Episode 240 - Composable Privacy with Manta Network

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week Kobe and I chat with shumo chu the co-founder of manta Network we discuss the origin story of the project how they aim to bring privacy to web3 the unique accessibility that being a polka dot pair chain in Naples the work they do on building ZK tooling and libraries for the general ZK Community

their plans for a multi-asset shielded pool a quick look into the future they have planned for the project and more but before we start in I want to highlight a new video series we have launched this summer called the ZK whiteboard sessions it's produced by ZK hack as well as the ZK crew from polygon init hosts bobbin and Brendan interview top experts in the ZK space and explore the most important Concepts and building blocks in ZK I'll add a link to this in the show notes it's definitely a great resource to check out now I want to invite Tanya to share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by anoma anoma is a set of protocols that enable self-sovereign coordination their unique architecture facilitates the simplest forms of economic coordination such as two

parties transferring an asset to each other as well as more sophisticated ones like an asset agnostic bartering system involving multiple parties without direct Coincidence of wants or even more complex ones such as end party Collective commitments to solve multi-polar traps where an interaction can be performed with an adjustable zero knowledge privacy anoma's first fractal instance namata is planned for later in 2022 and it focuses on enabling shielded transfers for any assets with a few second transaction latency and near zero fees visit anoma.net for more information so thanks again onoma now here is Anna and Kobe's interview with Manta Network today we are here with shumo chu co-founder of manta Network welcome to

the show shumo very happy to be in the show I'm a big fan of this ZK podcast myself and happy to be here cool as my co-host for today I've brought back Kobe welcome to the show again Kobe hello glad to be here all right so shumo let's jump in I think it would be great for us to learn a little bit about you what were you doing before Manta and what led you to this project awesome yeah um my name is schumachu I'm the co-founder of Mentor Network before Mentor I study computer science more specifically distributed systems and the formal method in University of Washington again my PhD degrees and thinking see a great potential in webstery space and then I'm

kind of thinking the best way to know space is actually join company then I joined a cryptocurrency company called agorant located in Boston right and there I met many I went for colleagues or some of them already appears in ZK podcast like Thursday yeah totally yeah and I think to spend it went for one year there my role there is basically developing the python DSL for the smart contract platforms right basically I almost single detained the python DSL for the smart contract and then I kind of get back to Academia then doing like a ZK uh compiler and a ZK plus machine learning research at the University of

California Center Barbara and then decided to full-time Elementary to building the Privacy layer for Webster that's kind of brief yeah it's quite a journey it does sound like algorithm has created a group of really kind of interesting research cryptography focused folks who've gone out to do other things what was it about working there that you think kind of made for these entrepreneurial cryptographers to emerge I think in general I think our grand is doing great in terms of curating people in text I think a lot of times matters a lot not only the company or also like who you are hanging out

with right so for example I know a lot of great uh cryptographers and uh also kind of on my side I'm learning ZK from my like algorithm days right so there are sometimes I kind of just like run into yogas uh one of the co-founder of uh exceller he just saw me just like reading the papers about pairings all these kind of things right so I think basically at that time I get a sense of what is the cryptography like how should we use in the cryptographic lens of thinking things and then kind of realize the power of ZK that's kind of I have to say like it's I would never do this if I'm not joining algorand and also like kind of hang out and then learn from a

group of awesome people there cool were you working on any privacy on algorithm um I didn't do anything particularly in privacy because I do have a kind of like academic programming language background it does give me a way to kind of um like formalizing things and thinking things formally my day job at algorithms is basically uh building the smart contract language for them um but my life job is actually study cryptographic nice I actually wanted to ask you shumo because I sort of I assumed you're kind of a cryptographer but actually how would you define your skill set are you cryptography research are you applied cryptography are you

more engineering uh I think uh there is analogy like you are like a fox and also a hedgehog right I'm kind of like more than like a person I think I basically get a hand of everything of the technical developments of mental is doing as mostly in the intersection of a Distributive system uh cryptography and also like smart contract platform building and also a little bit like operations and also setting the strategy goes for the project basically yeah who is the team today who's building Manta like who are your peers like how big is this company I'm really curious um yeah so we have a team of awesome

people I think till today we have uh 24 people and uh um most Niar Engineers we have about like a I mean maybe get the exact number wrong uh like 17 to 18 engineers and uh basically in different uh like Specialties there is applied crypto and there is a runtime distributed systems and there is the full stack slash like client software and then there's double that's overview and uh some of them are on Twitter like uh our CTO Brendan he's on Twitter please follow him and yeah it would be great if you can describe a bit the origin story of Manda maybe even

around the original paper of the anonymous swaps that you folks release yeah that's great so I think a WinStar Mentor right then we're thinking what is the meaningful problem we are going to tackle uh in the space right and privacy is one of the most foundational problem I think this is actually even like more today but how can we tackle privacy problems we have seen there's already some attacks on the Privacy problems for example like Z cash like Monero right but then basically our view is yes Z cash is great we have a huge respect for the cash team um the problem here is that this entire

