The zkEVM is Here | Alex Gluchowski of zkSync

Transcript

foreign hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation episode we've got a fantastic episode here for you look something we thought they said was years away apparently has just come to ethereum this is a key cornerstone in the the the efforts to scale ethereum into the future and that is a z zk evm

compatible roll up we're going to be talking about that today david who do we have on the show today to speak about that yeah we have alex the co-founder ceo of matter labs who is the team behind zk sync and zk evms uh what we're talking about today or zk roll ups uh especially in the last year of 2021 of ethereum uh esp that video of vitalik talking about how the internet of money needs to cost five cents has been a source of comedy for everyone who pointing out how high ethereum's gas fees are well when vitalik made that comment about how the internet of money needs to be five cents he's talking about zk roll ups he's talking about the zk evm uh and as of very recently the zk sync team the

matter labs team has been able to put a zk evm on a test net which means we have a zk evm ready to go we just got tested out first and so we're going to we're going to ask alex about all of these questions that we have as what's left in this roadmap what can people do now when is this going to be ready for users and of course the obvious and most fun question when token and just a few more conversations of that nature yeah it's a it's an incredibly important subject particularly this year this is the the year it's a um you know proof year for ethereum scalability approach we're also going to be talking about probably toward the end of the episode maybe at the front too about ukraine understand many of the um the matter labs team is actually located in ukraine

alex himself was born in ukraine i think crypto has a story to tell and a role to play there so we'll be talking about that david before we get into the episode though we've got a special psa from our friends at opolis all right opolis is awesome like straight up awesome if you want to become a self-sovereign web 3 worker you got to check out opolis what does it do david oblige is a dow that helps people work for other dows it's a dow that supports a dows and so a lot of people would love to work in web3 would love to be a self-sovereign worker but we still haven't figured out things like healthcare and benefits and payroll and taxes and all that stuff

and opolis is bridging the world of traditional employee benefits to people's that work for a dow so it's like a health it's like a employee infrastructure collective and so we all get to share our resources that we need in order to live a self-sovereign life when it comes to our employment but also still get all the benefits that we need to make sure that our risk our personal risk our health care risk family risk all that stuff is taken care of so you can actually sign if you sign up for opolis before i believe march 1st uh which is you know you got some time but not too much time you actually get a bonus of a thousand work tokens which is the opolis dow token and a thousand bank tokens out of the bankless dow uh oh may first excuse me first even more time uh

so if you are trying to get into the world of web 3 if you are listening to ryan and i yell at you every single weekly roll up about getting a job uh the opolis might make this life easier this transition easier for you yeah totally i mean i i resisted becoming a um a you know self-employed individual for a number of years just because i got health care insurance health insurance through my my corporate employer and i couldn't let that go but opolis provides an awesome off-ramp to that they give you health insurance take care of your benefits all the messy stuff so go check that out guys all right david um gotta start with the question i always ask you any state of the nation episodes which is this what is the state of the nation today around the state of the nations we are getting synced we're

talking with the zk sync and we're getting synced with zk sync i really wanted to do like a uh that's sync not sunk right yes not sunk i really wanted to do like a zip metaphor because for some reason zk sync and zk's always feels like very zippy to me but i couldn't figure out yeah fast yeah but i couldn't figure out how to roll that into a metaphor but i'll just talk about how we're getting synced with alex from zk sync today awesome we definitely want to get in sync on zk sync and that is coming up for you we're going to get to alex in just a moment but before we do we want to talk about the sponsors that made this episode possible slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy

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your favorite apps are already live with many more coming over soon you can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.one and you can bridge your assets over to arbitrom using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience defy and nfts the way it was always meant to be fast cheap and friction free hey guys we are back with alex glicovsky he's the co-founder of matter labs matter labs is the team behind zk sync that's what we're going to talk about today the zk roll up that is pioneering a zk evm just went to testnet want to hear all about that matter labs is really uh special i think for bankless and for those who are decentralization maximalists because they've been uncompromising on

many things including open source values this is also why we're excited to bring alex on bankless alex it's great to have you on bankless iran thank you david it's an honor uh you know alex we want to start because we understand that um a large part of the team or part of the team of matter labs is actually located it has been located in ukraine uh how's everyone doing give us an update is everyone safe what's what's happening yeah so obviously everyone is uh in a lot of stress uh because we have a really large part of it i mean in both russia and ukraine and we were lucky we managed to evacuate most of our ukrainian team in safe places mostly

abroad uh before that happened because we are a security uh first company like the securities is the the paramount concern that matter of labs is kissing and uh we live by the motto uh only the paranoid survive and the rumors appear that the situation might escalate we just thought we can take risks like the history is full of black swans and uh if um things happen you know that it's going to be really really difficult to do anything but it's really cheap to get a team on a few weeks vacation abroad so we decided we should go for this even if the probability is very low unfortunately though a lot of team members have family members back in

ukraine and some of them are trying to evacuate them so yeah there is what is just going on it sounds like a very stressful time we we are glad that um you guys were able to make some provisions and keep everyone safe during this time as well alex if you're okay with it we want to talk a bit more about ukraine understand you're born in ukraine you have some personal experience there also in the world of crypto of course you are here for reasons of values alignment with with what we're doing in the space and decentralization so i think we want to talk more about that maybe toward the end of the episode would you be okay with that absolutely we'll be having it okay awesome well let's do that uh first we want to get into some of the recent events and news from a technology

