Matter Labs open-sourced the permissioning engine of Prividium, the access-control layer that lets banks run the platform’s core code without a commercial license. Deutsche Bundesbank is the
Matter Labs, the developer behind the ZKsync network, has open-sourced the permissioning engine at the core of Prividium, its private blockchain platform for banks and other regulated institutions.
Germany’s central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, is testing the freed-up code in its own environment, Matter Labs said. It is the first outside institution to do so.
The permissioning engine controls who can see and transact on a bank’s private chain data. It is the layer that enforces a bank’s own compliance and access rules, and it was the one major piece of Prividium that Matter Labs had kept closed even as it opened up other parts of the stack: the ZKsync OS core, the Atlas sequencer, the Airbender prover, interoperability contracts and the block explorer, according to chief executive Alex Gluchowski.
Gluchowski said the change was a direct response to bank feedback.
“The most consistent feedback from regulated institutions was that a commercial-only core meant a single-vendor dependency they could not accept in critical infrastructure,” he said.
Institutions can now run, inspect and modify the permissioning code inside their own environment without a commercial agreement for it. Matter Labs still sells the management and system-integration tools built on top.
Bundesbank’s interest is notable next to its own record on distributed-ledger settlement. In 2021, the bank tested a separate approach with Deutsche Börse and Germany’s Finance Agency, bridging blockchain-based bond trades into the Eurosystem’s TARGET2 payment system without tokenized central bank money. That work continues through the Eurosystem’s Pontes project, which is meant to connect market DLT platforms to central bank payment rails and is due to launch in the third quarter of 2026.
Testing Prividium puts Bundesbank in a second, different position: instead of bridging to an outside DLT platform, it is evaluating a permissioned chain built directly on Ethereum-anchored, zero-knowledge-proofed code that a bank can run and modify itself.
Matter Labs has been courting this kind of institutional business since 2024, when it cut roughly 16% of its staff as activity on the retail-facing ZKsync Era network fell. Deutsche Bank has already built a fund-management tool on Prividium through a partnership with Memento, and Matter Labs says more than 35 institutions have evaluated the architecture. A central bank testing the code is a different kind of validation than a commercial lender doing so, a distinction Gluchowski drew directly.
“Central banks running public code is the clearest signal in this direction,” he said.
Whether other central banks follow will likely turn on how Bundesbank’s evaluation holds up against its existing Pontes work, and on whether Matter Labs can keep the core genuinely open while still selling the proprietary tools layered on top of it.