ZKsync today rolled out the Atlas upgrade to its ZK Stack, a release that the team says takes a big step toward a world of sovereign corporate chains that work together with cryptographic guarantees. The upgrade combines a rebuilt low-latency sequencer capable of supporting industrial-scale throughput with Airbender, ZKsync’s powerful RISC-V proof system, unlocking block trials at near real-time speeds and dramatically reducing the cost of proving transfers.
At the heart of Atlas is a new sequencer designed for three priorities: throughput, latency, and simplicity. The sequencer design strips away synchronous persistence and batch awareness, separates execution, API, and proof state, and makes block replay trivial because it is completely idempotent. These architectural choices allow the sequencer to focus on getting transactions into blocks quickly and reliably without dragging other components onto every critical path.
ZKsync says the sequencer can process well above 15,000 transactions per second in payment-style workloads in lab scenarios and much higher in lighter use cases, while average recording times are measured in hundreds of milliseconds. Complementing the sequencer is Airbender, the open-source RISC-V zkVM that ZKsync introduced earlier this year. Airbender’s promise is twofold: it compiles common programs to RISC-V and produces extremely fast, hardware-efficient proofs.
This combination allows ZK Stack chains to generate concise proofs at the edge of the network in about a second, giving counterparties immediate cryptographic certainty of execution, while the proofs are later handled with Ethereum for full L1 finality. The result, ZKsync argues, is a system where trust comes from evidence rather than from intermediaries; you verify a short proof rather than redoing someone else’s chain.
Built for real markets
These technical advantages are not academic. ZKsync frames Atlas as infrastructure built for real markets that are increasingly going onchain. Tokenized funds and other real-world assets have been moving to public chains in a big way, BlackRock’s tokenized US Treasury fund BUIDL surpassed $1 billion in assets earlier this year, and major fintechs are launching blockchain-native products that point toward the same trajectory.
Against that backdrop, ZKsync is positioning the ZK Stack as a toolkit for organizations looking to manage private or permissioned infrastructure while leveraging public liquidity and cryptographic settlement guarantees. The Atlas release also strengthens the link between what works and what is proven. ZKsync rebuilt its execution component in Rust and compiles the same program to both x86 (for the sequencer) and RISC-V (for proofs), so “what you run is what you prove.”
This multi-target approach today enables native EVM support and leaves the door open for other VMs that compile to RISC-V. Economically, ZKsync projects prove that an ERC-20 transfer can cost on the order of $0.0001, while the system can be tailored to different privacy, economics and access models depending on a builder’s needs.
Early adoption
ZKsync’s roadmap expects testnets and mainnets to adopt Atlas in the coming weeks, with early teams already using the new stack. The broader picture is clear: high-quality sequencing plus near real-time ZK proofs make it possible to execute payments that feel like traditional rails while providing cryptographic finality, shortening settlement cycles for tokenized securities and FX, and allowing private, regulated domains to interoperate with public liquidity without exposing sensitive data.
According to ZKsync, the endgame is not one megachain, but many sovereign systems connected by evidence. For developers and enterprises eyeing the space, Atlas is an invitation to reconsider tradeoffs. If one second of ZK finality becomes reliable and cheap enough, much of the financial infrastructure that today tolerates multi-minute or multi-hour settlement windows could be redesigned for speed and verifiable correctness.
ZKsync’s Atlas doesn’t claim to be the last word; The team itself says that the sequencer is not yet fully optimized and that more improvements are planned, but the upgrade is a substantial step towards the low-latency, high-assurance systems that many institutions have been asking for. As with any major protocol upgrade, the proof will be in adoption and real-world stress.
For now, Atlas offers builders a sharper toolset: a high-throughput sequencer, a flexible multi-VM test pipeline, and Airbender’s fast proofs. Together, they make the ZK Stack a practical platform for teams looking to issue and settle real-world assets, make global payments with near-instant settlement, and connect to Ethereum’s liquidity pool, a vision that, if realized, would put more global finance on cryptographic rails.