perspective which is this and this is very big this happened last week i believe the zk evm on testnet okay this is something i think the the crypto community thought was um years away in fact as recently as a year ago when we had vitalik on the podcast we talked about the future of roll-ups and scalability and he was very optimistic about zk roll ups in particular zk evm roll ups uh evm stands for the ethereum virtual machine of course which allows all the programmatic d5 magic that people experience on ethereum um but he thought at the time that would be years away like years plural you know maybe

three to five and here we are one year later and you guys have just released an evm zk roll up on test net was this a you know surprise development tell us about what was actually released and how you were able to deliver it maybe ahead of what a lot of people uh thought was going to be the schedule for this thing uh absolutely it was not just with alex prediction but actually an opinion of a lot of adult crypto cryptographers in the world that this will take a lot longer to deliver because of inefficiencies of zero knowledge proofs for general computation their knowledge proofs are uh you know you have to convert your program into specialized arithmetization form like essentially in

some mathematical representation of this program and it only works uh well if your program is is fixed and well defined but with generic computation we have loops we have recursion we have all the turing complete flexibility we can build any programs uh and it just doesn't convert well like you have a lot of overhead when you're trying to represent this flexibility in terms of pure mathematical function you can imagine like huge polynomial mathematical function so uh and everyone thought well this has to stay so we just have to find better ways to uh uh you know to be more efficient with proving with overcoming this massive overhead

through maybe more efficient hardware maybe more efficient proof systems and so on uh but what we did uh was we just realized there can be uh there are shortcuts to make and they will compensate for this huge inefficiency in in interesting ways so what we realized is that during complete part of the program uh is only gonna take maybe one percent of the entire computational power that we need while most computations will be spent on like heavy specialized operations uh which include hashes storage access and so on and so on so what we did we

built a hybrid product which combines this flexible part with the rigid part and the rigid part is well optimized and we knew how to do this and there was a number of uh breakthroughs also in the crypto cryptography around pros so this combination gave us this breakthrough which allowed to deliver uh technology much quicker so alex let me uh regurgitate that to make sure that i'm following because uh as much as i like to think that i understand zero knowledge cryptography uh it's not really my strong suit and i would imagine that's probably true for the listeners so you talked about two components of a zk evm that um uh are really needed to have a fully fledged

fully expressive roll-up that has all the composability that we all enjoy uh in d5 really the thing that really makes d5 power powerful is its composability and making sure that we retain composability in a zk evm on a zk roll up is a tough challenge and you talked about how there's the expressive flexible side and then there's this side the other side of things that are i think just always the same something like signatures or things about a rollup that just like don't change but are necessary and rigid and always there for all the rollups and so you've been able to compartmentalize these things and the things that don't change you've been

able to extremely extremely optimize and then that's been able to for you to uh separate or compartmentalize away from the flexible things and allowing you to maybe tackle these two problems separately simultaneously is that a fair way to put this uh yeah you can think of it as imagine a computer which can which has a cpu which can execute any program and then you have some specialized micro schemes for digital process like a let's say a gpu for specifically for graphic processing it can do one thing but it can do it really really well and much more efficient than the cpu and cpu is very generic can execute any program arbitrarily but it's it's slower so this

is the kind of analogy we have here and for for as far as composibility is is concerned if we can express an arbitrary program an arbitrary during complete program then we can do anything evm can do so we including compostability compressibility it's not some unique special case so what what what's really important also in this regard is that we should be able to execute programs of arbitrary length and it's it's a little bit hard with snarks because they have a limited proving capacity but we use recursion which was one of the breakthroughs i mentioned where we can combine we can have a lot of

um circuits of limited size but we compile them together in a line and then we recursively prove them uh with multiple layers until we get one single snark which attests to the validity of the entire execution of the block so with this particular design of the zk evm would you say that this is uh like the end state of um or the end goal of a zk evm or do you think that further designs and further iterations will actually change the the basic fundamental primitive or do you think that this is the the design structure that we're going to go with for the foreseeable future i think the design structure the uh the architecture the big picture is going to

remain roughly the same there are a few things which i expect to change so first of all i have to clarify that when we say zkvm it doesn't really mean that the we execute evm byte code what we execute is the virtual machine [Music] byte code which is optimized for zero knowledge pros and we have a compiler from solidity and from viper which and and from like uh in intermediate called like any any other languages uh going through llvm which is a very um optimized very well known compiler platform um compiling into this zkvm bytecode and then we execute this efficient bytecode uh so llvm actually

allows us in the future to uh to integrate um other like most modern languages from rust to c plus class to golang to python whatever all of them have front ends for llvm and then we we can reuse those front ends and then use our back end to produce the the resulting byte code so if people will find other languages uh to be more useful for specific tasks in the future then they will be using those um and generally i i also think that in the in a further future we will switch from pure snacks based on plonk to uh to something fully transparent uh that doesn't require a trusted setup but generally the architecture i

expected to remain roughly the same well opening up the design space for developers to uh to make it life easier for developers is of course crucial for building out ecosystems so we're going to definitely talk about that later in the show one last question before we get into some uh back to some of the basic stuff about the test net is this zk syncs breakthrough if breakthrough is the right word is this zk syncs breakthrough or is this uh just kind of shared knowledge like is is this your guys's victory here with like what you the design pattern that you've discovered or how is this uh design structure being shared around just the greater zk roll up ecosystem uh i think it's a general approach it's it lies on the surface so we

