Rayls: Bringing Banks and Real-World Assets Onchain

Rayls: the bridge between traditional banking and onchain finance

How do you bring the six billion users and the more than USD 100 trillion of liquidity in traditional finance onchain? In this MERGE Madrid keynote, Rayls is introduced: a network that combines permissioned blockchains banks install on-premise with a public EVM chain, adding bank-grade privacy through zero-knowledge (ZK) technology so financial institutions can tokenize assets and operate onchain without giving up regulatory compliance.

What you'll learn

• The adoption problem: why, after 15 years of blockchain, very few banks actually operate onchain, and what is changing with stablecoins and tokenization
• Hybrid architecture: how Rayls connects private nodes (privacy nodes) that banks install on-premise with a public EVM chain through a governance «hub»
• Privacy with compliance: how the Enigma protocol uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs) to hide sender, recipient and amount, while keeping a «view key» for the regulator
• Real use cases: tokenization of receivables and card receivables already live in production and generating yield for investors
• Built for banks: EVM compatibility, scalability, interoperability and gas fees paid in a stablecoin

Session summary

The challenge. Blockchains have existed for 15 years, yet real banking adoption remains minimal: pilots on private or public chains tend to stall. The exception is stablecoins, already used by large banks for cross-border payments, and the big pending opportunity is the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), with billions of dollars already onchain and a potential of trillions.

The Rayls proposal. Instead of choosing between a private or a public chain, Rayls combines both: each institution installs an on-premise privacy node (open source, running on an enterprise-grade database to fit its IT, disaster-recovery and compliance requirements) and they all connect to a public EVM chain through a «hub» where governance happens.

Bank-grade privacy. Without privacy there is no banking: if competitors can see balances and transfers, there is no bank secrecy. The Enigma protocol, based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-SNARKs), lets anyone see that a transaction happened but not who, to whom or how much; it also supports batching thousands of transactions into one.

Traction and use cases. Already in production: tokenization of receivables at the largest financial market infrastructure in the southern hemisphere (which processes around USD 4 trillion in payments per year), with thousands of operations every week. Also CBDCs —including work with the central bank of Brazil— and, soon, institutional DeFi with privacy. The privacy node reaches up to 10,000 transactions per second.

Watch the full session

Watch the full keynote about Rayls on MERGE's YouTube channel for a detailed walkthrough of its architecture, the Enigma privacy protocol and the tokenization use cases for financial institutions.

FAQs

What is Rayls?
It is a network that connects traditional finance with the onchain world, combining permissioned blockchains banks install on-premise with a public EVM chain and zero-knowledge-based privacy.

How does Rayls solve privacy on blockchain?
Through the Enigma protocol, which uses ZK-SNARKs to hide the sender, recipient and amount of each transaction while keeping a «view key» so regulators can supervise.

What is real-world asset tokenization for?
It brings assets such as receivables or card receivables onchain; they pay yield and can be bought by investors worldwide, leveraging the programmability of smart contracts.

Why is Rayls designed for financial institutions?
Because it prioritizes what banks need: EVM standards, scalability, interoperability, privacy with regulatory compliance and gas fees paid in a stablecoin for predictable costs.