Remy Blaire: According to Matter Labs, the creator of ZKsync, the primary bottleneck is not the underlying technology but basic operational plumbing. And to solve that problem, the company launched Prividium Commander at Money20/20. The new software allows financial institutions to apply compliance rules as well as user permissions and auditing tools across existing networks like Hyperledger Besu and public chains, without having to deploy a new blockchain.
Joining us live here at the New York Stock Exchange to break down this enterprise expansion is Alex Gluchowski, who is CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs. Alex, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
Alex Gluchowski: Excited to be here again.
Remy Blaire: Well, we’re hearing about bottlenecks when it comes to technology, not just within digital assets, but also AI. But when it comes to this problem, walk us through it and tell us why. When it comes to institutional pilots, what’s preventing the actual scaling from happening?
Alex Gluchowski: So what we’re seeing right now is many institutions are moving beyond pilots to actual production deployments, and this is where they face this friction. And the comparison you made with AI is very telling. It’s actually a very similar problem, whether you embrace a new SaaS tool, AI tool, or a blockchain tool. One thing is to evaluate whether it’s going to solve your problem. You know, maybe you take an AI and give it some task, and you see if it comes back with a good solution. But it’s a very different problem to roll it out to your entire enterprise organization, because you cannot go ahead and create individual users and recreate all of your policies and rules for every new tool, because you have a lot of those tools.
So what you do instead is you take your existing systems of record for users, identities, policies, compliance, operations, and you connect them to the existing tools. For identity, you would use something like Okta. For audits, you would use various auditing solutions. And Prividium Commander does this for blockchains, for digital assets more generally. So it’s ledger-agnostic. It works on the existing private ledgers. It works with the native blockchain solution, or also with public chains. And it connects to the existing enterprise tools that the banks, FMIs, and asset managers already deploy all the time.
And it makes it a lot easier for these institutions to start building, launching, and operating digital asset businesses of any kind. It affects regulated institutions much more than traditional enterprises with SaaS software, because they just have a lot more regulations and a lot more rules to comply with and conduct with their operations teams.
Remy Blaire: Yeah. So, Alex, for viewers out there who may not be as familiar, explain why the existing is more important than, say, a migration.
Alex Gluchowski: Oh, because a migration is a huge undertaking with a lot of risks, and the organizations we deal with are, by their nature, risk-averse. So I was at Money20/20, joined on a panel by leaders from the New York Stock Exchange and [unclear: “DXY carrier network”], and they shared a common theme. They said, we are with our organizations on the forefront of innovation in this space. We are taking the crawl, walk, run approach to digital assets. We’re going to roll out a very small service, make sure that it works, expand it gradually, and then roll it out to more users and more use cases within the organization.
And this is what every large enterprise, every regulated financial entity, is thinking of in their strategy. They want to go very slowly. Like, you’re not going to replace your existing core banking systems all at once with blockchains. But that is something that’s probably going to happen within the next few years. At this point, I think it’s inevitable, because the organizations that do not embrace digital assets are going to be left much more behind the ones who are using these much more flexible, much more efficient technologies, opening them up to a globally connected digital asset ecosystem, on the public side, but also on the private side, connecting to other institutions.
Remy Blaire: And as you mentioned, we are all coming back from Money20/20 in Vegas, and we’re back at the New York Stock Exchange. But when we’re talking about some of the conversations that are taking place off air, there is concern about governance as well as compliance. So give us your perspective on this.
Alex Gluchowski: Well, what we see there is that the concerns are kind of the background for action. The action is happening. The number of companies building in the digital asset space and blockchain technologies at Money20/20 was astounding. I was impressed myself. It’s like every second stand was something about digital assets.
Remy Blaire: Yeah.
Alex Gluchowski: So you can imagine the entire effort that is being poured into the space, and all of the innovations that have been built. And the same sentiment is reflected by the actual incumbents, the players that are active today. It’s happening. So the initiatives are becoming production very quickly.
Remy Blaire: And of course, while I have you here, I do want to ask you more about Prividium. So tell us about some of the commercial boundaries, open source versus enterprise tiers, and what Prividium actually does.
Alex Gluchowski: So Prividium is a full-stack platform for launching, building, and operating digital asset services. It’s a modular technology. So it starts with Commander, which is the control plane for digital assets, which you can use to connect your existing systems and implement your policies, users, and compliance. It then enables you to extend and upgrade your blockchain stack to our high-performance, zero-knowledge-proof-secured blockchain, which is very important in light of the AI-accelerated rise of various cyber threats.
You see, you cannot rely on security by obscurity anymore. You cannot rely on the fact that people don’t know how your systems work internally, and on several layers of defense that are secret, because you yourself don’t know what you don’t know. And AI is capable of very quickly navigating through. You know, if you have any holes, it’s going to find them, and you don’t know.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a security mechanism based on public cryptography, which is exposed to public scrutiny, with a lot of eyes and a lot of AI-accelerated research going into it. And so once you embrace it and use a ZK-based blockchain system as your core digital asset platform, you know that you have an independent security mechanism that is completely separate from the traditional mechanisms that you already use. And having two of them in place gives you much, much more safety and peace of mind operating these systems.
And then, going beyond that, it will be a question of how you connect all of these networks together, and what existing connection tools enable, and what is still necessary. And this is something where we have more news to share very soon.
Remy Blaire: Well, Alex, it was great having you join us here at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to continuing this conversation.
Alex Gluchowski: Thank you.
