and supported withdrawal network before buying.
My bear, base and bull valuations
CoinGecko put circulating supply at about 10.8bn ZK. CoinMarketCap reported slightly more. I use CoinGecko’s figure here, though I couldn’t reconcile the difference.
About 15.4bn ZK had been minted, matching CMC’s total supply. CoinGecko uses the full 21bn allocation instead. Capped minters explain the difference: authorized recipients mint tokens over time, and governance can upgrade the current 21bn cap.
Tokenomist lists an October unlock, which CoinGecko estimates at roughly 170m ZK, worth about $3m at the price used here. Insider vesting runs into 2028, but revised allocations and rounded disclosures leave the exact release amount uncertain.
For the end of 2028, I assume 18bn circulating ZK, about two-thirds more than today. That allows roughly 3.6bn from insider vesting at the tracker’s monthly rate and another 3.6bn from treasury and ecosystem circulation, after lasting burns.
That extra circulation is my stress assumption, not an announced schedule. Employee grants and governance decisions can change it; 3bn would still sit outside this modeled float.
| Scenario | What happens by end-2028 | Circulating market cap assumed | Approximate ZK price at 18bn float | Rough return from 1.7 cents |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bear | Bank work stays narrow; fee capture disappoints; token funding continues | $50m | $0.003 | Down about 85% |
| Base | Some production customers; limited, still uncertain token economics | $300m | $0.017 | Roughly flat |
| Speculative bull | A paying institutional network with recurring fees routed to ZK | $1.5bn | $0.08 | Up about 400% |
These are illustrative market valuations, not cash-flow fair values or probability-weighted forecasts. The base case shows how dilution can swallow a larger market cap. Total loss is possible beyond the bear case.
For a separate revenue check, I assume 25 times sustainable annual net value directed to ZK. The scenarios imply FDVs of roughly $60m, $350m and $1.8bn, requiring about $2m, $14m and $70m a year respectively.
That multiple is my assumption, not a peer average. I mean outside-funded purchases, burns or distributions after costs, rather than customer AUM, gross sales or minted staking rewards.
The 8-cent bull case is speculative. Its required $70m a year reaching ZK is roughly 400 times Era’s recent annualized gross fees, though those are different cash flows. Most of that money would have to come from a new institutional fee business.
I’d need paying banks, working fee pricing and reliable routing to ZK before treating that as a supported valuation. Today’s revenue doesn’t justify it, and the base case isn’t proven fair value either.
The current valuation would need about $15m a year on that basis. I haven’t verified anything close reaching ZK.
At the same circulating market caps, a 21bn float would lower the table’s prices by about 15%. A 10-cent token would mean roughly $2bn FDV.
What would make me buy, or give up
I’d reconsider after several quarters of paying production use, with approved, enforceable revenue routing and verifiable fees reaching ZK. I’d also want current treasury and cash-runway figures, customer interoperability deployments and a clear EraVM transition.
The thesis fails if banks use the software but little value reaches ZK, competition kills pricing, or token spending overwhelms outside demand. A serious proof or bridge failure could end it sooner.
The community’s complaints aren’t audited accounts. The project’s own disclosures explain enough of my hesitation.
I could miss a rally while waiting (annoying, but survivable).
Show me the fees reaching the token.
