Episode 299 - Catch up on zkSync with Alex G

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 [Music] online this week I chat with Alex glowski CEO of matter labs and one of the creators of the ZK sync Network in this episode we catch up about all things ZK sync the last time he was on the show was over two years ago and so there was a lot to talk about we cover the ZK stack framework hyper chains the

ZK Credo mission statement and the bujam proof system upgrade planned for ZK sync era we also chat about the future of the project and more now before we kick off Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor launching soon namada is a proof of stake L1 blockchain focused on multi-chain asset agnostic privacy via a unified set NADA is natively interoperable with fast finality chains via IBC and with ethereum using a trust minimized Bridge any compatible assets from these ecosystems whether fungible or non-fungible can join nada's unified shielded set effectively erasing the fragmentation of privacy sets that has limited multi-chain privacy guarantees in the past by remaining within the

shielded set users can utilize shielded actions to engage privately with applications on various chains including ethereum osmosis and Celestia that are not natively private nada's unique incentivization is embodied in a shielded set rewards these rewards function as a bootstrapping tool rewarding multi-chain users who enhance the overall privacy of namada participants follow namada on Twitter @ namada for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg NADA and now here's our episode today I'm here with Alex glowski the CEO and one of the co-founders of matter Labs as well as a creator of the ZK sync Network welcome back Alex hi Anna it's

an honor and a pleasure to be here again now Alex this is the fourth time you're on the show and I'm going to be adding links to the previous episodes I'm also going to be referencing them quite a bit because I had a chance to listen back one quick disclosure the ZK validator is an investor in ZK sync I think this was actually one of our first Investments we mentioned it on our last episode because I think we had done it around that time but I'm very excited to learn about what's happened since so that earlier episode was from April 2021 at the time I was very excited to be using ZK sync because it was the first time that I got to use a rollup it was through the gitcoin grants where they had actually just enabled the

option to use ZK sync instead of mainnet to do your donations and as a recipient of the these grants I also you know was getting grants on ZK sync and yeah I just remember being so excited about being having a chance to use a rollup at all but I know that since then so much has happened can you share I mean it's I know there's a lot to cover but can you share in a nutshell what's happened in the last two years with ZK sync absolutely with pleasure so the zync network that you've been using back then is now known as zync light uh we we it was the first protocol that we developed and uh launched on uh the

mainnet it was a simple protocol for sending tokens and and later token swap was uh were added to this and and that you used it at gitcoin Grants also captures a very important aspect of what zync is all about so zync is not really a specific Network or spe just the name of the protocol it's the name of the project it's name of a bigger vision and this has been the vision of the project since the very beginning since the Inception we've always been very deeply focused on this all this cor Mission and we've been very consistent about it and it's all about scaling crypto to everyone in the world without losing the properties that make

crypto valuable in the first place the decentralization self- custody security permissionless you know this inclusiveness where anyone can participate no matter what without asking anyone for permission to join uh so we had that in the beginning and it was also very very clear that in order to fulfill this Mission we have to make it very nice and user friendly and convenient and and I think this was the experience that was very impressive back then with gitcoin grants because you could do just one click in mam mask and the system would process dozens of transactions to different uh recipients of the grants uh and it felt like magic

and this is part in part what ZK is all about it's the the magic Moon maath which adds magic to blockchain applications and scales it too it is funny though that like back then that was very userfriendly but it was such a novel way of think like metamask before that point you would never choose networks you wouldn't actually make distinction I mean there was only one network you you were usually working on and I remember there was a learning curve even back then nowadays though I feel like a lot of that has become people are quite used to it and actually I think that conversation about like usability I want to come back to that later on because as much as I feel like the goal is usable

usability getting there still is at times very challenging I feel a lot of users even today even with easier tools are still having a hard time getting into it so let's come back to that I do want to say you know you mentioned that from the very start you were focused on the scaling of blockchains and in I think our first interview we talked about how a lot of your team and a lot of the founders of ZK sync were coming from the plasma world had moved over into rollups at what point did the idea of the ZK evm really come into your mind was it already back then that that was the goal of using ZK or was it like instead of plasma we're going to use DK

rollups and then eventually this idea dawned on on you that you could actually create an environment where people could deploy apps the way they do on mainnet ethereum on an actual ZK rollup uh this Vision was there from the very beginning it was very obvious that the end game has to be full skillability you knew it was going to be ZK evm if if you read the very first blog post introducing zync for where we mentioned zync for the very first time and it was close to 5 years ago it's called the introduction of zik sync uh one of the points that we make there is that eventually we envision full evm bite codes being executable and provable into knowledge

proofs um the the distinction from where we are today and where we were back then is it became feasible it was not feasible 5 years ago and it was not really clear how specifically we're going to manage that it was clear that eventually it will come we needed um breakthroughs in the protocol development in in in the fundamental crypto Primitives of Z knowledge proofs and those breakthroughs eventually came in the form of plon recursive plon red shift and then the the systems that came and exploded after that uh so that we can finally have performance high enough to to process essentially easy KVM level