Webster reward kind of need more things people not only need to like transfer their balance privately people want to do defy and one of the most prominent usage is decentralizing changes right so that's kind of the original of the Manta and then basically I kind of get back to the drawing board and of course the starting point of the study is actually try to really really understand what the Z cash paper did right and then to see hey can we actually generalize that to actually adding a decentralized exchange scheme and we find we could and also we can do decentralized change privately

and also we can um making the lp token privately as well that's kind of the origin of the paper yeah sure what was the original deployment Target from Manta like when you were thinking about this decentralized exchanges were you already thinking about you know polka dot where it is today or what were you thinking with them I think at that time basically like our requirement is pretty clear so we want to have a relatively fast consensus so that the performance is good um basically and second is have a relatively good run time and we want to have a high performance virtual machines and then by then the choices really like Cosmos and polka dots right it's basically

uh 2020 like october-ish we started the project and we did a basically a few evaluations um like the pros and cons and poked on Cosmos and at the end of the day like our team is just like full of rust programmers we just like to programming Ross and ring like the substrate that's a good choice so substrate blockchain Frameworks it's really like I think people in parity did amazing job to get a like a blockchain deployment suit as a substrate right so that's basically why we choose polka dot do you want to share a little bit about the landscape almost like the Manta landscape in polka dot I want to sort of set the stage you have two different networks and polka dot always has sort

of the canary on kusama and polka dots so maybe we can just like map out a little bit what does Manta actually look like right now in that polka dot setup perfect yeah that's a really great question and maybe I can talk a little bit about like uh where the mentors of viewing get a little bit more generalized than just a do a private payment and decentralized exchange right so the Polk dot has a this notion of canary Network people most know him uh like kusama as a canary network of polka dot so it's a little bit history like kusama used to be actually a an incentivized test net incentivized testnet kind of although I feel like they always push back when you try to call them an incentivized test net but

yeah it's just like the origin when the kusama just first launched is an instant device it's not incentivized oh honestly you used to have a token for yeah it's actually have a faucet you just have to force it it's very interesting like I guess the people get the faucet tokens are very happy right now wow really wait when it first launched there was a faucet I actually didn't know that yeah yeah yeah wow so and then I think uh basically people think it's a good idea it's the thing is if the token doesn't have any any economy values um it just gives a developer a different mental mode of deploying things so basically people think hey it's a good

idea to have a canary Network it's kind of expecting degree of the chaos and uh and then that's kusama I think we're following the same same Principle as uh like a Webster Foundation parity for the Polk dots right so basically we have um like a kusama based Network called kanmari and we have uh we're going to launch uh POG dot based Network called mental Network yeah and uh this share exactness same code base and have the exact same set of features and it actually shares the same binary yeah calamari is sort of advanced it's further along somehow right like you've already deployed more things there I mean it's live yeah and Manta is yeah

yeah so it basically the deployment sequence is that we deploy the features first in we call it often testnet is actually counts through several iterations of the test net and then to uh calamari and then to menta so dolphin is like a private test not that only you run on uh dolphin is a public test match anyone can try it's um actually working pretty well the test net V2 we already have more than like a one one 50k transactions have more than 20K active users in the test net I think it's just a very cool experience you can actually see uh stimulus private payment

experience on that like highly recommend you guys try it and it's actually just go to mental Network then you can just click to try it yeah I have one more question about the test net in a multi-chain like in the parachain model where you have various pair chains that have launched they have their Canary version on kusama they will also have test Nets when you're deploying like is it the test net that's actually somehow like playing with xcm to another Network's test net and if so like what are they going going through is there a test net relay chain too yes yes there's the infrastructure called the rokuku that's kind of run by parity yeah yeah

okay I think there are some projects their technology but we actually joined rokuku so that we can test uh xcm messages with other teams this is actually our daily workflow we have tested with the Moonbeam team with akala team for example nice I think later on we're going to go a little deeper into like the status of the project but before we did that like I think you had mentioned you know doing privacy what role does a project like man to have in this ecosystem what kind of privacy could you bring yeah what would be the use case that you could imagine um I think there are several questions let me try to unpack them first is that

