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Powering the Future of Institutional DeFi | Memento X zkSync X Zeeve

Exploring the World’s First zkSync Prividium Chain Built for Institutions

Welcome to a groundbreaking talk show featuring leaders from Memento Blockchain, zkSync, and Zeeve as they unveil the creation of one of the most advanced institutional DeFi infrastructures to date — the Prividium Chain, powered by zkSync’s ZK Stack and launched using Zeeve’s Rollups-as-a-Service platform.

Speakers:
⭐ Dr. Ravi Chamria, Co-founder & CEO, Zeeve
⭐ Nicola Lanteri, CEO, Memento Blockchain
⭐ Omar Azhar, Head of Business Development, zkSync

In this exclusive panel, we explore how regulated DeFi, privacy-centric fund tokenization, and custom enterprise rollups are driving the next evolution of financial systems.

Key Topics Covered:
🔹 Launching the world’s first zkSync Prividium chain
🔹 Enterprise-grade privacy with private RPC, ACLs, and permissioned access
🔹 Fund tokenization, DAMA 2 compliance, permissioned staking, and beyond
🔹 zkSync’s Elastic Chain vision and the rise of sovereign rollups
🔹 Embedding compliance and privacy by default in DeFi infrastructure
🔹 Building purpose-specific rollups with Zeeve’s Rollups-as-a-Service

💬 Drop your questions in the comments!

Like, comment, and subscribe for more deep dives into enterprise Web3 infrastructure.

Share this video with your team if you're building for institutions in the blockchain space.

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Transcript
00:00Hi, everyone, and welcome to ZWeb3Voice, today's talk show, where we are diving into the future
00:14of institutional DeFi, privacy, and purpose-built blockchains. And today, I'm excited to be joined
00:20by two pioneering teams who are shaping this future. Memento, a leader in digital asset
00:25infrastructure, and ZK Singh, the builders behind the powerful ZK Stack. Memento has built a sovereign
00:32ZK roll-up, and we have Nicola Lenteri today, the CEO of Memento Blockchain, who would be talking
00:38about the Memento blockchain and the products on top of it. And powering this journey has been ZK
00:47Singh's ZK Stack, one of the most advanced modular blockchain frameworks out there. And together
00:53with Zeeb as the RAS provider, I think these teams have pushed the envelope of what ZK infrastructure
00:59can do. So let's get into this collaboration and explore the design choices and see what it really
01:06takes to launch an institutional-grade blockchain as well as design and launch institutional-grade
01:15use cases on top of blockchain. First of all, I would like to welcome Nicola Lenteri, CEO of
01:21Memento Blockchain, and Omar Azal, who is the head of BD at ZK Sankera. And I would love
01:28to know more about you, a brief introduction about you, how your journey has been so far
01:34within the three and what you are building.
01:38Thanks, Ravi. I'll start quickly. So thanks for the invite. So I'm Nicola Lenteri. I'm the CEO of Memento Blockchain. I'm Italian, but I'm actually based in Australia at the moment. So in Sydney. Background in traditional banking. I've spent about 15 years in investment banking, looking after the front office and the middle office. And previous to that, I was a consultant in KPMG. And I've been in the
02:04and I always worked in risk management and investment banking industries. Since 2019, I moved full-time into blockchain. And that's where I joined Memento Blockchain in Singapore, while I was living there. And yeah, since the last six, seven years, we've been working with other technology partners to build what's today Memento ZK chain.
02:33I'll, yeah, I'll let Omar introduce himself and then we'll dive into the questions.
02:38Hey, everyone.
02:39That's Dave, I think.
02:40Yeah, Omar.
02:41Yeah, Omar Azar here, VP Head of Business Development for ZK Sync. I've been with ZK Sync now for about three years, pretty much from, you know, essentially the very beginning of when we moved on to ZK Sync 2.0, which was Aero. And now we have ZK Sync 3.0, which is the Elastic Network and ZK Stack.
03:01Prior to this, I, my formal background is essentially in Quant Finance. I was at Ernst & Young here in New York for a little over 10 years, mostly working in financial services advisory.