computation and this is what happened since the last time we spoke we launched the easy kvms on ethereum and they now life and flourishing in Z casing era was the the first blockchain L2 where you could deploy ethereum contracts without modifications and just let them uh work in exactly the same way the users interact with uh ethereum Manet or with optimistic Roll-Ups which were live earlier and now it's a uh where still at the beginning of a long journey to make it universally available and universally usable I want to ask you about given that I feel like the audience now knows much more about the evm ZK evm space and the different kinds of ZK EVMS I I I

know a few years ago or maybe a year ago vitalic published this like ZK evm landscape with these different types I'm curious where does ZK sync fall yes ZK sync era and ZK stack the the technology that that we currently have still falls under Type 4 uh meaning you have to compile your contracts and deploy them in this network uh but these borders are blurring eventually I think we will have systems that will support different types of virtual machines in the near future where it will not really matter you will be able to execute any types of um programming environments from evm native bite code to something that is

natively compiled for this system for maximum performance to something like Risk 5 or vasm or other types of virtual machines different bite codes uh all of that will live together and will cooperate with different tradeoffs for different purposes that is definitely where ziki SN is heading and everyone is heading yeah yeah let's talk about the launch of the ZK evm this was the second Network ZK era what was that like and actually when did it launch was it a year ago that was in February this year uh it was very exciting it was the first time that you could deploy evm contracts with exact same invariance exact same

interfaces some user experience on ezek rollup so it was obviously a very a moment of high responsibility because we were thinking a lot about security about different ways the system can break we were putting a lot of ction measures in there uh and so it was a mix of this responsibility and alertness and actual excitement for going live uh and we absolutely did not anticipate such a fast pace of uh onboarding users and and capital and applications we thought it's going to be a lot smoother and a lot longer for people to gain trust in the system and gradually over time um things will start moving but it was like like

like a snowball it's really really F I want to ask you though cuz I remember this was um Lisbon 2021 do you remember this we like caught a cab to a a dinner we happened to uh be in the same place and I got a chance to talk to you then about this launch and you had set like a date like You' put a line in the sand in the future you're like we will be launching there and I remember it being very ambitious what was that like behind the scenes like we've set the dates got CP of times we had to postpone it because there were you like you you're building something completely new yeah and you're you can be you cannot be focusing on on several different conflicting priorities all at the same

time for us security was Paramount so we we knew we're not going to launch something that is not meeting the standards that we expected in terms of security and diligence um in code quality but the moment we solved all the issues and we we we actually had a live test net going on in a very stable way with uh Partners launching things working properly we gained more and more confidence and then we we we just put a line saying like specifically by this date we will feel that the system is bottle tested enough and mature enough to be launched yeah and so it was a gradual improvement from from that point like we we were just very very conservative we did not really did not

want to rush yeah so the line the final line we've said was actually from a point where we were very very confident that the system is functional and and this may maybe this is why I confused it a little I think back then you might have said something like it's coming sooner like around November and then I guess is it possible that then you pushed it to February no no no we we I I think the the initial estimates for building Z AVM yeah were I think like from from the point uh where we started working on it we we thought it could be completed in one year it took us closer to two years and So within this time period I think there were a couple of points where we had to postpone I see it's very common to all projects I feel like we we do hear that often that idea

of predicting how long it's going to take what what do you think took longer was it because of needing to do more audits maybe can you point to any like of the most complicated or challenging parts of building this I think it was just a combination of things they cannot single out a a specific one thing you know like you start building stuff and then you do it iteratively and you discover challenges on the way you cannot just foresee all of them completely imaginary and saying oh here is the the perfect system all of the best world's products that are being shipped fast are being shipped in this cyclic way where you make an iteration you build you launch your MVP you get

the feedback you see what works what doesn't work what you have not thought about and then you work over and over with further iterations too in that time too though did you did you change the ZK under the hood at all like was there any sort of adaptivity on the on the ZK part or would you say like you already locked that in kind of the beginning of that two-year process The Primitives were locked uh what changed for uh the circuits we we discovered more ways to make things more efficient and so some of them were Rewritten but mostly it was just iterative work of building the the complete body of uh all components required to make a uh complete zkm but we now have a really good sense

of all this components it turned out that a lot of complexity was not in the ZK circuits itself and PE people overemphasize the the you know like the complexity of Z knowledge proof specifically there's a lot of complexity in rollups in just the platform side of things in your core note in scaling the um the storage and scaling the transaction processing and scaling the apis for quering transactions so all that required a lot of work and luckily we have a very very talented team and we made some right choices from the beginning um doing everything in Rust and using best practices from