what is mental feeling right I think so basically our vision is trying to bring privacy to all the different kind of applications to the in the web series space right not limited to payment decentral exchange and can elaborate a little bit more on like where the mentor project is going um like in the following right but but this is basically our vision and what is our current product that is already launching test net it's basically a shared payment protocol that supports multiple Assets in polka dots and also I guess bridged asset to a pocket on ecosystem so basically the role of the mentor in calamari is to be a privacy you can

think of kind of like a privacy as a service for all the um like the public ecosystem para chance and also the bridge asset on polka dots we basically can privatize any kind of assets and also all these assets are in a single shielded pool in a sense that one one feature we have is that we actually can Shield it the asset ID as well which means all those kind of can long tail asset will enjoy same level of privacy as a mainstream asset initially the pool right so that's that's a Woodwork kernier and in the future I'm happy to talk about that a little bit or actually launching um like a native programmable layer for

the smart contract and this programmable layer will be evm equivalent interesting so in a sense that it will be compostable and also Eva and equivalent smart contract layer directly on the private asset nice so this is kind of where your your philosophy diverges from the current let's say zikish philosophy or zika's Focus where their current focuses on the single asset um where you have you know transparent and shielded but it's all like a single asset I think there's no big effort in bridging anywhere and you you actually chose to focus on that um

also your your kind of touching on composibility so I guess what else would you consider that you diverged from the cash what are big differences that you have I I always tell the team using the LNG right I think again right I think this has those guys are doing great I think zika has come like a Bitcoin right like firstly Blaze trout and secondly and like they have an amazing defensive depths for their protocol designs right so a lot of people like Ender appreciate that like they have a lot of defensive depths and we're kind of like a we're kind of we kind of position ourselves more like a ethereum right we want to

support all the asset people love we want to support all the activities people love in the web series space like DFI ft metaverse gave me you name it right I think there is inherent need for all these spectrums of activities for the privacies so that uh um were a little bit more adaptive and uh and try to bring I think I guess um and this is also related to our future reading that we're going to bring the programmability to the private asset I mean you can think of analogous to kind of ethereum brings uh programmability to the cryptocurrencies and we are bringing the programmabilities to private assets yeah that makes sense do you want to talk a little bit about Manta pay and like what

is it because I think so far we've been talking primarily about Manta Network or like the company or calamari but yeah what is meant to pay so Mentor pay basically is a first project we are launching it's already live in testnet have the experience two variance and the kind of a rough estimation is that it's going to be live in calamari next month okay so we are uh kind of doing the trusted setup code right now and we're going to do the trusted setup pretty soon so like from high level it's basically a multi-asset shielded pool protocol and I guess from the feature side right so support

multi-asset and you can mint your public asset to the private asset and you can do a shared transfer we do have a kind of like a zcash style shielded address system and this shaded address system um first is reusable right like for example if you are for the lack of better word hanger artist you want to post your private shielded address over the internet to receive some donations you could right so you it's a reusable public address and also each shielded address come with a viewing keys in the sense that the viewing Keys give you the viewing powers of History so that you can do a selective disclosure and regulation compliance for Audits and without yeah for Audits and without

giving out giving the spending power I think that feature is quite useful for even your commercial settings for example you're running a dial or running a company you have a person in charge of spending you do want the spending history kind of uh audible right so um I think that's from feature level what is a mentor pay and from the implementation level we do like our amazing crypto team do spend a lot of time optimizing the speed right so actually one of our kind of like a technical advantages here is that we believe we have a very efficient probably the most efficient personal implementation in the industry in terms of the constraints and we have a very

streamlined protocol so it only takes about like 20K um like a rncs constraint for the zkp circuit and this basically translates to a blazingly fast approver type approver time is just like two seconds um so it's basically it doesn't add any lag for your transaction people's day-to-day like private transaction experiences it's not bad I wait before we go into the sort of details of this is meant to pay a product like I just I'm trying to figure out is it an application that lives on top of the Manta Network yeah that's that's also asking the question thanks for asking me this right so it can have different forms so first is a mental pay protocol is running on mental networks right so

you have to use inventor Network to have the private payment but thanks to xcn right basically support all the POG dots ecosystem perishing asset and Bridge assets right the first layer and second layer from any user point of view like how I'm going to use mentapeg right so you could use our depth right you use the original asset to our dap and use that and that's perfect and actually we're also developing sdks and also functionalities to other pairs in depths give you example like so for example if you are adapting the moon beans you just use our sdks um you can let your users to one click um like privatize your assets right so

