Cari Selects ZKsync’s Prividium to Power Bank-Governed Tokenized Deposit Network
Cari Network is building its bank-grade tokenized deposit network on Prividium, Matter Labs' private permissioned blockchain for regulated financial institutions.
ZKsync Blog > Five U.S. banks with $600B in ...
Published Mar 20, 2026
Five U.S. banks with $600B in deposits are moving to ZKsync. Here's why.
By Alex Gluckowski.
Yesterday, Cari Network announced that Prividium will power its tokenized deposit network, starting with five U.S. regional banks representing a total of $600B+ in deposit. To see why, you need to understand a difficult problem banks are still struggling with after a decade.
Control vs. Connectivity Trade-Off
Every serious financial institution has been caught between two conflicting constraints: control and connectivity.Regulators mandate control: transactions processed under the bank's own governance, counterparty data inside its walls, full auditability on demand. Markets demand connectivity: real-time settlement, 24/7 availability, the ability to reach every counterparty at the speed digital finance actually moves. Both are non-negotiable. Fail the first and you lose your license. Fail the second and you lose your deposits.That second risk is no longer theoretical. $5.7 trillion moved through stablecoins in 2024, deposit volume settling outside the banking system on infrastructure banks don't control. An April 2025 U.S. Treasury report estimates that stablecoins have the potential to drain as much as $6.6 trillion in deposits from the banking system. Smaller and regional banks are especially at risk of this shift, which directly impacts their profitability and stability.
Private chains, public chains, proprietary protocols: none resolved the underlying problem.
Private chains were the first serious attempt. The logic was sound: keep execution inside the institution, under its own rules. JPMorgan Coin does exactly that. It settles inside JPMorgan, instantly, with full control. The problem is that competitors will not build their payments infrastructure on a rival's rails. A private chain is only as useful as the network it can reach.Public chains inverted the problem. Any institution could connect, settle against any counterparty, move money at the speed of software. But positions and counterparty relationships stayed visible on a public ledger in real time. The exposure opened significant risk to bad actors.Proprietary protocols claimed to thread the needle. Private execution, shared settlement, no single institution in control. But as a class, they share the same structural dependency. Settlement requires a trusted third party to order transactions and confirm commits. Canton's sync domain is the latest version of this. The cryptography between participants may be real, but it only governs what each party sees, not whether the settlement itself was processed correctly. For that, every institution depends on an operator behaving honestly. Compromise that operator, or simply ask who runs it, and the integrity guarantee becomes organizational. A bank choosing this path would trust whoever controls the synchronization layer, bound by contract, not math.
Open protocols were always the natural settlement foundation. The missing piece was privacy.
Ethereum was always the right answer: settlement infrastructure no single actor controls. The problem was that nobody had figured out how to make it private.Before ZK proofs, the only way to verify that a transaction was settled correctly was to either see the underlying data or trust the party who processed it. That constraint is what made privacy and shared settlement incompatible. Every architecture that tried to solve both ended up hiding the data from counterparties or trusting an operator to behave.ZK proofs (zero-knowledge) remove that constraint entirely. A ZK proof is a cryptographic certificate that a transaction was processed correctly, verifiable by any counterparty without revealing what the transaction contained and without depending on any operator to confirm it. The proof is the guarantee.Prividium is designed around this unique property of cryptographic incorruptibility. Each institution runs its own chain, under governance and compliance rules it controls. Settlement is verified by ZK proofs posted to Ethereum, with no operator in the chain.That is the Bank Stack of Ethereum powering incorruptible financial infrastructure.
Cari Network, led by banking veterans, chose to build on Prividium as their foundation.
Cari exists to give regulated banks a path into programmable settlement without leaving the regulatory perimeter. Its founder, Eugene Ludwig, served as the 27th Comptroller of the Currency. His five design partner banks — Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bancorp — represent $600B in combined deposits.For institutions of this weight, moving to programmable settlement on rails where a private company controls the settlement guarantee would have traded one dependency for another. The settlement layer had to be neutral.Cari chose Prividium. Regulated finance is moving to ZKsync.
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