03:14Did quite a bit of different things from quantitative risk modeling for our office and second line defense modeling. And then also then for the last five years working previous last five years, they're mostly working on large data infrastructure projects and AI machine learning.
03:34And throughout that course, I kind of got a pretty good sense of how the global world of finance works from a data and information and also the flow of data perspective.
03:48And, you know, having been in retail crypto for some CICO days, it eventually clicked to me that blockchains are definitely a solution for modern finance. And so that's when I decided to jump all in and started working at Matterlabs on ZK Sync.
04:07I think you both have a very rich financial background, which becomes very instrumental today when we see, you know, Genius Act being passed by US and DeFi already has been very strong.
04:19But I think institutional DeFi, especially with RWA and tokenization across different asset classes, I think is something which has picked up very well in the last two years.
04:28And I think still, I would say it's just a start. We are going to see massive, massive adoption, especially when we talk about DeFi and institutional DeFi.
04:36So starting with Nikola, traditionally, you know, institutions either used to resort to permission blockchains or they used to deploy on public blockchains.
04:50As a shared decentralized app. But then, you know, the challenges were there, you know, we have been there working with institutions, enterprise space for almost five, six years now.
05:01And we have seen that, you know, challenges of privacy, data compliances, managing strict access controls and various other facets to serve an enterprise use case.
05:11And you have, I think, one of the torchbearers here, you have launched Memento using the Previdium chain or Previdium chain stack.
05:23So what kind of challenges you see from a privacy and compliance standpoint and how Memento has been able to solve it using Zcasing Previdium stack?
05:34Yeah, thanks. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, when it comes to compliance and privacy, I think these probably are the biggest challenge for institutional adoption of public blockchains.
05:49You know, you know, it's been a long journey to get where we are today. A lot of education with, you know, financial institution and everything started really in 2020 for us when we, you know, started to show to financial institution what's possible with blockchain.
06:10And obviously, at the beginning, you know, public blockchain, we're seen as like a roadblock because of lack of privacy, compliance, you know, you just log in with a Metamask account, you don't know who is behind that account, and it's very hard to track it.
06:27So I think that's always been a problem. And on the other side, we've seen other financial institutions that have gone completely private, building their private,
06:40chain for a chain for a while, because that's how they think they were addressing the issue with privacy compliance by building something that was just for themselves.
06:47I think they soon realized that this wasn't working because I mean, a public, so a blockchain needs to be accessible by all different institutions.
06:59Otherwise, it doesn't really make sense to have a public ledger if it's only used by yourself.
07:04So I think it became clear that there was potential for, you know, an interest for blockchain.
07:11And we found the right compromise together with ZK-Sync in building like a private permission chain that still settles and send the proofs to a public chain like Ethereum.
07:25It's interconnected to other chains, thanks to cross-chain interoperability with, you know, different providers today in the market like Axela, Chainlink and Layered0.
07:36But we retain control of the application with a permission layer that we built together with ZK-Sync using Previdium.
07:45So we only enable users that have, you know, a certain criteria or they've been whitelisted.
07:52Obviously, there's different ways that you can do it, but we pretty much permission only certain users to use the platform.
07:58So there are addresses constraints and when you can determine what users can do when they access the platform.
08:09So that's, you know, the level of permission that they would build.
08:12When it comes to privacy, I think it's very important as well.
08:16We want to make sure that the infrastructure is compliant with different regulations.
08:22We've been working very closely to the regulator in Singapore, but I think what we built satisfied probably most of the compliance requirements across the globe.
08:32And like, for example, the Block Explorer that we built together has features that only allows users to see their own data.
08:39So you can see others' users' data.
08:42There's transparency because obviously the data is available there.
08:46So, for example, when it comes to the regulator, we can give access to the regulator to see all the data in there and we can build compliance directly on the chain itself.
08:57So the Previdium is not like an enterprise chain in the outdated sense like we see in Web2.
09:03It's a next generation of, you know, compliance environment where, you know, the real financial institution can actually operate on chain.
09:13So that's how we really view the, you know, the momentum Zika chain today.
09:19I think, Nicola, you have given some very interesting points, especially, you know, and I would say it's an excellent choice to use Zika Stack or Zika Rollup Stack.