independently came to it uh from uh guys from from stucco for example but we are building on the shoulders of giants we we are using the pattern of tinyram which was uh introduced uh actually by the founders of of stockwell uh a few uh years ago uh but then uh we we're using this like we invented this approach of combining the uh the heavy and and the flexible parts together i think independently from from other teams but i can confirm because i don't know what their decision process was okay alex so uh tell us uh what is here today in the here and now with the zk sync 2.0 public test net release which is a z key zk evm on test net so what is

this uh the the subtitle is the zke evm has arrived the first evm compatible zk roll up on ethereum's test net so what does this look like in practice how mature is it and then you know after this the question we're about to ask is uh when mainnet but first tell us what's here now uh well what you have now is a separate testnet where you can deploy smart contracts written in solidity and you can interact with them using web3 api which you normally use with other ethereum labs so it looks very similar to other l2s and and sidechains that people are currently using for

scaling just that it's based on zta vm technology so how mature it is is it we the this announcement is about the opening the testing to the public it's been running in private for quite some time we had teams building on it and we were collecting feedback uh and fixing problems so we wanted to release something to the public that is more or less mature and people are not having children's diseases so alex what are the goals of this test net are you trying to get developers to like try and break it or are you just allowing them to get a feel for what it's like to build on nck evm what are you looking to get out of this test net

it's well which is offering people to to start building because the interface won't change the interface will only be extended by certain things uh which which are clearly documented in in our docs uh but the basics will just work so we wanted to show that you can take your existing code and deploy it without modifications or with only minor modifications and it's really important that you can reuse your code bases across l1 and different l2s and you you don't have to worry you have to rewrite everything completely from scratch you can rely on existing security patterns which you understand well you can use code bases that have been heavily audited uh it will all just work

and yeah we intend to release the the mainnet as soon as uh the testing shows mature and you know like everything around uh the uh full specification is fully implemented so uh alex can we talk about that for a minute so say i'm an uh a defy app developer and i have something i've i've wired up in solidity it's working on the evm right now maybe that same uh solidity app i've now ported that to like polygon for example their you know their proof-of-stake network maybe i've i'm trying to port that to you arbitram and optimism as well if i take that code and i try to deploy it on the sync test net how much modification is is really

required there because the understanding is there there's like degrees of the modification that uh that is required and could you contrast that with um maybe uh what something like starkware requires a a developer to do to port their application absolutely so the degree to which you have to make modifications depends on what your program is using uh if you are if you have just generic code most likely you will not need to change anything we support most things most uh primitives including creating contracts create create two uh you know like hashes all the ethereum hashes which by

the way translate to the same you know we actually like if you if you use hedgehog it's gonna produce ketchup hash if your shot of five six it's gonna use uh shot of five six for not replacing them under the hood as previously uh was thought of that we will need to um so uh there are a few things that aren't just not supported yet so if you rely on them you will either have to wait or you will have to certain that circumvent though those parts of code replace them with something different those are uh some certain cryptographic primitives so we don't support pairings yet we don't support uh mo mode operations uh although the compiler will soon uh also

uh bridge that functionality and um we don't support native if sending and like and receiving so you have to wrap if as a um your c20 token for now uh the part um yeah so apart from that everything should work uh and whatever is not working is clearly documented hey could you contrast that with um starkware so so far a lot of that sounds similar to some of the optimistic roll up style evm chains that we've seen but how does that compare with uh starkware i mean i know i understand they have a different you know programming language they have a completely different

programming language which you have to use from from like you have to actually rewrite your code from scratch in that language um they have a transpiler but i i'm not sure to what degree it's uh it's functional and i my understanding is that it will produce chirocode which you will have to then manually review and adjust you cannot just like keep your code in solidity but maybe i'm wrong here but in any case the input for stacker compiler is called in cairo whereas for us it's evm code and what's really important we support the same web3 api as all the other depths you most likely will not have to change your interface you will be able to rely on

the interface and you will be able to integrate services that or like have integration of services that already implement this web free api uh like uh ether scan and the graph and and you know like a bunch of tools that work with evm um today on mainnet and then on different l2s uh and they will just work out of box which which is not the case for uh cairo as far as i want to just reorient to the uh the user's perspective here so are are you saying that it could come to pass that your your favorite defy application say an ave a compound you know a maker uniswap you know same interface you're using on the existing ethereum main net uh with with high gas

fees of course and then one day you have the option with the exact same interface to use zk sync instead and it's all you know evm zk under the hood and suddenly your gas feeds drop from like dollars to cents and from a user perspective you know it's it's the same kind of ux experience that i've always received except now there's there's far lower gas fees is that the sort of thing that we can expect i mean same block explorer same wallet same user interface just lower gas fees or is it going to be a bit more uh incremental and clunky than that no it's it's actually the the exact same user experience so a big part of that is

that we allow people to reuse wallets so any ethereum wallets works natively uh and the the keys are actually kept in the wallet so you like when you sign a transaction you you you just sign it from the wallet uh so that that's really important so yes this allows for the migration of the entire ecosystem uh on like you know on us so you you extract the ecosystem uh uh by default you don't have to write all of that from scratch i think uh arjun is maybe one example of this with people are they using they're using zk sync i'm not sure if they're using the zk evm under the hood but um you know arjun is kind of a wallet wrapper that's that's generally

