Union

zkgm. Union is the leading zk interoperability L1, functioning as a settlement and liquidity layer for protocols and asset issuers. There are no dependencies on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC, unlike other interoperability protocols. 

• Union's protocol addresses this by utilizing ZKPs (zero knowledge proofs) as part of its Prove, Verify & Integrate modular architecture.

• Galois captures Union’s ZK efforts and its purpose is consensus verification. It can operate on a single machine, avoiding the need for large clusters.

• Under CometBLS, which is tailored for ZK proving, the network can optimally scale to over a hundred validators.

• Protocols, users and institutions gain direct access to any execution environment, be it EVM, IBC, MoveVM or AltVMs, and developers can build with any programming language.

Union’s hyper-efficient ZK interop layer enables seamless scaling across thousands of chains without sacrificing security, efficiency, decentralization or speed. This makes the Union network a first in its category, whilst aiming for sub-second settlement across chains - the end game for a crosschain future.

U token

U is the native gas token of the network and serves three main functions within the Union ecosystem:

1. Gas Token & Fee Market

2. Network Security via Delegated PoS

3. Crosschain Governance

Union has a capped supply of 10 billion with an initial annual inflation rate of 6%, decreasing by 10% each year until reaching a long-term issuance rate of 2%.

Background and team

Launched  in April 2023, the founding team of 6 engineers, including the CEO (Karel), CTO (Cor) and the Principal Engineer (Hussein) were the core contributors to CosmWasm, and implemented IBC within DotSama to create the first trustless bridge between Kusama and Polkadot. They worked together at Composable Finance before founding Union.

Senior team members have since joined from industry projects such as Consensys, TokenSoft and Zilliqa.

Achievements to date

• Union has deployed a phased testnet roll out since June 2024, with the ninth and final testnet crossing over 300 million transactions in August 2025. The project has raised $16M during this time. 

• A limited mainnet was launched in April 2025 to expand interoperability in the BTCfi space via partners such as Babylon, BOB, Corn, Lombard, Bedrock and Solv. Union has since become a Bitcoin Supercharged Network (BSN) and introduced Auro BTC (auBTC), Union's native, crosschain yield-generating product.

• The project has amassed a global community following across social channels, its regular events calendar and via its Wandering Whale Sharks and ZK Goblin Mode NFTs. 

• Ecosystem growth initiatives include a developer fellowship, 50-team incubator in partnership with Cracked Labs, and awarding initial grant funding to several cornerstone projects, including in the DeFi and privacy.

• The Union network set a new record for the largest Groth16 Trusted Setup Ceremony in crypto history with 5,866 verified contributions, processing 1.7TB of data (almost the same size as Ethereum mainnet archive).