this is all thanks to the wonderful xcn question communication mechanism baked in in the apocal ecosystem how does this Decay look like like what is the interface that users are getting so let's say it won't be developers are they getting something like I want to make a private transfer and then it automatically ex uses xcm to go to The Mentor Network and how does it work so SDK in our current environment design basically let's say if you are deaf among B and you want to privatize your assets you basically click the privatization we provide the axial encodings of what does a privatize mean you can think of this is basically a

streamline two things in in the same exam call the first thing is that to transfer their tokens from Moonbeam to menta and second is also feeding the Zero Energy proof in the Axiom call as a message passing and then on our side we interpret that as a private adaptation and generate private tokens for the users that's cool going back to zcash do you think that another privacy blockchain maybe like zcash or I don't know like penumbra or something could they ever lock into the polka dot system and do anything like this or is it really like by being a pair chain that you have that advantage of like actually

being able to use xcm and it does something different than what they would be able to do I think the question is which kind of advantages exam brings us so in principle right you can always do things like other for example like zcash Peninsula you mentioned if there is a message passing bridge to them they could do the similar things um but the advantage of the xcm is this cross-chain communication mechanism first it's baked in right so it's that supported by relation so have much better security guarantees basically you don't have to worry about the bridge security vulnerabilities secondly right it's very um like a programmable right I think Rob talked

about xcm here right it's very programmable in a sense that it's just like much easier for the parachen developers to do that I think it's always possible to uh using Bridges I think sync exam is basically a high security message passing and has a certain level of programmability high performance break like in the polka ecosystem yeah it does give a little bit of advantages in this regard yeah do you see yourself though also using like other Bridges for your privacy like going outside of polka dot yes right so then we support the tokens outside of the polo ecosystem right if we want to support that in our kind of

like Polk dot deployment we want to do that but uh I think we um are like looking to uh grow mentor to a multi-cham project in essence right so because I think the inherent reason here is that there are some security concerns over Bridges right also at least the current state of bridges um the things you can do is uh still quite limited not as good as native deployment right so we actually partnered with acceler um like on the break deployment okay on poke.e because you guys used to work together XLR Sergey or what yeah we used to work together and also I think it's

more about we trust their engineering capabilities we can make things secure right so yeah yeah you've sort of mentioned this multi-asset shielded pool and I'm might be thinking about something that's not related but it sort of made me think a little about the work that a Noma does I know that they often will mention this like multi-asset is it in any way related they even have a project that's called them ASP like oh wow yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's very it's very similar so okay it's kind of interesting so when we first developed ideas actually didn't know they exist so the the original masp design is before mental paper but uh I guess I just don't know the paper exists can the reinvented the well actually and then once once we

actually write the paper oh we say hey like this like Z cash people actually did this like a multi-asset shield to pull but the design I would wouldn't bore you into the design the design is a little bit different okay in general in the high level it's uh it's very very similar but is it similar to Z cash or a Noma well zcash the first people to do it or so this multi asset Shield pool is originally designed by the show and then kind of a Noma Forks that oh okay that's the history yeah yeah also like I think Noma the normal guys are amazing is actually properly credit that as well right so I think in our in our case we have no idea when we first write the

paper we have no idea this thing exists and after read the paper hey we finally you do this actually we add reference of uh multi as the show to put to the paper the second version of the paper when we revise paper um yeah but in general it's a very very good design in the sense that uh I think it's the way to go if you want to have a multi-asset privacy in a sense that there are going to have some like mainstream asset and long tail asset right and then if you put that into a single pool then this long tail asset will have the same level of privacy of this mainstream asset okay that's that's that's that's basically the design benefit you you have for the um multi-asset shieldable and I guess what

you're saying here a little bit is you know when you think of a shielded pool so far we do think of them as all having the same like asset type and then like say there isn't very much liquidity in it then you can often sort of spot things coming in and out of it when you say long tail you're talking about like things that have low liquidity there'd only be like once in a while something put in or taken out but wouldn't you still be able to see either side of that like wouldn't you still be able to track that like well they're long tail there's very little of it like how could you not still reveal that's a very very good observation so like putting in getting out right this you see the asset ID there's no way you can hide that because while end of the pipe is public