been on ethereum for most of its life and now it's it's starting to spin up wallets on zk sync is that an example of this are they using the same infrastructure technology here uh well arjun is a really interesting uh example of uh so argent is on the mission to allow mainstream adoption for ethereum in general because they solve the problem of security and usability you don't have to mess with your seed phrase which is hard for me for most people like they they don't understand security of it they you know they they have never been hooked in their history of art uh so right now uh we integrated argent with the kissim version one where people can make transfers can make

trades and can interact with existing uh d5 contracts on maintenance ethereum through batches with liquidity providers uh but it's also gonna be uh used on version two and for the users the experience will remain the same you will just have more functionality because you will be able to interact with contracts one or two also directly uh so what when i say the experience is going to be the same it's actually not true because the experience is going to be better so there are a lot of things which will be possible on layer 2 which are currently limited in ethereum for example account abstraction so it thinks arjun for example will work much better on zika sync than it works on ethereum

it's going to be a lot cheaper and easier to maintain the code um you will not need real layers people will be able to interact directly with uh with the peer-to-peer network to propagate transactions uh people will actually be able to pay a native gas not in in justin eath but in any token they they transact in uh so it's it's gonna open a lot of possibilities and and also for for other um you know use cases other dapps that uh that will do interesting things with account abstraction with meta transactions etc this is why a lot of people in the ethereum ecosystem think that the zk evm

zk roll ups are going to unlock the golden age of ux for defy which is something that we've just been missing basically since the entirety of defy's existence and alex um one of the properties about optimistic roll ups is that they they they both both arbitrage and optimism just boast about how you can just take your code and immediately deploy it on an optimistic rollup and that's one of the benefits of optimistic rollups is that it's just a very low touch transition and that's what i'm hearing coming out of you in zk sync is that it doesn't actually take all that much work to deploy your code on zk sync which is just phenomenal because we already have so much of d5 built out on the ethereum l1 as soon as just being able to copy and paste it and

put it on a zke rollup uh is oh it kind of almost sounds too good to be true um but i what i do know uh that i want to check with you is that while we do have this benefit of just being able to copy and paste and put it on zk sync the developer tooling i think still is going to be something that the zk evm ecosystem needs to build out because the developer tooling for building d5 on the ethereum l1 has been extremely robust because that's what we've been having that's what we've had for the last six years is this a an important conversation when it comes to building out the zk evm ecosystem how much rewriting and just like

rebuilding of the developer tooling needs to be done to truly enable developers to unlock their full potential for building out divi defy on a zk evm yeah this is a great question so we we have to split developer tooling into two categories one is the tooling around the code itself and the other one is is general tooling around smart contracts deployment and so on so the second category is completely covered by our support of web3 api so things like uh ether scan or the graph and so on will just work out the box chain link oracle stuff like this i chain the corals and so on yeah so like this it will be all provided by default now there is a a smaller part of the developer tooling is like when you have

to debug your code where you have to see what's happening and by the way also events are fully compatible with ethereum so like uh so like everything around the where like code doesn't matter will work everything what concerns the code will have to be adjusted but that's a small part and we're working with teams to uh to make those changes and to provide whatever you need to to make it work so for example we built a extension of the hard hat plugin um for the keysync to uh to just deploy contracts like you can use your hot hat to test deploy compile uh build contracts uh and yeah so like if you

tools will have to be adjusted there how how much of a lift is this going to be like on just like can you kind of measure how much work needs to go in in order to provide developers a comparable developer ecosystem to building on uh zk sync as i said like the the tools that are that are missing or need adjustment are a minority so it won't be it won't be much we expect everything to be fully functional within a few weeks months from now alex you said earlier that um you know we're talking about not just the same ux as the ethereum mainnet people have come to expect but better user experience uh

potentially in this in this zk roll up enabled world um can we also because this is not something we've talked about yet in the in the show but we've talked about on many bankless episodes including our episode on on monolithic versus modular blockchains that people can go back and and listen to but can we talk about the decentralization that we're trying to preserve here it's like take us a few a few notches above let's let's go to the higher level and talk about why are we going all this effort in the first place like why zk roll ups in the first place and what sort of um trust assumptions exist in something like the the zk evm what are what are we trusting versus

um versus other techniques on you know other chains and monolithic layer ones talk to us about that so this this is a really interesting question which goes to the roots of why we were building zika sync in the first place uh so we started with a very clear mission and it's still rooted as the like we are very very uh mission focused pro project where uh we want all the world to go bankrupt we want people to have full control over their financial assets and if we self-sovereign and that means we need to to go absolute mainstream like we need to be able to serve millions of people billions of people without limits

uh we can only do this if we keep uh resilience of the network like we cannot have centralized entities uh performing like you know it would not even work physically that we have one entity uh that controls all of the internet of value where all of the transactions have to go through a bottleneck of a single server or a few of the servers maybe just just won't work so we need to decentralize these things and we need to make sure that they cannot be killed by really powerful actors because what we see right now in the world that politics is uh going way beyond what what people would

