Published Jun 18, 2026
Why privacy is bringing institutions onchain. Omar Azhar, The Rollup Privacy Day.
Transcript
Omar Azhar (BD Head, ZKsync) on The Rollup — Privacy Day — June 17, 2026
Speaker: We've got Omar from ZKsync. Joining us, guys, to wrap up Privacy day. It's been a marathon three and a half hours. Guys are grinding. Uh, I think, uh, a ton just putting a food order. And he called it the nuts, so. We got. We're still here. Freedom guy. What's going on? Alan branch outstanding podcast. Thank you. Hot protocol. We're going to bring Omar up in a sec to round out. I feel like I'm an idiot. I was watching yesterday's stream thinking it was the current stream lol. Yikes. Yeah. All right. Chad is up here. Let's get Omar up here. Let's not talk about Kevin Warsh. All my homies hate Kevin Warsh. Omar, what's going on man? Good to have you on. How's it going guys.
Omar: Good man.
Speaker: Privacy day. It's privacy day. We all just like turn off our cameras though.
Omar: Exactly right. Full anonymous mode.
Speaker: I mean you look like you're you've been talking to some institutions, Men know what you look like. You dress when it's nice and sunny out in New York. You know, it's a beautiful day.
Omar: Yeah. Uh, no more t shirts. Just collars only.
Speaker: Yes, sir. Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. Man. Well, we've seen quite the adoption lately from privacy in terms of an idea, in terms of of a narrative, obviously zero knowledge technology. I think, uh, you know, has been it's been kind of like a not like a tangential kind of side effect, but it's a, it's a nice property of zero knowledge technology. Um, I know you guys have been doing a lot of work with the kind of banking side, the institutional side, kind of looking to onboard them into their own Prividium chains. So I think it's a pretty timely conversation for understanding like what these guys are looking for when they're building with ZKsync, when they're launching their own chain, when they're doing business on chain. Obviously it's privacy day. So I think they all kind of comes together or maybe just catch us up, man. What's the latest? Um, how's the adoption been? How is the institutional relationships been. Catch us up.
Omar: Yeah. No. Adoption has been great. A lot of interesting conversations. I would say in the last six months alone, the industry, at least on this side of the House, has been, you know, it's gone from zero to one hundred miles per hour very, very quickly. Um, everyone's trying to figure out, okay, these are the core use cases we need to build out, whether it's collateral management, tokenized deposits, money movement, uh, you're seeing like tokenized equity starting to move on, chain settlements moving on chain. Even the large exchanges are also starting to talk about, okay, how do I support twenty four over seven trading? Um, and all of that. No, it's market demand. There's the use cases have been figured out. Okay. These use cases make a lot of sense to move on to blockchain with twenty four over seven movement. And then the questions then become okay, how do you do it? Right. Um, and so privacy is the first gating criteria, but it's not the only one. Um, and so everyone talks about it quite a lot because it's relatively new for let's say, the blockchain industry and the crypto industry in general. Um, and, uh, so there's the privacy aspect, but then there's also, okay, how do I work with the privacy? Where does the privacy actually reside? Is it some sort of privacy pool? Do I control the data and I'm just hiding the data and I'm controlling the data. And, you know, you're getting some sort of proof, which is kind of how, you know, Prividium works and our private interoperability works. Um, but then there's all the other questions around the rest of the infrastructure stack too. Okay. You've got these private, private infrastructure. Can my same wallet infrastructure work and the same, you know, Oracle data pricing infrastructure also work? How do I connect it to off chain systems? So it's a much more mature conversation beyond just, hey, I just want to deploy a wallet. I want to deploy and get access to these types of assets. It's now much more sophisticated from a, the lifecycle of a trade end to end. How does that work within the infrastructure stack and how do I also make it work within my compliance paradigm, my risk accounting paradigm and audit paradigm as well. So, uh, but the conversation is very, very fruitful. Very interesting. I think you'll see quite a lot coming out in the next couple of months, uh, particularly on the Prividium side, especially with our private interoperability as well. Um, it's going to be a very interesting time. I would say literally, you know, institutions that I did not think were going to be moving fast on this type of thing. Every everything from government institutions down to local regional banks, uh, not just in the US and Europe, but around the world.
