zkSync Founder Fires Back at Canton’s ZK Proof Critique

zkSync founder fires back at Canton’s ZK critique, exposing how Canton’s trust model carries the same systemic risk it warns about.

Canton’s founders have been telling buyers and regulators that zero-knowledge proofs are too risky for institutional finance.

zkSync co-founder Alex Gluchowski pushed back publicly this week. He argued that Canton’s critique collapses under scrutiny.

Worse, he said Canton’s own infrastructure fails the very test it sets for others.

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Canton’s argument centers on complexity.

The firm claims ZKP bugs could go undetected because underlying data stays private. Undetected flaws then spread across the network, creating systemic risk.

Gluchowski called this reasoning flawed. He pointed out that the logic assumes any technology is the only line of defense.

Aviation, nuclear systems, and medical devices all run on software that can fail. Yet they remain in use because their architectures rely on redundancy and containment, not on the assumption of perfection.

The real question, he argued, is whether a system has more than one line of defense.

Canton’s model does not. Its privacy and integrity layer depends entirely on trusted operators segregating data. There is no cryptographic verification layer.

If operators are compromised, manipulated state moves silently through the network with nothing to catch it.

Canton founders claim ZK proofs are too risky for institutional finance. They have been making this argument to buyers and regulators, publicly and behind closed doors. It deserves a public answer.

Let’s see if the argument holds — and if Canton’s infrastructure passes its own…

— ALEX | ZK (@gluk64) March 27, 2026

Canton vs. Prividium: Comparing Institutional Blockchain Security Models

Gluchowski contrasted Canton’s setup with Prividium’s layered architecture.

Prividium runs three independent defenses. Institutional partners operate nodes within their own regulated environments. Zero-knowledge proofs sit on top as a separate integrity check.

And as ZK proof systems mature, multiple independent provers can verify the same computation, so one flaw gets caught by another.

Containment also works differently. Each Prividium instance is a separate chain tied to one institution.

Even if an attacker breaks into one institution and finds a ZKP bug simultaneously, the damage stays local. It cannot spread across the broader network.

Gluchowski also challenged Canton’s reliance on DAML, its proprietary smart contract language.

He noted that Ethereum’s EVM has survived over a decade of adversarial testing with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.

DAML, by contrast, has a fraction of that scrutiny. Every vulnerability Ethereum already worked through still lies ahead for DAML, with far fewer developers watching.