you know entrust them with and taking too many authorities on them so uh we want to keep this limit symbol in place um so ziki roll ups are the only technology we have today that can allow truly limitless extension of this internet of value the reason for this is since we cannot have a single cluster where everything will be happening because we will be limited by a throughput of a single consensus of decentralized [Music] nodes or a single peer-to-peer network or single data availability sharding system and so on we'll have to have many

of those clusters and they will need to be able to trust each other and trust each other in in an objective manner when i say objective i mean like machine to machine not people to people because you will have like like an internet you have a whole big network of those subnets that interact with each other so whenever you pass a message in the internet uh the systems on on the other side of the world can like verify the digital signatures they can verify encryption and see that it's coming from like the the person or the the entity that actually produce the message uh with digital with the word of value it's a lot harder because

we we're not just passing messages we're passing value so we have to trust that consensus mechanisms were enforced in the other subsystems and we preserve the scarcity so like if you send something from one side then it actually disappeared on that side and appeared on the other side and this requires this fully objective way to do uh to check that like you can trust the the seller systems uh and this is only possible with your knowledge proofs uh for the reasons that uh vitalik explained in in the recent posts about bridges we we can try to go into them uh and explain it more technically

[Music] but alex i'm curious if you agree with the bottom line here which i've i've heard described with you know zk the zk evm is is basically you're trusting two things you're trusting one the security of the ethereum main net and two you're trusting zk math that that that kind of cryptography are those the two trust assumptions or there are others here uh those are the two trust assumptions uh with the cryptography if you rely on trusted setup you would also trust the the correctness of the setup but that's kind of minor and transitory we expect in in the long run um to not be required but yes you trust ethereum as the settlement layer and the

main data availability layer uh and the source of consensus and you trust the math uh and and the code that implemented this and is there like an uh zk sync evm right now on testnet and you know i still haven't asked about the date of when mainnet which we'll get to i promise uh but um are there any kind of centralized operators in the mix here are there any sort of escape hatches i know many rollup solutions have sort of left in some centralization vectors on purpose because they're still you know testing the systems how about in zk sync are are there still some uh centralization vectors that you have in place in these early stages that you plan to

to take away later on we do have centralization of the sequencer right now because it's a lot easier and faster to develop so the uh all the transactions will have to go to the central server and the stereo then produces the box and this is only for for a short time until we have uh l2 consensus running which will be fully decentralized uh but where we're not willing to take any compromises is the security of the assets and the security big prerequisite for that is that you have this escape hatches what this means is you should be able to enforce any transaction so like if you have any money in l2 on zika sync any assets you should be able to take

those assets out if you don't trust the network anymore if the network becomes malicious either because the server is compromised or is just down and is not responding or if we don't have a server maybe you have a consensus mechanism uh governed by by some community based but maybe the majority of the stakeholders is compromised or subject to malicious takeover so you just don't trust them anymore you should be able to go to ethereum as a court of higher appeal and demand your assets be out and like this is what we will have from day one

on uh zika sync uh and this is actually a big difference from uh from stock net stock net uh for example they they they took a decision to implement um zero knowledge proofs in a slightly different way and they cannot currently build this enforcement mechanism um because they cannot prove that a failed transaction failed it can only prove successful transaction so we we decided to take additional overhead in the way virtual machine works in order to be able to prove that any transaction you made a call to this address to these arguments

this call was coming from ethereum mainnet uh as like an through a priority queue which enforces transactions and then we can prove that here is the outcome of this call here is what happened and like what could have happened is the transaction failed and not nothing executed but we will still include this transaction and we will still be able to prove that it's not executable and for the listeners that are familiar with arbitrage and optimism and they they also have centralized sequencers at this at the same time so zk sync is about comparable with the central the current centralization levels of the other uh roll-ups that users might have um might be have already have already

interacted with and basically what a centralized sequencer means is just that zk sync optimism arbitrage are the people that are ordering the transactions in the in the roll-up uh and so this is kind of par for the course for where we are in the current state of roll-up technology alex i have a question here coming out of justin drake uh and i'm gonna have to actually have to ask you to help me ask the question uh just and understand the importance of it but he asks uh can we ask about the prover cost denominated in either us dollars or gas and also the prover setup as in what type of aws instances they use and and how many alex why is this question significant and also what's the answer

uh it's significant because the it puts some limits on like what the minimum transaction costs will look like and i i can share that it's of course it depends on the type of transactions and on what operations it employs like each single transaction can be uh having a lot of storage accesses and a lot of execution or it can be like something very simple like a token transfer um but in general uh the costs uh estimates do not differ much from the cost costs on version one so you can like the key sync version one you can think of the transfers there as uh

um you know like using roughly the same computational power as what we will have for like simple erc token transfers or ethereum transfers in v2 and right now the uh the basic cost is something like 0.1 cent and and this remains like the basis so a simple transfer costs this now if your contract call requires multiple transfers and some other logic and some caching then it will be added on top of that but that that's the proof of course uh but of course in roll-ups the costs are always dominated by the data availability costs so

this is going to be the case for all roll-ups we are all using the same ethereum bandwidth space we are competing for it so uh the like the more usage will happen l2 shared by rollups the higher this costs are going to be we already see it in um you know like optimistic roll-ups are not cheap easy curl ups are not like not as cheap as some side chains because we'll still have to take those costs to ethereum uh but the beautiful thing about zk sync is that we actually plan a evolution called zk porter so the users will be able to choose uh how they want to they do to secure their data availability do they want their account to live in in the roll-up