but the the Privacy benefit you get is basically for token transfer let's think of a multi-asset design that you actually disclose the asset then you actually know like what asset is being transferred if the asset ID is public right and let's say Anna you're the only one who have this very Niche asset and people can directly hey you're you're transfer right so I think that's concrete benefit will for the multi-assets uh children pool have here yeah I guess like as long as you keep your assets in the shielded pool for a long time then you will be able to to at least wait until other users join and say something more of this asset so

don't go out too quick I guess yeah but in this case is it also that within that uh shielded pool there's just like more stuff happening like can you do more with it could you use it to do things so therefore like yeah it's maybe less about like the ownership of the asset what you could do with it that's another excellent question basically need to the Future direction we're going we want to basically have a general programmability for the private asset itself as it is without ever converting it back to the public asset I mean we actually have a very good design here actually um well uh try to get the uh like UVM test net out for the private asset this

year but in general we think that's could do and should do and that's where um in our view the Privacy uh like web3 project should uh moving towards because I think it's really about a like user experience problem right so I think it's great we can privatize this asset and transfer to our friends and privatize that to public token get some utilities but in general to be able to actually make privacy more mainstream and to protect more people's privacy we just need to lower the entry barrier in the sense that people can just use a private asset as they are using normal assets

and we think that's perfectly doable and then basically the way you do it is that basically you gives a private asset the same utility as a public asset where for example you can like buy ft's you can do D5 you can use that in all the metaverse applications right so I guess one interesting thing we think here is that let's imagine in the future web3 world basically our stance is that we think privacy is not a good to have seen it's actually a requirement let me give you several several concrete use cases right so of course we want privacy in D5

because that's your like most important privacy part the financial privacy there are many many other use cases I think when use case for example is nft right I think the current way the ft is actually have a biggest privacy leakage in the sense that I have my FTS my pfp I submit my address to Twitter to verify my pfp that's a direct leakage of your idea your personal identity with your Unchained address right so this leakage is just so huge right so think of you have a ZK based private ft you can still showing off hey I have this like a

wonderful FTS then you just verify that using xerology proof right so you get all the functionalities but um you actually will have privacy yeah there's actually two places where you could do that even you could privately prove that you own like an nft or something in a collection potentially to to get access to something or I think in your case you're saying you would not know to which address that nft actually belongs yeah yeah so you you can still hey this is my public profile right then I show that I own this FP but it doesn't necessarily have to link to your ECR or like a polka dot addresses right and uh just before we move next and allow me to

show you an another like uh applications we have in mind right so for example like in the future of the decentralized organization like Dao right very simple applications like payroll actually requires privacy I kind of like any like organizations I'm not happy my colleague just earned like a 10 bucks more more than me in a single month right so I think uh you can see right so basically we're Envision in the future like the the Privacy is actually inherent need if we are buying this is this web series space are going to be more important in people's daily lives then we think you need privacy from the first principle right that's

where we're looking at yeah yeah yeah okay now I want to spend a bit of time diving a little bit more into the tech stack and you had sort of mentioned a few things you'd mention the Poseidon implementation that you did I mean did you take the work that had already been done and use it or did you do something to that like there had been sort of these what was it like hash competitions a few years ago where they were trying to find these like do you remember this Kobe the snark friendly hash function competition that was organized by uh lithium Foundation I think cool cool yeah were you taking kind of the outcome of that shumo and then putting it to work or were you doing something to it uh so we're definitely kind of standing on the uh like a shoulder of giants so

there is a hatching competition then there is a passage on paper um by like a Dimitri and many other great cryptographers and also I think in our implementations we actually look into file cons a personal implementation called Neptune it has a very very good specs right so basically we look at all these those papers and implementations and then our own team make our own implementation using Arc Works um as the back end I think one thing I want to say a little bit here is that our team actually building our own like a ZK infrastructure called opencl um so it's not really anything like super fancy but it's basically build a

like intermediate representation layer kind of a proof system agnostic and this has been proven very very helpful in our internal like r d the most reason is that we think um the most Circle logic are kind of building in this open ZL we call eclair this uh like intermediate representations and then it compiles to both for example arc's World score 16 it compiled to ZK garage plug in the future it could compile to Nova which is a new processor right because we see chemistry Moore's Law like trajectory proof system new and better process coming out all the time and we want to build a IR that can using this proof system as a

compilation Target and partially the our get back to the personal implementation right our personal implementation the high level logic is actually implemented the using our IR and then we did a compilation to both ZK garage Planck and also to like artworks across 16 r1cs I think this uh Arts Works rncs uh Vern of the Paseo is super super efficient yeah like I'm hearing more and more projects like this or like ideas around this these sort of intermediate compilers whatever that role is sort of in between languages to be able to speak to different languages um I mean I've heard about it within

