Matter Labs Advances zkSync Paymaster and Prividium with $1M Monthly Funding

Matter Labs engineers are driving forward the roadmap for zkSync Paymaster and Prividium with a dedicated funding stream. The company has allocated 67 million ZK tokens monthly for twelve months, providing approximately $1 million USD each month at the $0.015/ZK reference price. This funding supports engineering, business development, and continued investment in the ZK Stack and Airbender layers. Alex Gluchowski and Alex Vlasov lead the engineering efforts, while a 5/7 Program Admin Multisig structure ensures oversight.

The allocation follows a structured governance model involving three Foundation signers, two ZKGPS signers, and two Security Council signers. The Token Assembly retains the power to revoke any future minter, ensuring accountability. The funding is part of a broader institutional deployment strategy aimed at advancing the Prividium engineering and deploying the ZK Stack and Airbender layers by 2026.

zkSync Era's native account abstraction sets it apart from the ERC-4337 standard. Unlike ERC-4337, which requires a separate Bundler and EntryPoint.sol contract, zkSync integrates paymaster functionality directly into the protocol. This design allows the bootloader smart contract to determine additional account logic and call the Paymaster directly, resulting in lower gas overhead compared to ERC-4337.

Market data from Q3 2026 highlights significant growth in Layer 2 TVL, reaching $150 billion, while Ethereum L1 DeFi TVL stood at $130 billion. The ZK token supply experienced an unlock of 173.41 million tokens on September 19, 2026, representing 0.83% of the maximum supply. The v31 protocol upgrade, completed by the end of Q2 2026, introduced native interoperability and a fixed fee of 10 ZK per cross-chain transaction, connecting chains like Memento and Cari.