where they have the full security of ethereum this theoretically like spare box or they are they are willing to accept certain risks uh and have their daily secured by a group of special actors called guardians which is still pretty secure and uh and like you know incentive aligned with uh with um the interests of the user uh but they will pay a lot less so if a roll-up transaction will cost let's say one dollar then the the portal users will pay maybe one second that that that's really great and i

think that's helpful so it you know for for bankless listeners once again i would refer you to that the podcast the um you know monolithic versus modular design podcasts to make even more sense of what alex just said but you know a base understanding is the ethereum scalability strategy in the modular design is we have three layers we have we have the consensus layer the data availability layer and the execution layer right the execution layer is is what's happening the data availability layers is what's happened the consensus layer is what's true okay and then ethereum in this design the mainnet remains the consensus layer what you were just talking about alex is zk sync being an execution layer uh and

then using zk porter for some data availability right and this could this could further reduce the uh the cost of transactions and it's it's user dependent whether they want to use ethereum for data availability or whether they want to use uh zk porter for data availability so that's a whole topic in and of itself and it's super cool but the net result is two things one transactions are about to get a hell of a lot cheaper good news for d5 and number two what alex just said is super cool is all of the roll-ups all of the execution layers are competing for us right now you guys are all competing for us you're competing for defy users that is a great thing i think for the ecosystem because it brings a lot of innovation

alex want to ask one more clarifying question on all of this uh which is getting released and that this is kind of a road map type question so um zk sync 2.0 the evm public test net is live that just went live last week i believe you've already had zk sync out in the wild here it is on a layer 2 beat it has 74 million in total locked value it's a zk roll up um can you talk about the difference between the zk sync that's out in the live out in the world today and like people have used this i've used this before for payments for example and the zk sync that you just released to public test

net and the trajectory of kind of what's next and and how that relates should we think of the zk sync that's on mainnet right now as kind of a 1.0 and this new evm compatible zk sync is sort of the 2.0 is that the way to think about this that's absolutely correct the zika sync one condo was a application specific execute rollout which you can only use for payments and swaps and since last summer also for nfts but nothing else you cannot have arbitrary contracts uh whereas easy keysync 2 is the full extension of ethereum where you can deploy anything you can build the entire system there so this is like going from a nokia 31

0 0 to an iphone well i think this is that's the part of the story that everyone is really excited for alex we have some questions that we still want to ask such as how we go from testnet to mainnet when we go from testnet to mainnet and then of course when token so we got these questions lined up coming for you next right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the

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any token at the current market price no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless all right guys we are back with alex from zk sync we're talking all about the current evm zk evm test net but i want to hear alex about when it becomes the zk evm main net so how does that

transition look are we just going to like wipe the slate clean with a test net and start from scratch or are we going to roll the test net into a main net how's the transition from test to main going to happen and then also when is that going to happen uh so the uh the test net from the developer perspective is going to remain at like essentially the same interface as i said a couple of features are coming uh but the contracts that are compilable and deployable now will just work you will not need to do anything we expect one major upgrade of the virtual machine to happen before the maintenance happens uh it's already on the way so it's a different version of

compiler and the virtual machine which has been developed in like in parallel sort of uh and um then just uh making sure that the test net is is mature and we can cover all the functionality and you know everything just works uh and yeah it's we're not gonna delay it for uh for unnecessary reasons we have got in our roadmap we have got all the unnecessary things and we want to get to the mainland really as soon as possible in the short as possible and so is this the state of the test net going to be preserved as an if a developer deploys like sushi swap a uniswap on uh zk on on zk sync and then it and then it goes into

mainnet is all the state of the smart contracts and the assets on the test net preserved into mainnet oh no no no that doesn't just test it like they think of it as a rinkaby or girly or coffin testament for ethereum it's a completely separate experiment so it's actually tied to a particular ethereum test now i think it's now we're on gurley uh so we actually have a deployment of the casing contract on that ethereum test net which the l2 state is attached to and so alex um how long are we talking here yeah i mean there's this phrase in uh you know the ethereum world that's uh that's become popular weeks not months

right uh are we talking weeks we talking months here are we talking about we we're realistically probably talking months uh about like not years for sure okay it will happen this year before the merch when's the merch gonna be david june 14th i did not say that uh okay so alex i think the other question that everyone really wants to hear is uh win token uh well that's that's also an interesting question so we're gonna deploy zika sync in stages in the first stage we're only going to deploy zika roll up which does not yet like really require a token uh but the

token is really needed for ziki porter because we need to secure the data with something that has uh inherent uh connection to this data that like you know like we will will uh will have consequences if uh if the data becomes unavailable and it's hard to manipulate so we we yeah uh we will definitely need token for that and we will need the token to introduce where to consensus uh and we also don't want to delay those things so they are next on the road map right after launching the payment so the the token is needed to uh slash people that do not secure the zk porter appropriately and then it's also needed

to decentralize the sequencer are those the two use cases that you just stated uh that's right although we don't we're we're not gonna slash individual uh people securing the data this is pretty interesting indeed reporter you you are never slashed you just like you're taking risks if you don't provide date like um you are only slashed if you are not providing data that you previously agreed to to provide this is very different so you know under normal circumstances you never need to provide this data it's only required in the case when the operator becomes malicious for the evaluator consensus becomes malicious and like stops serving users

