Summary
In Q4 2025, Matter Labs transitioned the Elastic Network from foundational readiness to large-scale production deployment. The quarter focused on hardening interoperability, enabling real-time settlement, activating network economics, and supporting regulated institutional chains in production.
Highlights included:
- executing the Atlas upgrade, solidifying the ZK Gateway and interop architecture,
- achieving ~1 second block proving with Airbender on consumer-grade GPUs,
- activating L1 interop for Ethereum-native liquidity and messaging,
- launching ZKsync Managed Services (RaaS) for enterprise and institutional chain operators,
- delivering enterprise-grade upgrades to Prividium, including Atlas support, Keycloak authentication, canonical bridging to Ethereum, L1→L2 transaction filtering, multi-tenant support, tokenized RPC, split function/event permissioning, auditing, and security hardening, providing operators with granular control and ensuring regulatory compliance.
- executing ZKnomics Part II with staking and burn upgrades,
- releasing solx v0.1.2, enabling complex enterprise contracts within Ethereum limits,
- launching Dawn and ADI Chain on mainnet as Atlas-based production deployments,
- running a LNET pilot on ZKsync for privacy-preserving institutional and government workflows in Latin America,
- publishing the ZK Token MiCA White Paper to support EU regulatory compliance.
Together, these milestones mark the transition to real-time, interoperable, economically aligned ZK infrastructure, validated by production chains, institutional partners, and nation-state level deployments.
1. Performance & Proving: Toward Real-Time Settlement
Matter Labs made major breakthroughs in proving latency and production readiness.
-
Airbender Hardware Breakthrough (Q4 2025):
The Airbender team achieved proving of ZKsync blocks in approximately 1 second using standard consumer hardware with two RTX 5090 GPUs. This milestone makes real-time settlement and interop viable for institutional and banking-grade chains, including the emerging Bank Stack use cases.
-
200 ms Block Times (v29):
Sub-second block times introduced in v29 remained live throughout Q4, delivering consistent low-latency execution across Atlas-based chains and improving UX for trading, payments, and real-time applications.
-
Shipped solx v0.1.2, significantly reducing binary sizes and eliminating common Solidity limitations such as “Stack Too Deep” errors. This upgrade allows complex enterprise and institutional contracts to fit within Ethereum’s bytecode limits without manual refactoring, a key requirement for regulated deployments.
2. Interoperability & Protocol Architecture
Q4 solidified ZKsync’s interoperability model as a core protocol primitive.
-
Atlas Upgrade (October 2025):
Executed the Atlas upgrade, strengthening the ZK Gateway as the canonical settlement and interoperability layer for the Elastic Network. Atlas unified message passing, settlement, and chain coordination under a coherent architecture optimized for multi-chain scale.
-
Successfully executed ZIP-12 and ZIP-14, enabling trustless message passing across ZKsync chains. This architectural focus on interoperability was publicly recognized by Vitalik Buterin, who highlighted ZKsync’s work on building a coherent and scalable multi-chain ecosystem.
-
Launched Ethereum L1 interoperability, enabling ZKsync chains to directly read from and write to Ethereum state without trusted bridges. This unlocks shared liquidity and composability with L1-native protocols while preserving ZKsync’s scalability and cost advantages.
As an early validation, Aave integrated L1 interop to enable liquidity and risk management logic anchored on Ethereum while executing on ZKsync infrastructure. This allows users on ZKsync to tap into major DeFi protocols on Ethereum without fragmenting liquidity.
3. Network Economics & Governance
ZKsync advanced from individual chain incentives to network-level economic alignment.
-
The ZKsync community executed critical upgrades introducing staking and token burn mechanisms, aligning the token with the Network Economies Part II vision. These changes enable the protocol to systematically capture value from both onchain interop fees and offchain enterprise licensing.
-
Sustainable Protocol Economics:
The upgraded economic model directly links institutional adoption, managed services, and interoperability growth to long-term protocol sustainability, converting network usage into durable economic alignment.
4. Enterprise Infrastructure & Compliance
Q4 marked a step-change in enterprise readiness and regulatory positioning.
-
ZKsync Managed Services (RaaS):
Launched ZKsync Managed Services, providing a fully managed operational stack for institutions and enterprises deploying ZK Stack chains. The service covers provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, and operational support, reducing time-to-production for regulated and large-scale deployments.
-
Prividium Enhancements:
Delivered significant upgrades to Prividium, improving enterprise usability, security, and multi-tenant operations:- Atlas support: Prividium chains can now run natively on the Atlas stack.
- Keycloak integration: Added support for Keycloak as an authentication provider out of the box.
- Canonical bridging: Built-in support for bridging to and from Prividium networks and Ethereum.
- L1→L2 transaction filtering: Transaction filtering now runs natively in Prividium, ready out of the box.
- MVP multi-tenant support: Early multi-tenant functionality enables multiple organizations to operate securely on the same Prividium network.
- Tokenized RPC: Supports crypto-native wallets and SIWE authentication flows.
- Split permissioning: Function-level and event-level permissioning now separate, giving network operators granular control.
- In-depth auditing system: Tracks all access, role, permission, and service changes for regulatory compliance.
- Security and hardening updates: Multiple improvements to resilience, access control, and operational security.
-
MiCA Compliance:
Published the ZK Token MiCA White Paper, outlining compliance alignment with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. This provides regulatory clarity for European institutions and supports long-term adoption within regulated markets.
5. Elastic Network Adoption & Chain Launches
Atlas-based chains progressed from pilots to full production deployments, validating Atlas readiness, supporting regulated digital assets, and demonstrating real-world interoperability.
-
Dawn Chain Mainnet (Nov 25, 2025):
Launched Dawn on mainnet as a new chain running on the Atlas stack, validating Atlas readiness for production deployments beyond Era.
-
ADI Chain Mainnet Launch:
The ADI Chain went live on mainnet as the first production deployment of the Atlas stack. Developed by the ADI Foundation, in partnership with First Abu Dhabi Bank and the Central Bank of the UAE, ADI Chain supports the first regulated digital Dirham initiative.
With early participation from BlackRock, Mastercard, and Franklin Templeton, ADI Chain validates ZKsync as nation-state level digital asset infrastructure and establishes a foundation for regulated digital finance across MENA.
-
LNET Pilot on ZKsync:
In December, LNET (the successor to LACChain/LACNet) ran a pilot on ZKsync, testing privacy-preserving infrastructure for institutional and government workflows in Latin America. The pilot validated verifiable, secure, and auditable operations while maintaining confidentiality, marking an early step in expanding the Elastic Network’s global reach.
Q4 2025 represents a decisive shift for ZKsync from protocol readiness to real-world scale. With real-time proving, trustless interoperability, aligned network economics, and regulated production chains live on Atlas, the Elastic Network entered a new phase defined by institutional adoption, economic sustainability, and global deployment.