engineering to make sure that we can eventually scale with the demand you know like not putting any artificial limits where we say oh 10 transactions per second is going to be enough and then all of a sudden you hit this wall of 10 transaction per second and and then what are you going to shut down your chain and like invest time in in in making the system more scalable that's not how you build in a sustainable way you have to anticipate yeah spikes in demand you have to anticipate growth and you have to put in a lot of buffer yeah actually orders of magnitude of buffer in order to be able to accommodate it's unexpected black swans and this is what the work was all about that's fascinating I I was just in prep for for this I was actually listening to our

first interview together with uh Alex v who was also on that one and I and I think you actually mentioned that thought like I think he said something along the lines of like plasma was built for this kind of capacity with ZK rollups it will be a lower capacity but you know these are the trade-offs that are made but what you're describing is like as you went on you realized actually those spikes of usage like you can't actually have a chain halt or not be able to use it it's not it may not need to maintain that capacity all the time but it has to be able to maintain that upper boundary so this sounds like real learning even from that episode what exists today like what is the ZK system in ZK era today because I know

there's something coming but I'm curious what it is right now as of today on mayet we use plonk with uh recursion MH what we're switching to now is uh the uh proof system called bja or implementation called bjam um this is now live on testet and we're we're making full switch on mayet in a couple of weeks oh wow and bjam is the implementation of um a construction we called red shift originally uh we uh Alex v published it together with uh Constantine and um Aki very shortly after plon was was announced it was a an extension of plon which enabled fry to

be used as polinomial commitments and essentially turning plon into a transparent proof system which then I mean this idea was very influential in general because we've seen lots of systems since then go with that idea we actually covered red shift on one of the episodes we did together as well but I remember last time we spoke you had actually talked about shelving it and now it sounds like you brought it back in Action what did you need to do to Red shift to get it into the state that it would be bojam so we spond the red shift implementation back then because it was not very efficient with The Primitives which we were available at the time when red shift appeared uh this has changed since then with uh a couple of breakthroughs okay an important one came

from the plunky 2 team they came up with an idea to use a shorter field in a really cool way which boosted the performance of of the hashing and also uh there were a couple of other insights there was I'm not the right person to to answer this question you should talk to Alex v but there was something with uh some research on uh better cach codian and multivariate bl Ops uh from Ariel gabison and a couple of other guys those things combined gave bujam the performance necessary to be able to be used in production and you mentioned that it's coming in a few weeks what does it mean to change out the proving system this is what we're we changing

the full like ZK proving system under the hood right yes we're changing the the the prover behind the rollup system uh but it's actually relatively easy for us to do because the new prover just follows one to one okay the block structure so we we're actually running it now in parallel for all the blocks that are being produced on the system that we Pro with uh with plon in parallel we also proving that with with pjam and what we're going to do is we're going to just shift to the new prover and just drop the old one so it's a it's a very smooth transition in the case of a rollup and like sort of making that change does the change just happen in a smart contract like do you just upgrade

a smart contract basically you essentially upgrade the verifier and you upgrade the prover that produces the the new proofs so one thing to mention here is it was very important to keep the proof system agnostic so what we did is We on purpose used sh 56 hash function for the Merkel trees in the in the storage so that we can um change the you like we did not use posidon that would be depending on the field and whenever you change the field whenever change the proof system you would have to rehash and do Regenesis of the entire system which would have to be a trusted operation we do not want that so we built a system from the beginning

slightly less efficient but with more future proofness if you want and this is how we always approach things so this is why it's so easy for us to to make this complete switch and this is why it's going to be easy for us to switch in the future to any new innovation that might be coming and will definitely be coming in the years ahead of us uh while preserving this system keeping it intact with all the value and all the contracts all the all the state that that is being accumulated there what does it actually do what does the upgrade actually do does it make it faster does it make the proofs smaller is it cheaper what's the actual benefit uh it's going to make the proofs more

efficient meaning for the end user that the the proof generation is going to be cheaper and the uh U overall throughput of the system is going to be higher although throughput is is not really a constraint here because you can PA like is your knowledge proof generation is really well paralyzable you can you can go and add more and more Mach we are running GPU provs we have optimized the bo Jam GPU prover to be consumer friendly with the aim of future decentralization of the of the proving space we we you only need under 16 GB of RAM and in a decent gaming GPU to be able to generate the proofs for bujam And So eventually yes it it boils down

to the cost so now what this is interesting because the cost is invisible the cost of the proof generation it's negligible ible compared to the cost of data availability this is going to change with the usage of Validia or hybrid systems like potions like ZK Porter there it will make a big difference like today on ethereum users are paying 10 20 cents per transaction on average so they they don't really notice the cost because they're tiny and buja makes it orders of make cheaper so you will you will eventually be able to have very very cheap transactions on validum interesting uh you just sort of