09:31One, you know, we have worked with quite a few enterprises, especially working with the private blockchains of yesterday.
09:37Now, there was a massive trade-off, as you rightly pointed out.
09:42You know, they could have privacy and data compliances easily, but at the same time, you know, there was lack of decentralization.
09:49There was lack of interoperability with other chains.
09:51And we know that when we talk about use cases like tokenization and various other DeFi use cases, you do require retail participation as well.
09:59So you may have some permissioned actors, you may have some non-permissioned actors, and still you would like to operate in an environment where you can manage the privacy and access control, yet at the same time serve both B2B and B2C kind of play within the use case.
10:14So I think that's super, super interesting, and I think it makes a very good use case for launching such chains or such use cases using the latest modular stacks like Zika Stack.
10:30So, Omar, you know, ZK Stack, I think, is the most mature ZK roll-up stack today in the market, and it is powering a new wave of modular ZK chains.
10:45And as, you know, Nikola mentioned, Memento pushed it into new directions with permissioned access, private RPCs, ACLs, et cetera.
10:54So, a bit about what ZK Stack is and how builders who are building use cases in the enterprise space can use it, and also how, you know, it makes the stacks too adaptable for such enterprise use cases.
11:11Yeah, sure.
11:12So, ZCasing Stack essentially started off last summer in 2024, so it's relatively new.
11:18It's only a year old, but we've already seen pretty good success for it.
11:20The key behind it is that it is using ZK from the very core part of the overall architecture, and what that enables is verifiability of everything that is happening within the chain.
11:33And since you can verify with zero-knowledge proofs, it allows you a lot of the customizations that we offer.
11:40For example, it allows you to customize different things around the data availability, right, which is, you know, you can have a full roll-up where all data is available on Ethereum L1.
11:50Or you can run a validium, which is, you know, what the providiums are built on top of and what Memento is building as well, where you kind of control where the data resides.
12:00You can have it be stored in your own personal server, on your own private servers in the cloud, or you could use a third-party DA layer like Aigen or Celestia or Avail.
12:09And so that modularity is really key behind ZK Sync Stack, and especially the ability to store data and not have it be public, but have it be fully verifiable so everyone can see, okay, yes, you are running your own private chain, private layer 2, and no one can see your data.
12:30However, everything you're doing is verifiable, because you are demonstrating the zero-knowledge proofs to the rest of the world, shows that everything that you're doing within your chain is actually accurate, there's no double spend, and, you know, the verifiability is the core component.
12:47The other thing is, it gives you full ownership. You have complete ownership in terms of the design and the architecture and what you want to do with your chain. I think that's very powerful.
12:58And then we realized very quickly, you know, we've been talking to many institutions, many banks, privacy and interoperability keep coming up as two key issues.
13:08And so we just, taking that from the market into account, we decided, you know, we need to take the Validiums another level. And so that's where the idea behind Providiums came.
13:19We had been chatting with teams such as Memento for quite some time and realized that we needed to build that additional layers of privacy that makes it much, much easier for teams such as Memento to build what they need to build.
13:32And so that's where Providiums came out. And we launched that in the spring. We worked directly with the Memento team to get feedback.
13:39And we will continue working with teams like Memento and Zeve as well, who continue building on Providiums, continue building the feature set that it has.
13:47And I think that's really where ZK Sync differentiates itself from other layer two solutions, is the privacy aspect, is the complete ownership and the verifiability that it gives you.
13:58The other thing I also want to point out, you know, in previous private solutions, as you mentioned, there were significant trade-offs.
14:08Either it was not EVM, so it potentially uses its own language and you have to rebuild all the standards and all the smart contracts and the applications that are already available to you in the Ethereum world.
14:18Or, you know, it didn't have performance. It would potentially be costly. It didn't have the transaction throughput that it could support.
14:27And then the other aspect was interoperability. These were essentially siloed islands that you were creating.
14:33And so it was very hard to get, you know, your counterparties to come and build on top of it because it really relied.
14:39They really also relied on trusted operators. With ZK Sync Stack, you aren't necessarily trusting the operator for valid transactions.
14:49The operator can't do invalid transactions on your behalf.
14:52The only worst thing that they could do is potentially censor transactions or liveliness where the operator might go down.
