Privacy tokens bucked the trend to surge in price and popularity during the recent market slump, but most of the discussion has centered on consumer-facing projects like Zcash.

At the same time, banks and financial institutions have been exploring zero-knowledge (ZK) systems that enable

Consumer growth has stalled, but privacy opens the door for institutions

Crypto bull cycles in recent years highlighted long stretches of speculation, dominated by trends that have

Privacy stands apart from that pattern because it has a direct functional role in how financial systems operate. It wasn’t fully explored in earlier cycles due to regulatory pressure;

“It’s night and day. No one wanted to touch crypto before — it was a taboo topic. Now the attitude is more like, ‘We need to embrace this technology, or we’re going to be outcompeted,’” Gluchowski said.

The

The institutional privacy layer is starting to materialize

Data from Nansen in early November showed ZKsync leading the industry in fee growth over a seven-day period. Gluchowski attributed the increase not to retail speculation but to activity following the release of new tokenomics and staking proposals.

“We published the proposal for the new tokenomics for the ZK token, and after that, we saw a surge of interest,” Gluchowski said. “The token price went up, the volumes went up, and there was a lot of movement on ZKsync Era. We also announced the pilot staking implementation around the same time, and a lot of people are now exploring it.”

Consumer-facing crypto use cases continue to expand, but Gluchowski argued that the next wave of scale sits with institutions that cannot operate on transparent ledgers. Privacy is emerging as an operational requirement for participating in shared settlement infrastructure.

ZKsync is now positioned as a network of chains rather than a single rollup, including systems operated by financial firms in controlled environments.

Some are already running in testing, and Gluchowski said the first production deployments are expected before the end of the year.

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