which hopefully never happens uh but um you as a user you actually don't have any consequences you you you should not be afraid of running a guardian node that secures zika sync on your ordinary laptop or or even you know like on this machine in the cloud that you control there is nothing like nothing can go wrong immediately if you are compromised unlike staking in in normal consensus mechanisms so is the theorized one of the theorized uses of the token is to to validate the zk uh roll up the zk sync and then receive uh compensation or fees from the uh from the sequencer and so if you are if you

are uh validating on on zk sync you get to order the transactions and then the incentive would be that you get to extract some amount of mev from the the zk roll up is that right or perhaps perhaps is that right so yes if you are a validate in the zika sync then you are the sequencer the validators will be will serve as a collective decentralized sequencer uh and yes of course you you get uh some some fees from the users to uh to you for this work that you provide do you have any details or notes because we want these things to be decentralized but then when we mint this token it starts off centralized you have any like notes for us and how you plan on

what the theorized plan is from going from a centralized token supply to a decentralized token supply uh so you mean um how are you gonna diffuse the token how we're gonna diffuse the token this is this is a big question which i'm not ready to answer now but it must be done in a uh like in a way that that maximizes decentralization because with data availability it's um [Music] you don't want them like the malicious majority can can uh do as much harm as uh um uh comparable to to a side chain so like

you really like it's not just about the controlling the sequence of transactions or extracting mbv or something like that it's really a matter of security and it's really really important for us to get it in the hands of individual people and this is why it's important that you can run a guardian note on a normal laptop because we expect the the and also you there are no latency requirements you don't have to be online all the time you don't have to be online with a super fast internet uh you can just run it on the laptops we expect a lot of people to contribute to actually become validators just like they're on ethereum full nodes right now requirements will will be roughly the same but you get paid for it unlike if you don't so we we think the

decentralization of the portal will be very very high and it must be reflected in the initial distribution of the token which we'll have to design accordingly that that that is fascinating i hope bankless listeners are reading between the lines here a little bit i mean we have confirmed the existence of a token it's necessary for the operation of zk porter and for uh the zk sync consensus layer um don't have an answer on when token of course which is very difficult to answer but it feels like it's a prerequisite for both of those two technologies and it also feels like there's great opportunity to get plugged into this ecosystem and start giving the network what it wants what does the network want

wants developers it wants users it wants liquidity it wants decentralization give it those things you know start start trying to run some of this infrastructure run guardian nodes um that's uh that's my footnote i think on everything you just said alex there's also this other entity here um called zk dao that has recently spun up can you tell us a bit more about zk dao what what is this and how is it related to the the primary zk sync project that we've been talking about so far uh well ziki dao is a separate thing uh uh the it's a cooperation uh with uh vidal

that pledged to to support the uh l2 ecosystem and invest in projects and support projects that are building on where to um uh and yes so it's open for as a source of funds for uh developers which we encourage to start using and that was uh 200 million dollars i think bitdow uh committed to funding the um zk dao with 200 million dollars around coordinated milestones so it's another way for bankless listeners to get plugged in go go check out what zk dao is doing i think they're just getting uh spun up right now um alex before we shift the conversation to ukraine a little bit and talk a bit more

about that is there anything else you want to tell us that we haven't touched so far that that you think is super interesting for the community to know about zk sync and your plants moving forward at matter labs uh i think that the uh i i touched on this already but like it's it's really important to understand that zero knowledge probes will be the technology that will enable us to go to this completely limitless internet of value uh and uh this is gonna change uh yeah this is gonna change the world i think in in the way uh how freedom is promoted and how self-sovereignty is promoted because like literally everyone will be able to get

the grasp of those things and we'll see the transformation of social media of everything powered by these technologies so um as we shift the conversation alex and thank you so much for for your massive contributions to the space uh you know on behalf of us at bankless and crypto uh we believe very much in the principles of decentralization and and you guys are uh painstakingly building building out those those value systems and into the code uh that that you're pushing out there and it's just fantastic to see so as we transition the conversation of ukraine i'm just uh kind of curious to hear a bit more about your your personal story because it feels like you've got

um you got a story in ukraine uh having been uh born there uh interest did hear about that and then uh why why why crypto became important to you as well so i guess first of all high level what's your lens on everything that's going on in ukraine right now and how do you think the you know the crypto story dovetails with that does the crypto industry uh the technology that we're building does it offer any any solutions any help to uh some of the conflict that's going on what's your take here uh yeah uh well i was born in soviet ukraine uh i grew up in ukraine when i was very

small when ukraine became independent and i like the conflict we see now is really a continuation of the tragedy that the country experienced with the soviet rule uh and like this is direct cause of uh like for me uh what brought me like this is systematic the root uh motive that brought me into krypton because as a kid i saw the consequences of the centralized economy centralized political system playing out on the society where everything collapsed um uh you know like it not that it collapsed it's just like it never really worked in the first place

the soviet union was the total mass like it was completely inadequate system of governance uh economical system where everything was in shortage like the shops weren't empty everything was these balanced people were on like dismotivated only a few branches that enjoyed a lot of attention by the government like military got some degree of uh you know world uh achievements but the rest of the country was completely in issue so what we see now is like the empire strikes back and wants to take it back like because the uh processes in russia took it back earlier than

