Published Oct 7, 2026
Earlier this week, we announced a partnership with NexBridge to bring Prividium to Japan's financial institutions. To see why this matters, you need to look at what Japan has done in the last four months. The amended Payment Services Act took effect in June. In August, the FSA stood up a dedicated Crypto Assets and Stablecoins Division and then removed the ¥1 million per-transaction ceiling that had confined regulated stablecoin operators to retail-sized payments. It’s clear that Japan has decided to move to the next step of experimenting with digital assets. It built a supervisory framework first, and now opens the gates to institutional volume. Very few markets on earth have done this in the right order.
The prize behind those gates is enormous. Japanese households hold over ¥2,200 trillion in financial assets, roughly half of it sitting in bank deposits, the highest cash-and-deposit share of any major economy. Japan's banks, trust banks and securities firms are the custodians of that money, and they already issue billions of dollars in tokenized securities. What they have lacked is infrastructure that resolves the same trade-off we wrote about when Cari chose Prividium: regulators mandate control, markets demand connectivity, and until now every architecture forced institutions to sacrifice one for the other.
Prividium exists to remove that trade-off. Each institution operates its own ledger, with execution private to the institution and its regulators, and settlement verified on Ethereum through zero-knowledge proofs. No operator to trust, no counterparty data exposed, no dependence on anyone else's rails. Last month, we open-sourced the Prividium permissioning engine, and the Deutsche Bundesbank became the first institution to deploy Prividium on its own self-hosted infrastructure. That is the standard institutions should hold their infrastructure to: software they can inspect, run inside their own perimeter, and prove correct to a public settlement layer no single actor controls.
But infrastructure alone does not win a market like Japan. Japanese institutions buy from partners who understand their supervisors, their security requirements and their language. NexBridge built exactly that: full-lifecycle infrastructure for regulated yen stablecoins. Trust-type issuance, HSM-secured custody, cross-border settlement. All made in Tokyo, for Japan's regulatory environment. Together we offer Japanese institutions something that has never existed in that market: a ledger they genuinely govern themselves, a public settlement foundation they don't have to trust anyone to use, and a local partner to run a digital asset business on top of it. Japan moved first on the rules. We intend to make sure its institutions move first on the rails.
NexBridge and Matter Labs partner to bring Prividium to Japan’s financial institutions for private digital asset issuance, settlement and tokenization.
Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski on open source as the answer to vendor dependency in financial infrastructure, and a central bank running public code.
Prividium Core is now open source under Apache 2.0: one app and six packages, designed to run against ZKsync OS as a working permissioned chain.
