Switzerland’s largest financial institution, UBS, has accomplished a proof-of-concept (PoC) utilizing ZKsync Validium, an Ethereum layer-2 (L2) answer, to reinforce its fractional gold funding product, UBS Key4 Gold. Notably, the pilot goals to handle scalability, privateness, and interoperability challenges in digital gold buying and selling.
Swiss UBS: Enhancing Scalability and Safety
The PoC was performed on a ZKsync Validium testnet to simulate the UBS Gold Community, a permissioned blockchain linking vaults, liquidity suppliers, and distributors. By means of this trial, UBS efficiently replicated key features akin to gold token issuance, transaction processing, and reconciliation.
Christoph Puhr, Digital Belongings Lead for UBS Group, emphasised the significance of blockchain innovation within the monetary sector within the announcement on X.
“That is one other nice instance of how UBS collaborates with expertise suppliers to remain on the forefront of innovation. While tokenized securities maintain numerous potential to carry new options to our purchasers, scalability, privateness, and interoperability stay key challenges to beat. Our PoC with ZKsync demonstrated that Layer 2 networks and ZK expertise maintain the potential to resolve these.”
Key Options of UBS Key4 Gold on ZKsync
UBS Key4 Gold permits retail buyers to purchase fractional quantities of gold with options together with real-time pricing, deep liquidity, safe storage, and optionally available bodily supply. By integrating ZKsync Validium, the PoC demonstrated a number of enhancements:
Privateness: Customers may solely entry their exercise whereas sustaining verifiability by Ethereum’s L1 bridge good contract.Interoperability: Stablecoins bridged from Ethereum had been used to buy gold tokens.Scalability: Off-chain knowledge storage decreased prices and improved transaction throughput.
Alex Gluchowski, co-inventor of ZKsync, highlighted the broader implications of the expertise. “This PoC displays UBS’ continued efforts to discover how blockchain can improve its monetary choices and assist its broader digital asset technique. I firmly imagine that the way forward for finance will happen onchain and ZK expertise would be the catalyst for development.”
Broader Implications for UBS and ZKsync
This blockchain-based pilot follows UBS’s earlier blockchain initiatives, together with the launch of a tokenized fund on Ethereum in November 2024. The financial institution continues to discover methods blockchain can combine with conventional monetary constructions.
In the meantime, ZKsync is pushing towards its 2025 roadmap targets, aiming for transaction speeds of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) and near-zero charges. The zero-knowledge proof expertise (ZK-proofs) underpinning ZKsync goals to enhance Ethereum’s scalability, safety, and privateness.
As UBS evaluates the outcomes of its PoC, the adoption of blockchain in conventional banking may additional speed up, significantly in tokenized property and digital securities
