What happened? Enterprises, banks, and developers are rapidly moving blockchain from theory to real-world use by adopting ZK privacy tools and zkVMs.
Surveys show nearly 90% of companies are experimenting with or using blockchain while big banks like BBVA are rolling out 24/7 crypto trading for retail customers. At the same time, projects like Stellar, Aztec, Risc0, NoirLang, and other ZK tooling are making zero-knowledge proofs and zkVMs easier for regular developers. Those advances are turning ZKPs from academic work into practical building blocks for private, scalable blockchain apps.
Who does this affect? Businesses, financial institutions, developers, and everyday users who want private, compliant transactions will feel the biggest impact.
Enterprises that need transaction privacy can finally consider public ledgers for real business use cases, and banks can expand crypto services with stronger privacy and compliance tooling. Developers benefit because new languages and verifiers lower the barrier to building ZK apps, shifting work from cryptographers to mainstream programmers. Consumers and businesses alike stand to gain privacy-preserving apps and services as these tools reach production.
Why does this matter? Widespread ZKP adoption could change market dynamics by unlocking institutional demand, new product lines, and investment into privacy-first infrastructure.
If ZKPs and zkVMs scale, institutions may deploy more blockchain solutions, pushing greater demand for infrastructure, tooling, and compliance services and attracting capital to those sectors. That could boost usage and valuations for projects providing privacy layers, developer toolkits, and enterprise-grade chains, while banks and fintechs broaden crypto offerings. Adoption speed is still uncertain, though—trade-offs between speed, efficiency, and succinctness could slow rollout, so market moves may be big but gradual.