maybe just like regular blockchain in the past but now I'm hearing about it more and more in the ZK space like would you put something like Cersei kind of in that category I think so this is a great example of something similar like they were also thinking about uh having these different backends rights and supporting different proving systems and so on I think uh it's it's very interesting that you're working on it because it's not a small challenge right like to translate um something that is expressible using hashes let's say or I don't know deriving nullifiers or whatever to both r1cs and Planck in an efficient manner it's I think something that is still

like kind of an open problem I think maybe I can talk a little bit more on that by the way this is not bad by me this is by done by like our CTO Brendan um so I think in high level you could do that the way you do that is that we get a lot of inspiration from llvm right the thing you want to build is the extensible structure so basically our compilation to which it has two layers the first layer is the eclair it's a proof system agnostic IR that describes the high level logic how does it look like what would be the optical it's just a rough except for us there's no op code yeah what I mean like in the rust do I write like um this is a times b equals zero do I

write like I'm hashing using Shadow 5c like what do I write uh so I think it's it's closer to letter but we have a kind of a try to maximizing the usage of a rust generic we have a notion of the compiler so in the sense that all these backends whatever the support is pressing the rust the trade interface and then plugging as a like generic argument as a compiler that's why I mentioned lvm right it's really insensible in the sense that we can be using this to staging different uh like expressions of the computation logic a different layer right so it's I think to the first operation you can think of something like a Russ ddsl we don't have a front end yet right so uh I think it's

just like currently just like internal uh purpose but we do want to make it open source and uh we actually applied for uh like a polk dot ecosystem fundings to make it public good but get back to the Techno design right basically there are two layers the first layer is expressed in the computation Logic the second layer is where the optimization comes through right the thing is you do want to express proof system specific clinizations right this kind of in our notion we we call it compiler basically you plugins compiler and you express the proof system specific optimizations in the second stage in a sense that it's not completely agnostic right so basically

we write adapters for rncs for spacing equals 16 based in rncs right adapters for plug right so this adapter are actually not in generic level and can be application Level adapters as well basically that's the thing right so you could express Poseidon specific optimizations in these adapters that's why I kind of bring the extensive design of llvm here if you're familiar with our VMware it's kind of like a building some like extensions and back end of the llvm so it actually helps the team a lot the developer effort already pays off in the

sense that we're kind of evaluating whether we're using Planck or using cross 16 right and after we Benchmark it showed like a overwhelming advantages to actually using core 16 as a proof backend and our team being able to basically switch the back end in like 1.5 hour from plan to core 16 for example that's um actually give us a lot of confidence to keep building this infrastructure yeah nice so like this kind of um specific optimization that you mentioned I guess they could use things like custom Gates or lookups um things of that sort yeah exactly for example in the application specific

adapters for Planck we actually uh leverages like a higher than standard weights customized gates in Planck to have a more optimized plan implementation as well for example you just mentioned actually you use the term CK garage Planck which I don't know if our listeners are that familiar with CK garage but I know you've been very very involved in that effort do you want to just explain a little bit what that is and actually I want to know is that a new name for Planck for a type of plonk ZK garage plunk because I hadn't heard it anyway first explains DK garage though um ZK garage is a Community Driven effort to build a public good plan there are several people involved I wish I can take all the credit but the truth is I'm

just along with the I'm just one of the contributors exactly majorly lead by Luke Pearson one of the polygen partners and also there are a lot of amazing people all over the places from projects like ethereum Foundation like a Noma you just mentioned I think Kobe is kind of active in the at least in the discussion guilty yeah I think it's a really nice common good plant implementations I think two of our team members uh taught our cryptographic engineers and also our CTO Brandon all they all contribute to ZK guard's plan and uh I think also they did a at least quite a few educational tutorials for Planck

um like for example one of our cryptographic engineered Todd he actually gave uh like a general ZK tutorial based on that on the line hack organized by Columbia students yeah nice I think it was another VK podcast perhaps but I think you might be right I just brief introduced the community effort here yeah cool cool and actually I think I call it like ZK garage because of my North American accent but given that Luke is British I believe then it would be a ZK garage I think is more how he pronounces it am I right something like that anyway maybe I'm doing it totally not Justice and we should probably have him on the show to