talked about like the prover and like the actual proof creation potentially being decentralized this is a space that I I've at least heard people talking about for well publicly for a few years I know like Mina and Alo have always talked about like these snark marketplaces like proving marketplaces somehow um I've heard of a few projects doing just that where that's their entire business at the moment is like developing these marketplaces for proof generation what's your vision for that do you eventually see other teams or some third party creating the proofs actually in ZK sync like networks or do you all like would it need to come from

your orc um so let's start with the basics we see the decentralization of all aspects all components of the system as an absolute non-negotiable requirement remember the mission of Z think is to scale blockchains with preserving this core values the core philosophy the core valuable properties that that we have there these properties include decentralization they include resilience the only way to become resilient is to decentralize decentralization paradoxically is is actually not a value itself it's it's a means to enable several important values and it's a means to give your systems your your blockchain networks credible neutrality

like if all of the proof generation is happening on one cloud provider or just on a few big cloud providers that completely control it then they have the you know the soft power of being able like they they can just always threaten to switch off your your proof generation your system and then your blockchain just shuts down so you will be able you will be forced to follow whatever orders whatever subtle uh requirements they they impose on you and we want to oppose that we want to build truly resilient systems so you have to decentralize the sequencer you have to decentralize the the prover and you have to decentralize also the development process and and the community that watches over the system

and and guards the towards the development points in which direction system should be developed further and like all of that brings us to the um to the idea or the the document called called ZK creto which we also published this summer yeah I want to talk about ZK creto but right before that I just want to ask you what your thoughts are on like the decentralized sequencer space or maybe even the shared sequencers as a major ZK rollup at this point do you see yourselves working with one of those shared sequencers or do you imagine actually a decentralized sequencer on your side so as a said we definitely will have a decentralized sequencer uh

in some form uh we will have have many chains as a part of the bigger Zing ecosystem we call them hyper chains uh the priority for us in building the ZK stack that powers the hyper chains is the sovereignty of the chains giving maximum freedom to all of the chains to to decide their parameters to decide their structure configuration and so on and this includes the the sequencing so uh they will be able to choose the same decentralized sequencing approach as the casing era uh they will be able to use centralized sequencing they will be able to use to opt in into shared sequencing schemes um to go for other providers

there are a number of talented teams working on the shared sequencer design space so like I I think we'll see a lot of experimentation and we'll definitely see like different chains pursuing different strategies and uh it's not going to be one size fits all it's going to be some variety some some different trade of space than sense let's talk about ZK Credo uh I actually found this I wasn't sure what it was I actually asked you before the interview is this a mission statement is this a kind of guiding document so yeah what what is ZK Credo so ZK Credo is a statement it is a statement about our mission philosophy and values of the ZK sync project it's

not bringing in something new those are the values whatever we articulate in uh in the first draft of of the zik cred I don't think it's going to be the last draft we we we have Community discussing it uh getting involved and it will be an evolving process but what we set out to do is to articulate those principles in a very specific way which can serve as the basis of the formation of community of uh ZK sync governance because we're building systems that have to be credibly neutral uh we are striving for using math instead of relying on humans on validators on some centralized

authorities or even on decentralized groups of people because there will inevitably be some forms of uh politics you know like some some slight decision-making changes uh so we we want to make them as neutral as as transparent as immutable as as possible and this actually works for blockchain systems it doesn't really work work well for evolving those blockchain systems we we are not yet at at a point where the code can write of its own like the systems do not evolve by by their own we don't have yet artificial general intelligence they are being involved in development by people and those people make sub choices which might affect

entire ecosystems that might affect specific applications it might affect specific groups of people and so it's really really important to have some guiding principles and and a a strong decentralized community that enforces those principles so I think of blockchains I think we have a really nice analogy in the real world uh which is called Charter cities it's this idea that you can go and create a new territory where no one lives and you just write in new rules of the game and then Whoever likes those rules can can join move in and start living and working there and build something interesting and if you don't like them you leave and those rules can also

Define how the rules can be changed and so this enables you to experiment to do to go and create a lot of different communities with these different approaches to different Lifestyles different values different government systems and um the and we see this in the world of blockchains it's a little harder to do in L2 world than in the L1 world because in l1's you can easily Fork a system always uh in l2s the fork ability is not really possible like you can migrate but you cannot really Fork the assets you know if you have some ether it's locked in one contract it's going to stay there unless the base chain is forked which is a much bigger unless the

base chain is forked but then everything is is being forked right so like but even even lay one for Ability has its limits so ideally we want to come up with a system which is uh having some minimum common ground because blockchains are for Universal coordination so we're going to have a lot of wildly different people participating in those systems and they don't have to agree on everything right we only have to agree on the consensus of the blockchain state that I own so much if you own so much if I send some transaction to you you know it's objective like you can believe in in in in in completely different ideologies or uh economic systems or whatever but like we all agree on this objective consensus

state right so we want to come together with this minimum form of governance that that will enable us to move on to to iterate on the system design into the future while not scaring off some groups of these people or enabling them to to Fork away and and have their lives if if they want to and so the zik credle is this foundational like if you want a declaration of independence or Declaration like Declaration of uh of values for this digital community that will form around ziki syn idea in this case though using the term

