Five U.S. regional banks have selected ZKsync's Prividium technology to build a shared tokenized deposit network called Cari Network. The participating banks — Huntington, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyBank, and Old National — represent a combined multi-trillion-dollar deposit base covering millions of retail and business customers.

How It Works

Cari Network uses ZKsync's Prividium infrastructure, which gives banks private, compliance-grade blockchain rails while still anchoring settlement to Ethereum mainnet. Deposits remain on each bank's own balance sheet and stay fully FDIC-insured — unlike stablecoins, these are tokenized representations of actual bank accounts, not a separate instrument.

The network enables instant 24/7/365 settlement. Traditional interbank transfers rely on batch processing windows and correspondent banks; Cari collapses that to on-chain finality in seconds. Banks can also interact with the broader Ethereum ecosystem — enabling programmable money flows, smart contract automation, and future digital asset interoperability — while staying within existing regulatory frameworks.

Why It Matters

This is a notable step beyond proof-of-concept pilots. Most previous bank blockchain projects involved closed internal ledgers or small consortia with no live customer exposure. Cari Network is designed to run real deposit infrastructure for real account holders using ZK-proof-based privacy to satisfy compliance requirements without publishing sensitive transaction data publicly.

The Ethereum Foundation retweeted the ZKsync announcement, signaling that Ethereum's base layer is increasingly being positioned as neutral settlement infrastructure for institutional use — not just a venue for decentralized applications.

Prividium joins a growing list of bank-grade ZK solutions (including StarkNet Enterprise and Polygon CDK private chains) competing for the institutional blockchain stack.