ZKsync (ZK)

2026 will be the year of ZK

2026 will be the year of ZK

Most important charts of 2025 series: ZK is an established thesis now. ZK proofs market: $97M (2025) → $1.34B (2030) at a 68.6% CAGR. For context, PoS staking rewards total $16.3B annually. By 2030, the ZK market might rival this scale. Alpha news. https://t.co/ztUUaFuGue

'3P' that dominated 2025, and the answer for 2026 (feat. @0xMiden) At Kaito as the 3P that penetrated the 2025 crypto market We selected Privacy, Perp DEX, and Prediction Market. These three sectors are not mere fads; they actually attract liquidity and users and have become market‑centric. And the important point is that this flow is expected to continue into 2026. Many people are looking for the sector that will lead 2026. However, at this point it is necessary to rethink the question itself. Sectors may change, but the technology that enables those sectors survives much longer. Therefore, instead of focusing on individual narratives, it is time to concentrate on ZK technology, which serves as the common foundation for all narratives. -------- 3P may appear to belong to different areas, but technically they share the same problem. The problem is that information must be hidden while its legitimacy must be provable. Privacy and Prediction Market require that voting details, bet amounts, and participants’ choices remain concealed. Yet the fact that the results have not been tampered with must be verifiable by anyone. The technology that can resolve this contradiction is ZK, which allows verification without revealing information. Perp DEX also faces a clear limitation: to achieve centralized‑exchange‑level speed and fee calculation on‑chain, recording every transaction as is is not feasible. ZK rollups compress thousands of transactions into a single proof, securing both performance and decentralization. This trend does not end with 3P. In the RWA space, the coexistence of real‑name verification and privacy is essential. In the AI space, data integrity and computational trustworthiness are key. In both areas, ZK that preserves data sovereignty while securing trust is not optional but mandatory. Thus, it is reasonable to view ZK as the common denominator of the 2026 crypto meta. -------- Projects that untangle ZK into structures, such as Miden, as opposed to merely applying ZK at a superficial level.

This is an important shift in how to look at @ADIChain_ . Once you move past the surface comparisons and actually study the ZKsync + Airbender stack, the conversation changes from branding to engineering. Institutions don’t care about narratives, they care about proof generation, execution guarantees, and how the system behaves under load. Framing the evaluation around ZK assumptions and architecture feels like the right lens here. If those fundamentals hold, everything else becomes secondary.