Fork kind of is confusing because you wouldn't actually be forking any particular L2 or ZK evm you'd be you you could create a new one I guess is what you sort of mean right like using the ZK stack framework and you could create a new chain correct it's it's it's a the word itself is a little ambiguous but let's illustrate this so we we're starting off with a single deployment of zik sync let's say zync era is is the first hyper chain in this this universe of interconnected hyper chain we should talk about that separately so now if you like the rules of of the system you can just move in and participate uh the rules are built in a way that give you

sovereignty like the the validators the the proof generators whoever whatever stakeholders are in the system that are necessary for operation of the system cannot mess with your assets cannot change the rules they cannot uh rewrite contracts rewrite State uh or even prevent you from withdrawing your assets back to ethereum or to some other L2 right so like the upgradability of of the systems uh is going to be done in a way that that that is giving users a lot of time to withdraw if they don't like any any new upgrade but if an upgrade is coming that

is changing the rules of the system in a way that you don't like there must be a way for you to withdraw so the and like you will probably not want to withdraw to layer one because the costs of using the layer one will become prohibita ofely expensive with time so everyone will be living in Alto S free some kind of scalability systems that that's ethereum's vision of of the future so you will want to withdraw to a different Layer Two And if you don't have any Layer Two that that you see that that is fulfilling uh the promise uh that that you want you can just take the code Fork the code deploy an instance of this new lay to and then invite your fellow

citizens of of this networ State whoever we're using the first L2 in the first place to join you and say look this new change is coming it's actually contradicting the the values we we stand for uh we so and it's Our obligation to to prevent that so we should all just vote with our feet and migrate to this new Fork yeah it's so so it's not forking in the way that we've understood blockchains in the past but it's it is still forking in a way right because would you be able to also maintain the state of what's like like the the existing balances on that L2 if you did that well at the very least you Fork the code yeah the fork ability of the code is the very essence of uh open

source movement everything we do for sync is obviously full free open source for this very reason in order to enable this workability and then um foring the state yeah you cannot for the state but you can migrate and it serves the same purpose kind of like you move away you you you create your own version of the Universe which you like more M and you just walk there let's actually dive into the ZK stack the hyper chains cuz I want to understand how these chains interface and interact with one another when you talk about walking away I want to understand a little more what that means or if you were to yeah migrate so ZK stack you sort of mentioned it a few times is it the cosmos SDK equivalent the op stack equivalent the like this is

the Builder library that anyone can use to like deploy another ZK evm CK sync this is correct I would call it a framework okay framework which is a ready to use system complex of code that you can deploy and start your own hyper chain we call it hyper chains for a specific reason the difference of a hyper chain and some random rollup is that hyper chains are hyper linkable okay we using a technology called the hyper Bridges to connect hyper chains in a very interesting way which enables what we call surprise hypers scalability the ability of the system to grow in

definitely large accumulating or absorbing as many users as many transactions as will be necessary for for the growth of of ethereum you want 1 million users sure you want 10 million users you can do that like you you just keep adding blockchains keep adding the the systems and and it just crosss and Hyper bridges are are uh using the Zer knowledge proofs and a specific architecture which is a little hard to illustrate without video uh but it enables you to move assets from any hyper chain to any other hyper chain without friction like not adding security

assumptions or trust assumptions and not adding any Capital cost and doing all of that very very fast not adding any footprint on on the underlying layers on ethereum for example is it similar at all to some of the other ZK Bridge kind of Technologies like having a very compressed light client on one side basically communicating across these two hyper chains is it similar to anything maybe we've already heard about on the show uh this is similar but it has a very very big and important distinction so let's like let's try to illustrate it imagine that you have two systems two rollups on ethereum for

Simplicity and you want to move assets you want to move native assets minted on ethereum from one of this rollup to another let's call them rollup a and rollup B okay so roll up a has let's say 100 e locked into it what does it mean means that there is a contract on layer one that governs the treasury of roll up a and it has a balance of 100 e and there is a the similar cont for roller B also on ethereum which does not have this balance yeah right so now if you want to move the um to uh to use zero knowledge bridging to move this uh assets from from rollup a to roll up B you first need some way to pass a

message from rollup a to rollup b in a trustless way and you can use those ZK Bridges to do this H what you do is you make some commitment in rollup a this commitment is is being propagated through Merkel trees down to ethereum and then it can be read by Rolla B so all of that works so one contract from one rollup can talk to any to to some other contract on the other rollup completely trustless so that that's all good and great but how do we actually get the 100 e to move from the treasury contract a to the treasury contract B there's no way to do it you cannot just burn and mint it there cuz that those are

