ZKsync pivots to real-world infrastructure as core focus for 2026 strategy

ZKsync has listed real-world infrastructure as the primary focus in its 2026 strategy, building upon existing capabilities and unlocking new classes of applications. Alex Gluchowski, the inventor of ZKsync, said 2025 laid the foundation that now enables real-world use cases requiring privacy, performance, coordination, and operational maturity.

Gluchowski noted that privacy will be the most important competitive advantage in the crypto space, and Prividium represents the most advanced blockchain platform for privacy. According to the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, Prividium is fully EVM-compatible, production-ready, and expressive. Developers can build private applications without the need to rewrite code in obscure languages, break familiar UX flows, abandon Ethereum tooling, or sacrifice compatibility and liquidity.

Meanwhile, 2026 will build on this foundation, making privacy the default starting point for enterprise applications. Building and operating private applications on ZKsync will feel natural for developer teams accustomed to enterprise infrastructure, which is unlike adopting a separate crypto stack. 

Atlas upgrade turns ZK stack into high-performance production L2 stack 

Gluchowski claimed that the Atlas upgrade turned the ZK stack into the highest-performance production L2 stack, designed to support enterprise-level and institutional chains under real load. In 2026, this foundation will evolve into a platform where appchains are first-class citizens, allowing multiple chains to be operated as a single system.  

Meanwhile, applications will be able to access liquidity, execution, and shared services across private and public ZK chains, including Ethereum, without external bridges or integrations. On the other hand, cross-chain behavior will be native, composable, and largely invisible to both developers and users. The result is that performance isolation, shared services, bootstrapping infrastructure, native connectivity, and security primitives will all be available out of the box. ZK stack will, therefore, become the default choice for building appchains.

According to Gluchowski, ZKsync made a deliberate decision to build for real-world constraints rather than industry shortcuts. That meant avoiding many practices that are popular in this industry but incompatible with a long-term approach. 

Meanwhile, those choices are now embedded into the ZKsync architecture and are irreversible. They form the foundation of Incorruptible Financial Infrastructure, where trust is fostered in cryptography rather than human intermediaries or operators. 

ZKsync uses TEEs to verify ZK computation

According to the ZKsync team, the protocol utilizes ZK to verify the chain’s validity and TEEs to further validate the ZK computation. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are secure areas within a hardware device that protect sensitive operations and data from external attacks or unauthorized access. 

A TEE provides an isolated environment where encryption, decryption, and authentication can be executed while ensuring integrity and confidentiality. The TEE is isolated from the main operating system and applications running on it, making it more difficult for attackers to access or interfere with the data being processed within the TEE.

Meanwhile, many TEE implementations utilize hardware security features, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), secure enclaves, or hardware-based encryption accelerators, to enhance security. TEEs can also provide attestation services,  enabling confidential computing by ensuring that data processed within the environment remains encrypted and protected from both hardware and software vulnerabilities outside the secure area.

TEEs are widely used in various applications, including mobile payments, financial transactions, IoT security, and identity verification, among others. They also help protect against data breaches and malware attacks, among other cybersecurity threats, by providing a trusted environment for private operations. 

Another reason why ZK sync uses TEEs is that they are faster than ZK Proofs, therefore, making interoperability between ZK chains faster. Additionally, the TEE prover runs transactions in its VM and checks at the end whether the same Merkle tree was produced.

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