14:58So those are additional areas that we are also working to resolve without losing, you know, that privacy aspect that Providiums give.
15:06Absolutely. I think you have made some very interesting points.
15:11I think it builds a very solid case for using Modular Stack today to launch your own custom chain.
15:19And one of the things that I would like to point out, you know, ZK Sync made an announcement regarding the new prover which is coming in,
15:28which is going to be, again, you know, highly scalable at the same time reduce the cost.
15:33Because one of the challenges that, not in the enterprise we have seen, but yeah, in the crypto native space,
15:38we have seen that people still were worried about proving costs.
15:43But now with that also getting solved, I think it makes a very interesting proposition for anyone who is planning to launch an institutional chain.
15:53Yeah, just one comment on the proving costs, right?
15:58So the ZK is on, from a product standpoint, is pretty much on an exponential curve in terms of performance.
16:08I've only been at ZK Sync for three years.
16:10And each year, there's a 10x improvement in performance.
16:14What does that mean?
16:14ZK Sync, when we first launched ZK Sync, the proving costs were potentially about, I think, about $0.05 per transaction.
16:22Now it has gone down to a tenth of a penny.
16:26And with the new Airbender proof system, it'll go down to a basis point of a penny, right, for the average transaction.
16:32That means you can do a lot more with much cheaper hardware.
16:37You don't need massive GPU clusters to run the chain.
16:40You can run it on commodity GPUs.
16:41And eventually, our goal is that you can pretty much run the chain on, let's say, a cell phone.
16:47All right.
16:47I think that would be awesome.
16:50So, Nikola, moving further, you have positioned Memento as an infrastructure for a regulated DeFi and fund tokenization.
16:59I saw on your website ETF-style funds that can be tokenized and put on chain.
17:04So, what real-world use cases you have been part of Dharma2 project, permission staking.
17:10So, where are you seeing traction and how do you, you know, how these use cases validate the platform design, the choice?
17:19And at the same time, what are your plans, you know, to move further, whether in the use case space or getting more customers or more users joining your chain?
17:29Yeah.
17:31So, you know, I think when we started a conversation with a financial institution and other asset manager, there was a clear demand for, like, a new asset to be distributed.
17:50And, you know, with Web2 and the traditional finance, there are some limitations on what you can distribute using, you know, a typical financial instrument.
18:01And what we see today, like, with real-world assets becoming very popular, I think there is a lot of interest and demand from this asset manager to create new assets.
18:14And you can only distribute these using blockchain.
18:17So, you know, some example that we discussed with this asset manager, for example, you know, real estate or hearts or even wine to some extent.
18:28You know, if you think of these real assets, traditionally, they've been, you know, transacted as a whole piece.
18:37You know, you have a real estate building or you have a painting that gets, you know, exchanged between buyers.
18:42But with tokenization and with blockchain, you can actually tokenize these assets, fractionalize and distribute in, you know, to different investors.
18:53So, I think there's an appetite for new assets that can increase the asset and the management for traditional asset managers.
19:03So, you know, they're all looking for new ways to increase their mass and their asset and the management.
19:10Obviously, we can look at structured products as well.
19:13We were actually one of the first companies to create a fully decentralized capital protected structure notes back in 2020.
19:24Funds on chain is obviously another use case that we've seen.
19:29It's something that it's probably easy for financial institutions to test because they are very familiar with the process today of traditional funds.
19:39So, what we're working with, you know, some of the financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, that's one of our partners, is to tokenize an existing fund and use the blockchain more as a distribution vehicle rather than an issuance.
19:54So, that this way, we still retain the legal and the ownership in the traditional world.
19:59So, we remove the risk from, you know, smart contract and a new technology that's still not really battle tested for this type of use case.
20:09And we use the chain as a distribution.
20:11So, I think it's an interesting use case to start with.
20:15So, we start using the blockchain, we distribute, you know, with different chain and we can fractionalize also the type of funds that we can build on chain.
20:31Then, obviously, you know, with blockchain and tokenization, you know, there's unlimited possibilities.
20:37But I think the approach that financial institutions are taking is it's very cautious.
20:42They want to try with something that they are familiar with, funds and financial instruments that are simple before they obviously go and explore, you know, other type of assets.
