zkgm. Union operates as the premier zk interoperability Layer 1, acting as a settlement and liquidity foundation for asset issuers and protocols. Distinct from other interoperability solutions, it eliminates reliance on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC.

• The protocol employs ZKPs (zero knowledge proofs) within its modular Prove, Verify & Integrate architecture to solve these challenges.

• Galois handles Union’s ZK operations with a focus on consensus verification, capable of running on a single machine rather than requiring large clusters.

• CometBLS, designed specifically for ZK proving, allows the network to scale efficiently to support more than one hundred validators.

• Institutions, users, and protocols can directly access any execution environment, including EVM, IBC, MoveVM, or AltVMs, while developers retain the freedom to use any programming language.

Union’s highly efficient ZK interoperability layer facilitates seamless scaling across thousands of chains while maintaining security, decentralization, speed, and efficiency. This positions Union as a first in its field, with the goal of achieving sub-second cross-chain settlement, representing the ultimate objective for a cross-chain future.

U token

U serves as the network’s native gas token and fulfills three primary roles in the Union ecosystem:

1. Gas Token & Fee Market

1. Network Security via Delegated PoS

1. Crosschain Governance

The supply of U is capped at 10 billion. It begins with an annual inflation rate of 6%, which drops by 10% each year until it stabilizes at a long-term issuance rate of 2%.

Background and team

The project launched in April 2023. The founding team consists of 6 engineers, including CEO Karel, CTO Cor, and Principal Engineer Hussein. These core contributors previously worked on CosmWasm and implemented IBC within DotSama to establish the first trustless bridge between Polkadot and Kusama. They collaborated at Composable Finance prior to starting Union.

Senior team members have subsequently joined from industry entities such as Zilliqa, TokenSoft, and Consensys.

Achievements to date

• Union has executed a phased testnet rollout starting in June 2024. By August 2025, the ninth and final testnet had processed over 300 million transactions. During this period, the project secured $16M in funding.

• A limited mainnet went live in April 2025 to enhance interoperability in the BTCfi sector through partners like Solv, Bedrock, Lombard, Corn, BOB, and Babylon. Union has since achieved status as a Bitcoin Supercharged Network (BSN) and launched Auro BTC (auBTC), its native cross-chain yield-generating product.

• The project has built a global community through social channels, regular events, and its ZK Goblin Mode and Wandering Whale Sharks NFTs.

• Ecosystem growth efforts include a developer fellowship, a 50-team incubator with Cracked Labs, and initial grants for cornerstone projects in privacy and DeFi.

• Union established a new record for the largest Groth16 Trusted Setup Ceremony in crypto history, featuring 5,866 verified contributions and processing 1.7TB of data (comparable in size to the Ethereum mainnet archive).