than what we've seen now and the antidote to this is to give more power to people economical power which will enforce their political powers the sooner we can get there the less likely such scenarios on a huge scale will will actually play that you have a single person which is capable of taking decisions that will destroy the world or destroy entire countries uh because everything is subordinated and you know highly centralized uh so i i was i think seven when uh

uh there was a hyperinflation going on in my country where prices would rise by 30 every single day for a period of a year i saw how that works uh so i was uh surrounded by people that were highly mistrustful of governments and banks of sorts and since then i i once made a uh a clash of um bank financial or other types of like crisis involving money uh that happened in the world ever since then like almost every year in some part of the world sometimes globally

uh where people could not get money from the banks where you could see the queues before atms where the economy would stop working like you would get capital controls you'll get mandatory orders to sell uh foreign um fiat reserves and and stuff like that uh and you would see people losing all of their fortunes overnight uh that they were working really hard to get and were hoping to to pass on to their to their kids and you know like a lot of tragedy a lot of suffering uh that all roots down in the way the society is organized like freedom is is lacking because certain groups of

interests want to preserve the interest and they're abusing the powers there and you know like most of the people in the world live under corrupt regimes they're not living in democracies um even if you live in a democracy you can have a situation like you know we recently have in canada uh where money is being confiscated without court orders without any like any even like pretext of some legal uh decency uh so it should be a really really strong message to everyone like it will only stop if you don't let these things to happen and the way to to to not let these things happen is that to have food

control to empower the individual and not some authority that claims to to work on people's behalf and this is like to me this is all what was like what crypto is all about starting with bitcoin and and then extending with ethereum which gave it a lot more powerful um capabilities to to build like really really interesting things and expanded like to actually absorb all of the world's finance all of the world's uh values into this huge internet of internet 2.0 3.0 alex there's been a number of just examples of how crypto has been a part

of this story there's a ukraine dow that has helped raise four million dollars there's the the bitcoin volumes jumping to all-time highs in the russian rupal due to the devaluation of the rupal there are stories of people being able to maintain their wealth as they flee from kiev and other ukraine stories because of the power of private keys are there any stories that you've heard that have stood out to you as uh examples of like crypto really helped here is there any stories that you've heard that you you can share with us uh well they just the donations uh is is a really big powerful thing uh because it's it's really you know the banking system is not reliable it was already hard to send money in ukraine for

certain things like sometimes money comes back it's just like a lot easier uh for uh for you to donate and i actually i spoke personally to the founders of ukraine now the unchained fund uh the people who manage the uh people from the minister of digital transformation uh donations on the uh twitter at ukraine uh all of them are legit to please donate because like as we speak right now there is work going on and people are dying and like people being bombarded civil citizens please please do something like three or close to half a million refugees now the borders with uh 20 hours long queues to

just leave the country not everyone can leave a huge tragedy huge humanitarian crisis going on so please donate well we can definitely get those links into into the show notes i'll do that as you uh as i ask this next question um do you have any idea how when when we send ether or bitcoin to the addresses that have been uh generated and verified by by the ukraine dow in in the the actual ukraine uh digital organization how does that how does the ether that we send or the usdc that we send how does that actually translate into actual help on the ground do you actually do you know how those two things are bridged uh yeah so they either sell it for in ukraine for crimina and send to bank

accounts or just get cash and pay people in cash for the goods that that are needed on spot or they sell it and brought on foreign accounts and purchase stuff uh that helps people and transport it back into ukraine alex um i'm curious as well what does the crypto community look like in that part of the world yeah ukraine uh even parts of of russia is is it strong is it is it robust uh just in general um what does it look like uh well there are a lot of technological projects uh coming from russia and ukraine uh with a lot of russian ukrainian developers because the uh

the mathematical and like the scientific school in soviet union was pretty strong because it was necessary for the defense military but like the the good uh outcome is that we have a lot of smart people who are really well trained in mathematics programming and they're building stuff uh there is less crypto uh you know like business crypto projects like most people who are followers of some projects like uh guys uh from new york protocol uh salon is partially followed by ukrainians uh a lot of others they're mostly in the west because

like crypto is a truly global movement and it doesn't know boundaries and like people just move around and most people are just normal installation as i've put the donation addresses of bitcoin and ethereum which have been verified into the youtube show notes so if you're watching live you can go ahead and refresh the page and the addresses will be there available to you and they'll also be in the podcast show notes as well um alex thank you for for your perspective and also just sharing everything else with us on on today's state of the nation without with uh zk sync so thank you for your time sir thank you guys and thank you all the listeners it's incredible uh privilege to talk to you uh to talk to folks like alex uh i'm

saying this to you to bankless listeners you know uh i know we've had many generations of freedom fighters and alex to me and his team is an example of the freedom builder uh which is fantastic this is truly a technology for the people and by the people whether you're russian ukrainian somewhere from the west uh you know this is why we're on the bankless journey as for decentralization from power back to the people self-sovereignty uh so it's a fantastic story to see anyway guys risks and disclaimers of course none of this has been financial advice it never is eth is risky crypto is risky so are rollups at this stage in the journey so is d5 you could lose what

you put in but hey the world's kind of risky too so what do you have to lose i don't know we're headed west though this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested

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