Lightning Talk: L2BEAT ZK Catalog 🤝 Ethproofs by Sergey Shemyakov, L2BEAT

Transcript

And the second uh L2B contributor that's speaking is Sergey who's going to be speaking uh contrast and comparison between the ZK uh the L2 beat ZK catalog and ETH proofs. Uh where do they overlap? Where do they stand alone? Thanks for being here. >> Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so hi guys. I'm Sergey. I'm a ZK researcher at L2BIT. And today I'll be speaking about L2B ZK catalog and it proves. So L2 beat ZK catalog is this page that uh basically tracks all the ZK proving systems that scale L2s and E proofs is this um dashboard that

has a look at all the ZK proving systems uh that should scale L1. And the natural question you might have is, okay, why do we have two ZK dashboards? So, corporate needs us to find the diff between those two. Let's make the corporate happy. I think that's the name of the game for ZK uh for crypto right now. So, and let's have a look at the diff. I'll be using this tool. Um, it's a tool created by our wonderful tooling team at a little bit. It actually doesn't let you compare two different websites, but it does let you compare two different smart contracts deployed on chain. Very useful. I'm using this a lot in my research work. So, um I look at it a

lot. I will make you look at it as well. Let's go to the first div. Um so the first diff is that L2B looks at all the ZK proving systems that are deployed on chain and they're actually in production and it proves also track some systems that are under development or you know uh still being modified and the main insight coming of this uh div is that actually so I had a look at the this tracker by east proofs it has 37 ZKVMs only five are used in ZK catalog and there are two more that I used um in production but are not uh followed on proofs.

So the diff number two is that L2BK catalog also tracks nonZKVM snark provers and it proves focuses only on ZKVM systems. So sometimes they're called snarks and the insight coming from this div is that actually there are projects that continue deploying uh completely snark um system. So um C custom circuits in the bottom you can see Intimax launched June this year and the mainet they um I think they're using their circuits for privacy mainly and later launched in October this year. I think they are mostly using for performance but they don't use any ZKVM.

So diff number two has to uh diff number three has to deal with diff number two. we have to deal with trusted setups because we also look at snarks and this proves doesn't have to do with trusted setups. That's fair enough for um scaling one but the learning um coming from this is that actually most projects use um this as recognition trust setup from you know the old days of 2019 which is quite good but there are some notable outliers. So mainly I want to highlight growth 16 um trusted setup by SP1 that has only uh seven participants somehow as I understand all affiliated with succinct and interestingly enough used by uh four projects in production including zirkut.

So, we just wanted to call this out. But, um, also to be fair to them, they also offer the plunk final wrap and they mention in the docs that you can use it if you're not happy with this. And another call out is to Starware, whatever these guys do. Um, they don't um they don't rely on trusted setups. I think that's great. Um, yeah, I think we should look at them. So diff number four is actually not a diff. This is the same. Um both projects push for transparent, reviewable and reliable ZK systems that can scale Ethereum. And the insight coming from this div is actually the main insight of

my presentation. Everything before was a setup and this is the punch line. It is extremely hard to independently verify the onchain verifiers and that they actually check what is claims to be checked. So basically that there are no back doors in the whole onchain um setup. So for example this is a um circuit uh this is onchain verifier for um flunk I think it's um completely not clear what is exactly being verified here or for example this is um part of tao onchain setup this is the risk zero program hash again just by looking at these things you would be able to know what exactly is being proven and

verified so somehow in our industry we have this social norm to not deploy unverified contracts and I think this is great but I want to argue that we should also treat the ZK proven systems deployed on chain in the same way and really um be mindful about this. So this is the PSA. We often talk about this ZK technology as this tech that is secured only by cryptography and I mean this has merit in it. But this is true only if you have verified the setup and you know which program is being proven and which program is being verified.

So this is our call to the projects. Please be mindful of your setups. So this means if you write circuits please provide the ways to regenerate um some guides how to regenerate the verification keys. If you are a ZQVM project and you use some programs please provide the sources for the programs and how to regenerate onchain commitments. And here is a proposal posted on our LCB forum um to actually add this to as a requirement to stage one projects. So if you're a ZK rollup, you will be um you probably will be required to u publish this information and make this accessible. And from our side, we are committed to bringing this um

information to the public to make it transparent. So here you can see some screenshots from um Zika catalog. We have already um verified the um onchain verifier deployed by uh ZK prover from Polygon labs. We have already verified some programs um from um these ones are used in S2 prover by starket. So you can uh go go there check out the all the steps and do this yourself. You don't have to trust us with this green check marks. We also try to put the we also put the verification steps there.

So coming back to the diff number four um this is the the common push of LCBDK catalog of E if proofs to bring the transparence and um and reliability and auditability to ZK setups but also I think this is the something we should do altogether including all the ZK project that are in the room right now. So please be mindful of this and then maybe we realize that we are working to the same goal but just move from slightly different directions. Thank you.

[applause] Thank you so much Sergey. Um any questions for Sergey? I not seeing anything in the chat. All right. Amazing company to keep. So glad that you guys were here. Big another round of applause for LTV.