zkSync

In 2019 Matter Labs began developing zkSync, and in 2020 it launched zkSync Lite, using zero-knowledge proofs to cut Ethereum transfer costs.

In 2021 Matter Labs first proposed the zkEVM concept for zkSync, arguing Solidity contracts could run with almost no changes; in November it raised a $50 million Series B led by a16z.

On March 24, 2023 the zkSync Era mainnet opened to all users, the first public zkEVM and the turning point where zkSync moved from payment scaling to general computation.

In November 2022 zkSync closed a $200 million Series C co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, bringing total funding above $450 million.

On June 17, 2024 zkSync's ZK token launched, airdropping 3.6 billion tokens, 17.5% of supply, to 695,000 addresses, one of the largest distributions of its time.

In 2025 zkSync's Atlas upgrade pushed throughput into the tens of thousands of TPS and advanced the ZKsync OS, Gateway and Elastic Network interoperability stack; Vitalik Buterin publicly called its work underrated, drawing renewed attention.

In April 2025 an exploit of zkSync's airdrop distributor contract cost about $5 million, later recovered via a bounty; ZK kept sliding and hit an all-time low near $0.007 in August 2026.

In June 2026 zkSync announced layoffs and redirected the entire organization toward Prividium, an institutional privacy platform; in September it open-sourced the permissioning engine, and Germany's Bundesbank became the first central bank to run it in its own infrastructure.

Tokenomics reform dominated the past six months. On April 27, 2026, Matter Labs submitted the ZIP-16 (V31 upgrade) draft, introducing native interoperability across the ZKsync ecosystem with interop fees paid in ZK. On May 6, the governance forum published the ZK Token Fee Flow System v1.0, whose initial parameter burns 100% of collected ZK, aiming to turn ZK from a governance token into a deflationary asset — though official filings confirmed mid-year that the buyback-and-burn mechanism is not yet live.

ZKsync Lite stopped producing blocks on May 4 and was officially retired. The ZKnomics staking pilot capped rewards at 10 million and 25 million ZK for Seasons 1 and 2 (up to 10% APY), with Season 2 paused in May.

On September 8, Matter Labs open-sourced Prividium's permissioning engine, which is being tested by Germany's Bundesbank. ZK hit an all-time low of $0.0071 on August 14, while monthly team and investor unlocks of 150–350 million ZK continue through June 2028, with about 173 million more released in mid-September.

On October 13, 2026, zkSync unveiled Airbender Prime, which proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each and every block within 12 seconds on a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, topping ETHproofs.org on proving time, GPU efficiency and cost; it uses hash-based, post-quantum STARKs on RISC-V and plans Keccak-256 for L1 proofs. On October 15 Vitalik Buterin said the zkEVM speed race was settled and called for formal verification and proving-cost caps, and ZK rose 6.2%.

in the year the v31 upgrade added native interop between ZKsync chains with a flat 10 ZK fee per cross-chain call; Prividium shifted toward a bank-grade private execution environment, with the 2026 budget proposal citing a 30-plus institution pipeline, SOC 2 attestation and a migration path for Besu L1s, while public chains include Abstract, Lens and GRVT. Mid-October data showed ZKsync Era processing 586,731 transactions in 30 days, about one-seventh of Starknet, while holding roughly twice the bridged ETH and still rated Stage 0 on L2BEAT.

zkSync's Future strategy and roadmap: zkSync's commercial centre of gravity has moved to Prividium, but value capture is misaligned: Commander and managed-operations revenue go to Matter Labs rather than ZK holders, 2026 revenue guidance is only $4-7 million, and the year-end target is six production deployments with 11 chains already signed and 15 more in talks, while the SOC 2 Type II audit is still under way. Demand-side evidence is firmer than the narrative: Cari Network has grown past 30 banks representing about $10 trillion in assets, the Deutsche Bundesbank is testing the Prividium Core open-sourced in September, and Besu support turns installed institutional chains into an addressable market. On the public side Abstract, Lens and GRVT supply liquidity depth, while Airbender 2.0 cutting proof costs another two to three times is the precondition for institutional unit economics, so Prividium sells compliance and operations before it sells a chain.

Alex Gluchowski, co-founder and CEO, holds an MSc in computer science from Technische Universitaet Berlin. He started as a developer in Ukraine, led engineering at Clarity AG in Germany, and founded the lifestyle platform Somuchmore and the campervan marketplace PaulCamper as CTO of both, co-founding Matter Labs with Alexandr Vlasov in December 2018 and owning strategy and people.

Alexandr Vlasov, co-founder, head of R&D and director, is a nuclear physicist with a master's in high-energy physics and a doctorate in electrical engineering. He worked on Ethereum Plasma designs and GPU-based zkSNARK provers, co-founded the company in 2018 and now oversees zero-knowledge and protocol research.

Marcin Michalski, CTO, is a blockchain and distributed-systems engineer who owns Matter Labs' technical architecture and engineering organization, running the Era and Prividium development lines.

The founders split strategy and R&D, Michalski's engineering team reports to Gluchowski, and research and engineering jointly review the technical roadmap.

Recent team changes at zkSync include the departure of Chief Protocol Architect Marcin Michalski in June 2026. He joined in March 2023 and was responsible for protocol design. Additionally, according to network sources, parent company Matter Labs conducted another round of layoffs in June 2026, with founder Alex Gluchowski announcing a full pivot to Prividium, a permissioned privacy chain for financial institutions, abandoning the original permissionless public chain route. This marks the second round of layoffs since September 2024, further shrinking the team. These changes reflect a major strategic shift for the project.