separate contracts right you have to move this ether on ethereum itself you cannot have the treasury contract of Rand B go to ethereum and tell ethereum mint me 100 e where from are you a minor or yeah yeah right so like you need to somehow move so and this is a fundamental problem so what you have to do in order to enable hyper bridging is you have to have all of these um chains have a share single contract on layer one that that M manages treasury of all of them in a single place and then you can use this magic ZK bridging to pass arbitrary messages between system contracts and

then the system contracts can trust each other because they all of these hyper chains have to run the exact same circuits at least for the system contracts so some minimum viable shared state of the circuits and then they can mint they can instruct the treasury to release certain amount of assets because it's coming from the system so like it's it's it's a consensus of all of this hyper chain that this actually happened secured by math and cryptography I want to just clarify to see if I understand this but like so you have the two contracts that represent the two rollups MH that's the original case in this new case is there like a third contract that manages the treasury of everyone or is there a joint contract that manages both

of those rollups there is a joint contract that manages both of the rollups really yes okay but is do they also like so just to to check though like is does rollup a still have its own contract or is it just attached to this joint contract it can have its own contract for managing the state or maybe for some other activities but all of the assets have to be in one shared contract got it I don't know how some of the other ecosystems have developed but like does the op stack do something like that too they do exactly the same thing so we pioneered this with with our hyper chain Vision a year ago and since then we saw the op stack and the polygon uh cdk embracing the same approach I see so it

will be a few of these big ecosystems that are perfectly seamless inside like the zyns hyper chains the op super chain something from polygon maybe something from others that will be like this big super networks of rollups that are easily talkable to each other but it's it's much more expensive and and requires more time and cost and Trust assumptions to talk between those differents interesting I mean there are a lot of bridge projects like there's Axel and hyperlane who are doing kind of the that interfacing between these different ecosystems they will still

remain they will F fulfill their role it's the you know like the they will be connecting this completely separate ecosystems like you can think of these ecosystems as countries mhm you have a country on maybe on an island uh then you have different cities in that country each city is a roll up and you have a connect a network of highspeed Railways uh that connects them and you can move goods and people like really fast inside or maybe maybe like even even like you can think of one city right you can move things really seamlessly inside but if you want to go to a uh different continent to to Country overseas you have to take a plane and the plane is going to be necessarily more expensive and it will

take you longer to get there so you're not going to be using planes hopefully just to get the dinner in some place and then come back right but uh you will be using it when when you have to move like once a while something something big so I think but in in ples are still important we'll still have these big continents countries connected with planes and I see those Bridge systems more like this alternative for for airports I'm trying to figure out what it is in the case of the ZK sync Universe there's a lot of small rollups all on ethereum but in this case like a lot of the value will just be moving in between these chains and not really touching the main chain even though yes

the original funds might be locked and held in that smart contract it's all kind of happening under the hood exactly is there a moment where actually like you start minting native tokens on the L2 that aren't on the L1 of course you will have a lot of native tokens yeah and then I have a question about like so in that case then are you just using the ethereum blockchain as your data availability space because at that point you're not even using it for the financial it's not holding the original uh funds or the original tokens yes all rollups and validium are going to be using ethereum for for a couple of functions number one is consensus on the state so all of them will agree on what

is the final State what what is the sequence of transactions that have been executed and that's going to be final then you're going to be using ethereum as the source of security of the validity of your computations like all all of the ZK systems are eventually verified by every single validator on the ethereum network by every single full note of the ethereum network so this is how you ensure that the math is like is actually correct like someone needs to verify it and it's going to be a theory so and in addition to that rollups are going to use ethereum for data availability that's going to be the most sensorship resistant source of data availability out there you might have

seen vitalik's recent post about L2 uh and he points out to this specifically that for high value transactions for high value interaction for example for like for for your most valuable tokens but also for things like your account private Keys you will be using ethereum you want this data to be completely sensorship resistant and um unusable but then in addition to that ethereum uh you know like ethereum's data availability uh bandwidth is going to remain limited no matter how performant even even if we get to uh full sharding it's still going to have some limits and

we'll still need systems that can go without limits and those systems will be validum will you will be able to extend it some so some of the hyper chains will be using at least part of their State uh stored or made available uh through some external data availability Solutions either managed by them or managed by external providers or managed by decentralized systems like Celestia like there will be some way for them to to off load uh data offchain growing indefinitely absorbing arer demand for ethereum wild you sort of mentioned uh that these hyper chains can be any system you could have kind of like any language you could it could be rust

based system it could be I don't know like basically the app developers if there's all these hyper chains with these different language requirements they can actually deploy in Native languages on these hyper chains not always using solidity and sort of that evm basis that's correct right these these hyper chains could be anything I kind of want to bring the conversation a little bit back to languages to ask you about a language that was created by matter Labs a long while ago called zinc right MH is that ever going to make a reappearance do you think like that was also something around the time of red shift you were doing red shift and you were doing zinc yeah I'm just curious if you see any further development on that