Speaker: Do they feel the heat? Do they feel like, you know, okay, this is a regulatory regime that's actually pushing this and this, the adoption of this thing. SEC has got Project Crypto. You know, we've got to be known as the, you know, crypto capital of the world. They see their competitors or their peers running a digital asset strategy. They, they feel like if they don't have a strategy or they don't implement something here, they're going to fall behind. Is that the general sentiment amongst these institutions?
Omar: Yeah, I would say yeah. So the FOMO aspect is definitely very real. Um, and it's coming at a time where the use cases have more or less been proven out. So you've got on some side, you've got the market dynamics of okay, stablecoins are coming, they're great product market fit. Uh, tokenized deposits have been starting to move up as well. People are starting to figure that out now. They're moving to more complex types of trades like settlement, uh, equities, treasuries, etc.. So it's a amalgamation of both the regulatory regime changing quite a bit and giving a lot more clarity on what can and can't be done. But then also there's the market dynamics as well, right? And you don't want to be left behind. So everyone does need to have an on chain strategy. They need to figure out, okay, where do I position myself my current business? How do I transform myself as well? And, uh, you know, it's interesting because you've also got AI on the other side too. So there's a lot of different things people have to very quickly figure out, um, because, you know, the future of business is not going to look very similar to what it has been over the last like five, five years from now is going to look very different from what it was five years ago.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, I'm curious on the Prividium side, Omar, what is the what has been the kind of response from these firms that you're speaking to about kind of launching their own Prividium chain? Do they understand like kind of like the nuts and bolts? Do they need to. Are they is it, is it compelling to what they want to do? Are you seeing any special like customizations or requirements? So like generally on the Prividium side, what's been the kind of feedback loop that you've experienced?
Omar: Yeah, I would say it's, it's resonates very well. Um, the main thing is it's not so much of an individual institution launching their own Prividium chain. It's more about what can I do with my counterparties? What can I do within my network, which means that it goes beyond just a single chain itself, which an institution would be able to run, have fully private control, have full, full privacy, full control over everything to do within it. But beyond that, it's okay. How do I properly interact with my banks that are within my network? How do I interact with stablecoins? How do I do money movement? How do I interact with, you know, all the different types of tokenization that's happening? So the conversations have moved quite significantly from individual Prividiums to now being more of, um, I would say network discussions, like, okay, I am a bank, I want to interact with this other bank to try and figure out, okay, can we do cross-border twenty four over seven much faster, much cheaper. Okay. Now I also need some way to actually move my tokenized deposit with their tokenized products. Now, okay, now I potentially also a clearing solution in the middle. So it's now turning more into just pure infrastructure and now a lot more into coordination, I would say as well, which is very interesting. Um, and I think it's a very good sign overall for the industry as well, because instead of just, you know, banks or institutions or any enterprise just doing point solutions that are just relevant to them, the bigger piece of the puzzle is, okay, how do I build this network and how do I interact with everyone? How do I actually move assets and money around? Because, you know, uh, finance in general doesn't work if it's just one company.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Naturally, like these things are constantly lending to one another, borrowing from one another. Um, and this has been one of the hardest, you know, circles to square. It's been the, the balance or the harmony between privacy. And we are here on privacy day privacy and composability. Because fundamentally, you know, privacy means that I'm not sharing all my data with you. And maybe there aren't there are there are aspects of, um, you know, a transaction or an asset or a chain or a smart contract that are withheld from who? You know, we're transacting with, but we still need to maintain the composability with that person because like you said, this entire financial thing doesn't work in a vacuum. So how has ZKsync been able to harmonize between privacy and composability? Like we've heard, you know, responses all across the docket from, you know, uh, you know, technical things like we have, uh, token standard that maintain some privacy, but, you know, we have a smart contract check that makes sure that, you know, someone can own this particular asset, they meet all the requirements. How have you seen some of these institutions kind of pull the levers or tweak these idioms such that it makes sense, it's compliant and everything, but it maintains the composability broadly across the ecosystem?