20:54Absolutely.
20:55I think, one, it's a very interesting, you know, vision document or roadmap you have.
21:00And you are absolutely right.
21:01We are seeing tokenization in various asset classes.
21:04But, yeah, the first, you know, the assets which are already digital, the financial instruments and other digital assets, I think it's much easier.
21:13And then, we are going to see a lot of physical assets.
21:16Some of the areas that we have seen traction as one is commodities, whether it be graphite or antimony, some of the critical minerals or, you know, precious metals like gold, etc.
21:28And at the same time, another area is more on the ESG side, carbon credits, carbon accounting.
21:33I think, yeah, we are seeing a lot of traction there.
21:37So, I think Omar can also add, so, since now ZkSync with ZkStack is focusing a lot on the enterprise space.
21:47So, which are some of the use cases that you are seeing traction and where you see, you know, which will drive more adoption within the blockchain space?
21:57Yeah, I think the intersection between DeFi and TrackFi is probably the biggest use case area that we're seeing.
22:09Obviously, that covers quite a large spectrum of different use cases.
22:13For example, we're seeing different countries wanting to launch their own official, let's say, stablecoin and create their own, almost like use the layer two as an economic zone for them to start thinking of tokenization of their, you know, real estate, different types of payments that, you know, their stablecoin would bring to the on-chain world.
22:35And I think the stablecoins overall are probably a very big hot topic, particularly from both from countries launching their official stablecoins, but then also, I think, corporates that want to modernize finance and treasury functions with stablecoins.
22:54I think you already have some of the major banks deploying that, for example, we saw JP Morgan launch their deposit token.
23:01I think Citi is also, has announced that they're working on such a thing as well.
23:07So, that's really a very big area that we're seeing very good traction in the market from many different sectors.
23:15It's not just TribeFi and banks looking to deploy, but it's also now actual, you know, more traditional, large corporates that have thousands of bank accounts.
23:26They have many different banks that they work with, and they operate in many different jurisdictions and countries.
23:34And so, having a ledger or moving a lot of that functionality on-chain creates many different efficiencies, both from a settlement time, movement of money overall is significantly faster, and then just a cost perspective.
23:49And being able to do that in a fully private and compliant manner is really the sweet spot that we want to be operating in with ZK Sync.
23:57I think one other thing that's interesting about the Momento chain, Nikola, I don't know if you want to go into this, but the, so there's a privacy aspect, but then there's the other aspect of also making it compliant, such as I think you essentially ensure that everyone operating within the chain has gone through a compliant KYC process, so people can be confident of who they're transacting with.
24:17Do you want to maybe also talk about a little bit about that?
24:20I think you guys have done a pretty novel mechanism for identity as well.
24:25I think identity is also a very big concept that is, you know, it's an unsolved problem, even in the traditional world, because every bank has to do their own onboarding.
24:35So, how does that kind of work with Momento?
24:37Yeah, absolutely.
24:38I mean, that's very important.
24:40I think, you know, KYC and having like a digital identity, it's very important.
24:46I mean, we use one, you know, mechanism using a softbound token, but there are other ways, of course.
24:53I think, I mean, for now, the softbound token, I think works for us.
24:57So, this pretty much creates a digital identity for each users, and we use the softbound token to not only identify the user, but also give permission to the user to certain functions.
25:10So, we have actually two layers of permission.
25:12One is an infrastructure level, where we allow users to enter or not enter the infrastructure.
25:19And then there is a second level, application level, where users are identified and authorized to do certain permissions.
25:29So, for example, we store, you know, citizenship, we store, you know, obviously, personal details, we store social wealth.
25:38There's different factors that are typical of KYC infrastructure, but they're all stored on-chain and off-chain, obviously, with, you know, cryptography and, you know, encryption in place.
25:49But this allows us, for example, to offer a certain product just to accredit and sophisticated investors or allow certain product just to non-U.S. citizens, for example, if there's a specific regulation that allows us to offer certain product outside the U.S.
26:04So, we can identify every user and, you know, offer them different type of products.
26:09And, you know, the softbound token, ideally, it's a feature that it's not done at, you know, customer level, but it's actually a global type of identity.