and if you could imagine a hyper chain that actually uses it potentially uh no we we abandoned uh zinc it's it's not going to be developed further it it lost its justification the original reason we were creating zinc was that we needed a language for non- tiering complete computation and since we now can do full tiering complete stuff with zkm with uh risk um or vasm or know other virtual machines why would you use something rust like if you can just use rust with all the tooling of rust with with all you know so it just doesn't doesn't make any sense do you imagine though maybe like matter Labs itself deploying a

hyper chain with a different base language we're ourselves we're focusing on the core protocol but I think that some hyper chains could be launching with um languages that are better suited for smart contracts I can I can think uh of move for example yeah the development from um Facebook Libra de uh that was a language that was inspired by rust but was actually optimized for making smart contracts more secure and uh easier to develop and if that takes off I can totally imagine a hyper chain using move or something else entirely sure like existing languages such as rust are were created for specific purposes like

system programming making sure that you have um safe memory space um using it for parallelism and so on all of that does not really matter in the world of smart contracts you want different elements of the language to support your development to make it more expressive so I can totally imagine that in the future we'll see that coming interesting I know you sort of mentioned that when you launched the zkm February 2023 that you were surprised at how quickly it was adopted do you have any theories as to why you did see so much adoption now looking back oh we we still have not just a lot of adoption we are

the most actively used L2 on ethereum today if you go to l2b uh doino just switch to activity so we're we're number four by tvl uh but we are consistently number one by far with uh 24 million average monthly transactions it's eum stands at 30 million and uh all the other chains are starting with like 16 14 million and below so there is a lot of uh growth happening also in terms of protocols adopting zik sync and building new stuff and completely entirely new stuff that that was not uh um done before uh going in the direction also of uh Native account abstraction which we

haven't covered yet but this it's an important aspect of making blockchains usable by Main audience and we see a lot of projects that are expanding in this mainstream audience space so we see things like pet Penguins uh launching their uh nft campaigns with uh Walmart corporations where where millions of users will be able to just scan a QR code and and get their nfts and connect the physical world with the uh with the virtual space with metaverse we see projects like uh the city government of Buenos Argentina is using zik for uh for their for the ID um system for the citizens where they will be using blockchain to to connect to goods and

services and and providers we're seeing hyper chains being used for interesting mainstream um audience spaces so I think what contributed to to this popularity of zik sync is on the one hand this focus on technological innovation being future proof Building Systems for the future like not being not focusing so much on being backwards compatible but focusing on being future compatible and uh building for the end consumer in mind and on the other hand just this consistency with the mission with the values like people know that they can rely on us people know that when we say this calization we actually mean it it's not a project that was created just you

know like to pump and dump promote some idea and and burn it in in one year we are here for a very long future we are really well funded we are like we as matter Labs so we will be able to to build everything we need for the final Vision like to to make this reality of anyone in the world can access ethereum in an affordable way fully preserving the properties of ethereum and all of that is owned by the uh the community all this network governance the direction in which it's going it's all controlled not by a single Party by by the broad community so we we've been very consistent with this message I think it's also contributed to where we

are today do you think there is a moat this is something I've sort of been curious about with like a lot of the L2 projects what do you think will keep people on ZK sync because if it's evm compatible they can deploy elsewhere right they can they can do it on optimism they could do it on the new ZK EVMS that are coming out yeah what's what's the moat first of all I don't care that much about the mode I care about the mission and uh we have a very specific criteria of where where the mission is complete and what we need to do for this Mission if you ask me what I think the development is going to be on ethereum in terms of like how things will will play out I think that you will see network effects occuring to

this big hyper chain super chain ecosystems and that is going to be what matters they will not be bound to individual chains but to this big ecosystem but I mean individual chains will also have their Network effects obviously for for instant composability with um synchronous transactions and so on but this access to users and liquidity from one hyper chain to all the other hyper chains at just one click without any capital or trust or security friction uh is what's going to matter so you will be measuring not just the tvl or transactions or users active daily users all the parameters by which we

shine with at a ziki Sara today you will not be measuring that on individual chains but in this like chain ecosystems that's cool what's your vision then for the future of this space one of the big questions and I kind of hinted at it before but it was this idea of like if you have the native assets on the Block on the l2s themselves like in your vision of the future is ethereum still at the center or does it look more like a me like a mesh or a net where like more interconnection and actually value has shifted a little bit further up the L2 stack ethereum is definitely going to be at the center as the backbone connecting all the l2s I believe that the internet of value the eventual form

of the web 3 that Embraces all forms of value transactions in the world will be in ethereum L2 C 3es okay like it will be in the in this networks I don't think they're going to be far outside of ethereum you will have a couple of projects outside of ethereum a couple of blockchains still doing some things and being used for different purposes but I believe that the bulk of this world value transactions will be happening on ethereum networks not on layer one itself as it is ethereum's Vision to use layer one as the the fundament the connection layer it's not where the actual end user transactions will happen