Omar: Yes, that's a great question. So I would split that into two layers really, right. One is the composability on the infrastructure side. And what does that mean? That means, okay, I have my own privacy layer, which could be private. So what? My counterparty has their own privacy layer, which is their own Prividium. They fully control everything that goes on inside. Now, how do I from a technology or infrastructure standpoint, how do I do interoperability with that other chain? But how do I do interoperability while maintaining atomicity? Right. So either transaction happens or it doesn't happen, right? So I can't essentially send you something and then wait for you and then trust that you'll send it. I need to make sure that if I send it, you also send it, otherwise transaction completely. Otherwise transaction doesn't happen. Right. So that's a pretty big counterparty risk side of things. So we are solving that with our own private atomic interoperability between Prividiums. So that kind of solves it from a technology standpoint. Right. Um the next layer, which is also just as critical, maybe, if not just as critical is the composability of the actual assets themselves, because now we're talking about things that are on different banks, balance sheets or different custodians assets, for example. A good example might be to be two banks that each have their own tokenized deposits. They want to transact with each other. Okay. From a technology standpoint, we can make that happen. You have your own Prividium. Your counterparty bank has their own Prividium. You have the token. They have a token. We can make that be a fully atomic transaction. So you only send it if they also send it. And that could be a protocol level guarantee as well. The next question is okay, well I can't necessarily receive their tokenized deposit because that's a their liability. I'm assuming their liability and they can't receive mine. So now we need to talk about composability between these assets themselves. And this is kind of where I think a lot of the question marks are coming on. Do you still maintain and have things like, you know, we have clearinghouses for these types of things where banks essentially are sending money to each other for wholesale payments Um, or another interesting thought is what if you had a, uh, like a settlement token that everyone kind of agreed to? And this is potentially an interesting area where stablecoins can also come in to play, where effectively the money in money out is a stablecoin or some sort of settlement token that everyone agrees on and is a neutral party. Um, and that could be the money at move at movement. And then the tokenized depositor or other things could be money at rest within each Prividium. So when you talk about composability, we have to think about how do you actually convert these assets to the other while not taking on someone's, uh, counterparty risk. Right. So it's very, it's, it's, I mean, it's pretty much kind of the same thing as in DeFi as well, right? But we just don't, uh, because in DeFi, everything's a bearer asset. So it's a little bit different.
Speaker: You know, just kind of closing out where it's been a long privacy day. We're just thinking about tokenized funds in this kind of rise of tokenization and how this wave continues to happen. You know, we just talked about interoperability, privacy being kind of two sides to a different kind of sword here. When we're thinking about this wave of tokenized assets coming on chain. How do you think about capturing a an outsized share of that value when it comes on chain? There's going to be everything from non-speculative assets like stablecoins all the way to, you know, the furthest thing down the risk curve. You could call it equities, private credit, whatever it is. What is the vision for capturing a ton of that tokenized asset market share? And what does that actually look like practically?
Omar: I would say it's building the protocol and infrastructure that effectively removes a lot of the counterparty risk, removes a lot of the operational and reconciliation costs and risks. And that's kind of A big area. If you can remove that, then it enables a lot more seamless movement of assets between different partners. The other area as well is, you know, there's a lot to be done in terms of connecting this to on chain, off chain systems and doing the reconciliation that way, and the workflows and the templates of, okay, what should be the open standards for how you move these assets across? I think someone, whoever can help create those open standards and build a network effect around those open standards is where a lot of network effects can be built out. And that's kind of. So there's the, you know, the team itself. And then, but then there's the network effects of, okay, here's open standards, everyone agrees to them and everyone's willing to trade through these open standards because the benefits are huge, right? You're eliminating counterparty risk on these trades. You're taking out a lot of the reconciliation costs, a lot of the operational costs and burden. Uh, and that will create, I think, a significant multiplier on how money moves our assets move.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. Omar, thanks for joining us. You must be busy in New York with all this. It's been institutional bull run a token bear market. But man, things are happening.
Omar: Things are happening. Absolutely. Interesting time.
Speaker: Yeah. Privacy day is, uh, is coming to a wrap. And, uh, we appreciate you joining and, and, uh, wrapping us here. Um, man, we've, uh, we've had all kinds of speakers from all, all across the docket. So appreciate you taking some time, spending some time talking about privacy and privacy is the good work. So keep up, keep up the good work out there. Go close some deals. Omar. Appreciate you fighting.
Omar: Come on man. Gonna put on my suit next after this call.
Speaker: There we go. Seventy five and sunny out there. Get out there! Huh? All right, all right, all right. Cheers, man.
Omar: Thanks for having me. Bye.
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