Cari Picks ZKsync's Prividium for Regional Banks

Cari Network has tapped ZKsync's Prividium infrastructure to build what could become the first serious bank-governed tokenized deposit network for US regional lenders — a direct counter-punch to stablecoin issuers that have been quietly eating into banks' payments business for years. The platform, built on ZKsync and anchored to Ethereum, would let participating banks issue and move tokenized deposits around the clock while keeping them firmly on the balance sheet as bank liabilities.

What Cari Network Is Actually Building

The short version: deposits that move like stablecoins but stay inside the regulated banking system. Cari Network — a permissioned infrastructure project led by former US Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig — is using Matter Labs' Prividium as the shared ledger layer. Prividium enables instant settlement between verified counterparties while routing transaction data separately from personally identifiable information, which never leaves each bank's core system.

That data separation is the key design choice here. Banks have been burned before by blockchain pilots that couldn't satisfy examiners demanding access to transaction records. Prividium's architecture keeps settlement logic on-chain while keeping customer data off-chain — a structure ZKsync describes as purpose-built for banking privacy requirements, supervisory access, and tamper-evident audit trails.

The Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America has backed the broader model, arguing that keeping deposits within regulated institutions is essential for small business lending and the health of local economies. That's not just feel-good language — it's a political argument aimed directly at lawmakers currently debating the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin framework bill working its way through Congress.

Financial infrastructure is being redesigned in real time, and mid-sized banks are the ones being left behind.

Five Banks In — and Why That Number Matters

Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bancorp have been actively involved in designing and testing Cari Network since February, according to a Bloomberg report. These aren't fringe community banks — they collectively represent hundreds of billions in assets and millions of retail and business deposit accounts across the US.

Getting five mid-sized institutions into a design-and-test phase before a public announcement is actually hard. Most blockchain-in-banking stories come with one tentative pilot bank and a lot of vaporware. Five banks with named institutions suggests this got past the legal and compliance review stage, which is typically where these deals die.

The US regional banks involved aren't doing this out of curiosity — they're doing it because stablecoin issuers are encroaching on the deposit funding and payments roles that mid-sized banks have relied on for decades. PayPal USD, Circle's USDC, and others have demonstrated that dollar-denominated digital payments can work outside the banking system. Cari is the banking industry's answer to that threat.

Is ZKsync Pivoting Away From Its Public Chain?

That's the question no one in the announcement is eager to answer. ZKsync's public network had a rough 2025 — on-chain data analyzed by Nansen showed it recording one of the steepest transaction declines among major chains, down roughly 90% as airdrop-driven activity dried up. The token launch that was supposed to cement ZKsync as a major Layer 2 destination instead became a cautionary tale about mercenary liquidity.

So now Prividium. The institutional product. The B2B pivot. It's not hard to read the strategic logic here — if the consumer DeFi market isn't coming back fast enough, you sell privacy-compliant infrastructure to banks and governments instead. ZKsync's 2026 roadmap explicitly centers on privacy, deterministic control, and native interoperability as prerequisites for institutional clients. That's not a coincidence.

To be fair, Gluchowski frames it as complementary rather than a retreat. Tokenized deposits and stablecoins serve different functions in this architecture, he argued — deposits handle the movement of money in and out of private banking infrastructure, while stablecoins do something else entirely. Whether the market believes that framing depends a lot on what happens to ZKsync's public chain metrics over the next two quarters.

Tokenized deposits are complementary to stablecoins — deposits being used as the payment tokens by banks when money needs to move in and out of their private infrastructure.