26:20So, if I'm KYC with Deutsche Bank, I can use that softbound token to go and operate, for example, with Citibank and JP Morgan.
26:27I don't need to do this again.
26:29So, that's really the end goal, to have a digital identity, it's like a password that you can use anywhere.
26:33So, it's completely, you know, different to what happens today, where every time a client that deals with a different bank has to go through that KYC process over and over again.
26:47And I think that would be awesome.
26:49And, Nicola, it's not just if you are going to a different bank, you need to do the KYC again.
26:54Within the same bank, if you are availing of different products, you know, if you are going from savings account to an investment account, you still need to do KYC again.
27:02So, I think it's a nightmare today.
27:04And having a decentralized identity, which is portable across, you know, different departments within the bank and different organizations, I think, would solve an age-old problem in the financial services space.
27:18So, as a closing question, now that, you know, self-custody, we talked about identity, compliances, privacy, interoperability.
27:31So, they are no longer trade-offs.
27:33You know, they are expectations.
27:34They are needed for most of the use cases if you want to have larger adoption among the enterprises.
27:39So, what is one piece of advice you would like to give to projects who are building in this case, either enterprises directly building into this space or startups who are helping enterprises navigate the benefits of blockchain to use within their use cases?
27:58So, Nicola, starting with you.
28:00Yeah, I think something that we experienced with, you know, Deutsche Bank and the other financial solution is that I think it's important for projects to not build just one specific piece of the puzzle, but build the entire workflow.
28:17And, you know, as we mentioned, you know, we built the entire workflow from identity, you know, access permission, obviously the core of the platform, the infrastructure, the compliance, you know, the, obviously the, you know, the, the, the, the, the reporting, the custody.
28:36So, the entire workflow.
28:37So, I think it's important to think at how the blockchain and the technology, you know, can be utilized for the entire workflow for banks, because otherwise, if we just solve one piece of the puzzle, they would still have to rely on a legacy system in Web2 or rely on other protocols.
28:56So, I think it's, it's important that you build for the entire workflow so that you give a full solution to, to the banks and the other financial solution.
29:05And, and obviously, you know, it's very important, you know, the compliance aspect, you know, again, I come from banking, so I know how, you know, the compliance team, you know, they, they, they always want to be a hundred, 110% sure that, you know, you tick all the boxes for compliance.
29:21So, don't think compliance is just a patch in your, in your build, but it has to be like the core of your build, you know, compliance has to be there.
29:32Absolutely.
29:33I think that's an excellent point you have made.
29:34So, Omar, from, from ZKStack perspective, any builder who is using ZKStack to build something in the institutional side, what is, what is your advice to the builders?
29:49I would say definitely get in touch.
29:51There's a lot of different customization options available.
29:54There's Providium that's available as well.
29:57And, you know, we'd love to get, we're constantly trying to get more feedback so we can make it more feature rich.
30:01For all sorts of builders, whether you're building an app for retail, whether you're building an app for an enterprise, or whether you're building an app for an institution or government, definitely get in touch with us.
30:13We would love to better understand your use case, what design parameters you would like to have, and see, you know, if Providium's out of the box is the right solution for you, or maybe there's other features that we don't currently have that maybe we should support.
30:27And, you know, we'd love to get that feedback and work directly with the builders to build what it is that exactly they need to be successful.
30:35Oh, excellent.
30:39Yeah, so I think with that, we close the session.
30:43Thanks a lot, Omar, and thanks a lot, Nikola, for joining us.
30:46And I would reiterate again that we are very, very excited to be a RAS partner with Memento, a highly innovative project, I think, will be a basis of a lot many other projects that we are going to see in this institutional side.
30:58And we are also very excited to be an implementation partner for ZKStack.
31:02So as Omar said, you know, anyone who wants to launch an enterprise use case, I think ZKStack is the most advanced, most mature stack today.
31:12And we being the leading RAS partner for ZKStack would be more than willing to help.
31:17And with that, thanks, everyone.
31:20Thanks for joining.
31:21Keep building.
31:21Keep smiling.
31:24Thank you for having me.
31:26Bye.
31:26Bye.
31:27Bye.
31:28Bye.
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