except for maybe like some super super high value trans yeah in the ZK Credo there is one term which is privacy and it's something when we first met we talked a lot about and then I know that there was more of a focus on scaling do you see privacy kind of coming back for ZK sync maybe it's always been there and sorry if I but like at least in the messaging it hasn't been as much of a focus sure it's not been at the Forefront but it's it's always been there if you read the same uh introductory post about zi sink 5 years ago one one of the key points there is privacy yeah because you can't like you can't be using blockchains as Twitter for your bank account you cannot

be having transactions where everyone in the world can see all the assets you have and all the all the people interact with in order to enter mainstream adoption you have to implement privacy uh but the the reason we've not been focused on privacy is two things one scalability is a prerequisite for priv privacy so specifically like the the the way ZK sync is and ZK St is architected is going to make private privacy preserving transactions recursive zero knowledge proof verification on these chains super cheap because we will not need to use data availability from ethereum even on rollups to verify Zer knowledge proofs it's it's all going to

be embedded you will be just paying a fraction of a scent for this verification uh and this pay the path of privacy preserving applications but the second reason is that uh we are as as an organization as metalabs uh is one of the contributors to the ZK stack and there are now more and there will be more and more and more organizations individuals who are contributing to this open source code base of ZK stat we are embracing ethereum's philosophy of subtraction we don't want to become an Empire like Google or Facebook or whatnot with like thousands of employees doing like all kind of different things we want to focus on one problem which is the

scalability and do it really really well okay so what we're building is this Internet Protocol for this internet of chains the rest should be done by other people like we don't want to to be building wallets we don't want to be building privacy uh extensions we don't want to be building like individual DBS uh any any kind of Define FTS whatever on top of the kissing that is all for others to be built and we want to support them okay so it's in The Credo more as like guidance but not as something that you're building currently like you you're not going to build the Privacy modules or the Privacy hyper chains but someone else could build I guess a potentially like private hyper chain I I I don't see it coming for now

unless no one really builds it for a long period of time in which case we will have to intervene so like eventually I want to see all the points from zik kredo being built okay like actually life in in in being used by millions of people that is success for us I believe that some that other people will do it but like if no one builds I don't know like a fantastic wallet or a point of sales system or or something else we will have to help this happen maybe not in a way that metal laabs builds it maybe in a way that dyn ecosystem supports some teams with grants and F the development and just helps the the systems to to be created

but eventually the all of that is going to be built I can promise it this that's cool are you also paying attention to some of the kind of co-processor or like this this other way that chains and offchain computation is happening not really the traditional l2s and I'm curious if you like if you'll be interacting with any of that um sure I think eventually we will see the Cod processing being natively seamlessly integrated into into blockchain systems so you will be able to just like make a call to to Smart contract and then execute arbitrary complex function on on some public data set plugging in

external oracles that will provide access to this data and relying on some networks to the co-processing that that is going to be very easy from the programmability point of view H can you imagine building something like that within the ZK stack or would you imagine that living somewhere else being kind of this the third party groups that are putting it together uh for for for now we we're focusing on making ZK St come to life with all the promises of the ZK St with hypers scalability connection between the hyper chains with Hyper Bridges data availability different data availability modes like validum um zik Porter all of this of that has to

work in a very very smooth way and with uh fantastic user experience all the extensions like adding like Rass programs co-processing whatever that is not in the primary focus the primary focus is to make the foundation work meanwhile so like as as we approaching the completion of the foundation we'll probably have a lot of projects working on those things and we'll be happy to support them in integ cool cool is there actually a foundation for ZK sync like who gives the grants is it a treasury that's part of the like governance of the actual Network or is it some sort of like existing organization it must be rooted in the

governance system of the chain if you want okay so like obviously as long as uh like metalabs is a centralized organization it's just a just a private company so we can give grants on our own at our own discretion to whoever we want and we are supporting some teams and we're we're we're doing some Partnerships to uh accelerate the development but uh I think you're asking about the the this network Community yeah governance like exactly that like following that question on privacy like how you know I don't really imagine like matter going and funding a privacy project given that it's not in the exact sort of like you just said in the exact space that you're working working but yeah is there going to be some like

larger treasury pool or something that the like the community can actually make decisions on what gets funded uh yeah I think that every big protocol has to come up with with some form of governance that can also be sustainable financially over a long period of time and this is a big challenge that we see a lot of experiments but we don't see final like uh um final system that that is perfect yet yeah like no one had has come up with with anything that I I believe like is is yet sustainable so this is a big research challenge that we're still in interesting Alex thank you so much for coming on the show and

sharing with us all of the updates on ZK sync I feel like this was a very overdue episode hopefully it won't take another two years for us to get on one of these again uh thank you Anna enjoy the questions and it's always fun to to be here thanks I want to say thank you to the podcast team Henrik yonas Rachel and Tanya and to our listeners thanks for [Music] listening