talk more about this at some point okay um but so is that but is that now a type of plonk you know people have used the word plonk in various ways but would that be almost like a standalone distinct plunk if it's a ZK garage Plum I guess in some sense we have like a few plug implementations going around right so you could have chosen any of those like the Halo 2 one or now the espresso one let's say what why is zika right from our view right so we want to having uh like optimize plant implementation first right so I think uh basically instead of using all these uh like plunks we do have some our own ideas of

actually how to do the front implementations I think plunk is very kind of like a like you said it's a it's embroider of many different things basically there is a plank original paper and there are a few other papers adding scenes for example like a turbo plant and then there is a paper called the blue cup right basically kind of doing the lookup in the plank side the ultimate reason why using zika Garza plan is that we see um like a pure Community Driven like independent projects that have a long-term mental abilities for going forward that was at a stage we are kind of leaning towards using plunk and we also want basically our team to be part

of the design and also the implementation of the plug I think our teams still are very happy to contribute uh to the the ZK cards plunk today even if uh yeah our production moved from plant to cross 60. I sort of want to go back one step back to that compiler role because um I did wonder since I am hearing about more and more projects trying to do this like would it not make sense for there to be a standardized version of that like why is it good that everybody's kind of developing their own glue between these different pieces yeah this is the place where you put the xkcd comic where you know you have 14 standards so it's time to make a new

Step yeah no you have 15 well I think there definitely is is just like I'm more like a practical person right so from the practice point of view if you have a production and then I right you do want to say hey like your team have a clear understanding of how things are going in some sense it's not that bad right so basically like we have good communication with the know my team about their vampir we basically learn from them and the reason that we decided not using vampire is that we have very very different design code for example the the IR we're using is not a vampire this has a dramatically different design goes we also talked to a firecon team so we have a new language called Lark right so you can think of that's a different

language Let me just briefly compare vampir and the eclair we're doing and the Lark right Lark is very high level language it's basically lists right it's great for like uh people who actually doesn't understand anything about zkp right but it's actually misses at least uh in my view some of no level optimization opportunities right so that's a log and ventum error is on the opposite right I think ventam IR is a great like intermediate representations right so and we're actually thinking in the long term we are potentially can compile our eclair into vampire the eclair wear design we just like vaguely named the IR it's more like a library and the extensive

framework that I just uh talked about several minutes ago basically to allow you to freely Express both high level like semantics and low level optimizations for lack of better word it's more like a llvm framework rather than a dedicated array so you can see we are aware of the different development in the space it's just like currently we don't have anything that we can use uh fulfill our need stimulus need that's why um oh we're building this uh like eclair and opencl a library in general basically that's interesting I mean I'd sort of already mentioned Cersei from Alex osw mirror which I guess Falls in a similar category I don't know if you are

aware of it or if you've like talked to him about that yeah yeah of course of course but is that at a different place as well like where on that Spectrum would you put it actually Cersei is kind of being the same in our two vampire okay vampire are in to some extent but I wouldn't say if the Cersei is the same as vampire as well right because Cersei they have uh you know there is a thing called a smt solver right basically you can think of it as a like above the set former right they have this kind of a fancy solver based optimization design baked in Thursday as well right so um just a little bit more research oriented for Cersei I'm not saying that it cannot be getting production it's more a little bit like research oriented because they have

potential to having like a smt server server-based optimization baking sourcing right so but in terms of the spectrum the closest thing to Cersei is actually the vampire that a Noma is building right now basically got it I know of at least one more project but I think they might still be in stealth but I do Wonder like just general zkdsls this map of how things are working together do you also have to include the kind of individual project dsls into that or is this kind of compiling living in a different part like it's almost the question here is like would other languages also be interacting potentially with your IR you're calling

it I guess intermediate representation is that what that stands for yeah yeah exactly that's a very very good question I can like elaborate a little bit more here um basically we definitely could have a higher level like from net right so it's basically because like our team of cryptography they are like a zika expert right they are able to write this no level Primitives and also to do dramatic optimization so that our zks are good fast right I think we can definitely building a higher level abstractions on top of that and also for example there are some foreign languages we can plug in things like circum and Cairo for example right so this is definitely doable and in terms of the language

design point of view I can only speak for myself I kind of like care a little bit better because it actually expose the like a fan and field as a raw element the primitive data type at least allow you to have in some expressive 70 of the optimizations in the higher level language for example compared with circle but in principle right all these things can be compiled right and I see there is not enough interest and also again like uh our like IR stack will be Apache licensed as a public good project would definitely welcome people to help us to actually build a higher level stack but currently our team will be focused on the infrastructure the

library the back end to make it Rock Solid right so I think I definitely see the possibilities and what we're also open to collaborations basically yeah got it um you just sort of mentioned Cairo but everything we've been talking about is snarks so do you have any like Stark or fry anything in your stack that sort of touches that and So currently we don't um most of you for uh efficiency reasons and also the proof size reasons right so I talked about carrot because carry is a high level okay that's the beauty of abstractions so you can compel Cairo to snap okay it's nothing kind of like like 100 inherits like carrot or some fragments of the carrier like a

high-level language design like Cairo you can compile that to snark there's no inherent reason you cannot do so right so that's that's what I'm talking about yeah yeah I even heard about some projects that are trying to do that so it is definitely doable and interesting Yeah Yeah you sort of mentioned that you're doing a trusted setup but I'm curious like you already have calamari live have you already done a trusted setup for that and you're making a new trusted setup for Manta Network deployed on polka dot or like yeah what is the trusted setup for that you just described so mentor and calamari while using this exactly the same ZK circuit and there's a calamari were doing the uh like trusted setup either laser this month or

beginning next month for color Market basically but how does it run already like what are you running then because it's live but there's no trusted setup underneath the hood you haven't done one yet basically so this is basically the um like a modular and also the runtime upgrades the current calamari run as a kind of like a generic like a parachan it's join the uh kusama networks but the Maori pay hasn't been deployed to calamari yet so is it not private right now so yeah so the current uh kind of manta paper in the Murray pay is going to be deployed on the um calamari sometime next month right so but that's after the trust is set up basically okay so like the snark portion of calamari is not deployed currently it will come soon

yes okay so the current calamari it has its native tokens it has the governance we already removed the sudos um basically all these kind of like a shenanigans that getting a peritone up and running all the devops all the decentralized validators there okay I see I see so in order to introduce the let's say the snark portion after the setup you will have to do this kind of governance proposal to get that happen right so this is a runtime upgrade go through the governance proposals so I guess this is another thing that uh kind of advantage in using a polk.in sub trade right so basically you the the

runtime upgrade is part of the infrastructure so for for many other chance I know it's just a little headache to do the runtime upgrade adding features but here just like a daily Standard practice can we touch on the general purpose privacy that you're planning for the future um this kind of composable thing yeah perfect so yeah like I said right so we basically we have a bulletproof private payment Protocols are they working and the next step is getting programmability to this private asset instead talking that from Tech point of view maybe I should talk from what does this brings to developers and users right I guess

the first is that to the developers you can deploy your favorite solidity based smart contract into the platform and this can directly manipulate the private asset in the sense inside it's a private asset will be providing as the same interface as erc20 which for fungible tokens and ERC 721 and erc1155 as for FTS and potentially many more as a compostable interface so the app Developers they don't have to learn ZK they can just write a solid dap and this step can seamlessly working on the private asset

that's to the Developers and to the users and you don't have to worry about that as long as you are using the dabs or adopting this private asset um we actually spread some effort developing the wallet infrastructure to putting things for example putting the zkp generator into a wallet like uh Taxman like a metamask snap right so you don't have to worry about that you just use the private asset as if you are using public asset right so that's a end goal and we are actually pretty close to that uh to get these private uh like uh once you coin the term right now because it's a little bit confusing it's not DK evm because uh VK event action doesn't

have a privacy and also we are not privatize the entire part of the evm if you guys having some ideas of what is the term here and we're happy to do lesson for like a better word let's call it uh this new uh like a evm design that support composable privacy it's quite a known word so that's basically the high level goals we want to we want to achieve here and uh I think nowadays it's uh popular to say things like Alpha leak it's I think we're definitely um trying to disclose more information including the design and how does things work and also how like when people can play with the test net in the following months and uh I guess keep on iOS yeah pretty excited it's funny because I

think a naming standard you could employ if you wanted to like it used to be ZK roll up and then there was like ZK ZK roll up which was like the private CK roll up I know you said it's not exactly evm but like ZK ZK evm Maybe um maybe I've even heard that thanks Anna this is some of the candidate who are going to consider maybe we'll we'll send you an aft if that's a private nft though private okay yeah exactly exactly exactly yeah cool all right I want to say a big thank you to coming on the show sharing with us Manta and it's kind of Journey to now and what you have planned that was great talking to you thank you doing so much

work for the entire space yeah ah cheers I want to say thanks again Kobe for co-hosting with me happy to be here thank you and I want to say a big thank you to the ZK podcast team Tanya Chris Rachel and our kind of guest editor for this particular episode David so thank you David for taking over from Henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening