zkEVM & zkPorter with Matter Labs

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i chat with alex glukowski ceo at matter labs and co-creator of zk-sync we chat about the history and evolution of the zk-sync project the upcoming zk-sync 2.0 which includes a zkevm an evm based programming model and

composability architecture as well as a new l2 scaling technique called zk porter now before we start in i want to let you know about the zk jobs fair which is happening on april 22nd so this is an event that i'm actually running it's part of the zk session series it's the third monthly event that i'm putting together but unlike the previous events this is not a conference it really is a job fair all online so i've learned that many of the top projects and companies working in the zk community are looking to hire talented people into their team and at the same time i've seen that the zero knowledge community keeps growing there's more students or folks just coming out of school as well as employees in other areas of blockchain tech or other traditional

tech companies who are looking to get their feet wet in the zk space so i decided to put together a social event that brings these two groups together and that is the zk jobs fair so this is happening as mentioned on april 22nd it follows the third day of the zk proofs workshop which is a full-fledged conference put on by our friends at zkproof.org you can expect the job fair to be a social gathering on an interactive online platform i'm still deciding on which platform to use but have in mind something like gather dot town or topia or sofia or something in that direction but whatever the choice i'll be sure to throw in some fun games or activities to try out while you're there so if you are looking for a new

opportunity in the space or you're just curious to meet some of the folks behind the projects you know and love do apply to be whitelisted for this event i've added the application form in the show notes and i'll shortly be announcing the sponsoring projects who will be present at these events ready to meet you on another note i want to say a big thank you to this week's sponsor mina protocol mina is the world's lightest blockchain it's a l1 crypto protocol that replaces the traditional blockchain with a zero knowledge proof ensuring a super light and constant sized chain that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network mina's mainnet has just gone live offering users a platform to build a

private gateway between the real world and crypto mina also has an active demo in partnership with teller.finance for end-to-end data privacy showing how you could use mina to access your credit score and prove that you meet credit threshold requirements for on-chain services without ever disclosing your actual score very interesting use case right there so if you're interested visit meenaprotocol.com to find out more how you can get involved and join the community so thank you again mina protocol now here is my conversation with alex glukowski all about zk sync [Music] so today i'd like to welcome alex the co-founder of matter labs and one of the

co-creators of zk sync back to the show welcome back alex hi anna very excited to be here again yeah so this is actually your third time i think on the zero knowledge podcast and i feel like what's cool with matter labs and the work that you've been doing with your team i feel like i was there kind of at the beginning of that journey like i've seen it now for uh maybe almost like two years three years how long have you have you been around so we started building uh zika sink i think two and a half years ago it was december i'm trying to remember like were you were you doing like hackathon projects before that point uh not really my co-founder was involved in a number of hackathons

that's what it was i was doing different things but then we converged onto the same idea from different angles yeah and actually the first presentation of zika sync was on hackathon in singapore exactly this is this is what i'm remembering i think i may have been like i was there and i was a judge there and this is why i feel like i really saw zk sink's kind of history from the very beginning to now in a way that i maybe haven't seen like other projects develop so much so anyway it's a project that's dear to my heart anyway so i also you know as the xeronaut validator we actually have started to do a few small investments and we have done an investment into zk sync as well and so this is

also an exciting thing you're you know it's a it's a very new endeavor for us and it's one of the first investments we've made i'm very excited to talk to you today about this project and where it's at so the first time you came on the show i think we actually did a general overview of what a zk roll up is and the second time you came on the show you introduced ck sync and redshift but this time around like what's kind of neat is since that second uh interview and since you've introduced ck sync i feel like a lot of us have actually gotten a chance to properly interact with it because of its inclusion in git coin so the git coin grant round clr matching nine

just ended but like zk sync is is something that people are probably more familiar with today so why don't you tell us a little bit about the history of this project and maybe how it's been going this past year now that like people can actually play with it sure so we started working on this because it was uh two and a half years ago we just had crypto kitties crisis and it was quite obvious that scalability is going to be a big problem into the future in the context of the mass adoption of crypto when we expect a lot of people to come and start using ethereum and crypto in general and we kind of did not anticipate this to happen so fast and to such a great extent

as it turned out to be so we realized that uh zero knowledge proofs offer a tremendous potential to solve this problem it was what the the only way to break out of the blockchain to lemma to actually scale blockchains without giving up decentralization and security to the class degree so we started back then with basic r d on zq roll ups because the technology the fundamental research was not mature enough to support generic use cases so like the zero knowledge proofs were still on the verge of being usable in production back then we only had

the the most advanced proof system that was available to us was growth 16 and that required a trusted setup ceremony for each circuit in other words for each application and for each update of this application similar to how zika did this and it was clear that it's not very sustainable and we did not have recursion so we can only do some very simple applications some some very very limited applications in scope with fixed functionality so we went for payments because we saw uh the need for payments growing and people in a lot of countries embracing crypto as not only a store of value but actually means of payment already and this is what brought us to the first

version of zika sync which we launched last summer where we just had payments with a heavy focus on usability we we made a roll up which was very convenient to use you did not have to pre-register before you could just use your existing ethereum addresses uh you could transfer funds to any ethereum address no matter whether it's a normal account or a smart contract or you know like we we built a ux friendly wallet with a lot of nice things and it it kind of paid off we got a lot of integrations recently starting with bitcoin uh in the origin the first bitcoin round we did

i think less than half of contributions worth through ziki singh in the latest round which just ended uh 82 of all contributions were through the kissing yeah i mean i think the way they displayed it too is to say like if you use zk sync you actually can this is sort of your savings and the savings are so dramatic now that it makes a lot of sense that these are like it's it's so funny because it's really the it is the need that's pushing people into this you know like it's it's really solving a problem and not just like a cool nice to have i mean the first time around i was just like yeah i get to use the zk roll up but but i also saved some money but yeah this time around it's like

there's no question this is true and it's it's very clear to everyone that the need is burning and not only for payments it turned out that you need to scale now all smart contracts on ethereum and this was clear already a year ago and uh coincidentally a year ago something happened in the zero knowledge proof research which made it possible to accelerate dramatically the adoption of this technology namely the long proof system was introduced and recursion was invented for planck yeah recursion is what allows us to build this generic smart contract functionality which we're very excited to talk about today we just published an update about zika sync

development roadmap and we will heavily rely on it to bring evm compatible or evm portable smart contracts to ezekie roll up which is huge news it's it's really hard to underestimate the importance of this so let's let's talk about that kind of the the update and the things that are now planned and then i want to revisit how plonk and recursion actually allow for this but first why don't we introduce like what are these updates what's coming up for zk sync so the main news is that we we are going to open a public test net for ez casing 2.0 in may and as you can see 2.0 is going to be the platform where we support smart

contracts and not just smart contracts it's going to be evm compatible smart contacts you will be it's not strictly evm compatible in in the strict scientific sense because we will recompile your solidity code into a different virtual machine which is snark friendly but it's essentially using the same code and this is what most people mean when they're saying they have compatible so you can take your existing solidity code your existing tooling and make very very minimal modifications in in this and maybe for for a lot of contracts you won't need to do any modifications at all if you don't rely on some specifics of edm and it will just work out of box in the new version

and it will also be composable with other contracts so the entire programming model remains exactly as it is now in ethereum you have your contracts those companies can have some state you can update the state and the they can call each other and have atomic composable transactions across a number of different contracts exactly the same way you have now on ethereum and what is this called exactly like is it still just called zk sync or is there like a term for this evm compatible component technically there is no name yet we will we will think of naming maybe we'll come up with something nice but let's call it for now zk evm because

that that's going to be easy for people to grasp it's a virtual machine which is steering complete this is something we've been working on for many months now and it's coming to completion and this virtual machine has a compiler from both zinc our existing smart contact language which is based on rust and from solidity and we use llvm to compile and use a lot of optimizations and security features from llvm and we use recursion to efficient to make it efficient because with zero knowledge proofs you can only create efficient circuits which are specialized but then if you have different different smart contracts

and uh they require different types of operations to different degrees so for example one contract call may have a lot of storage accesses and a different smart contract call might require a lot of using of hashes it would be really hard to fit them into a single type of circuit that's why we're using different circuits for these different operations and we combine them nicely through the recursion so you kind of do like another snark of those different snarks and i guess are you just doing one you're just doing one level of recursion here you're not doing like multiple recursions or we're we're going to do multiple levels of recursion so

what we we already have recursion live in production on mainnet for payments this is why zksync is currently the by far most affordable roll up for payments we have the lowest cost across all roll-ups there are some validium solutions with with lower costs but they don't offer the same security guarantees as roll-ups but across all roll-ups we're cheapest because we use recursion i see i recently did an episode on languages with alex osdemir we actually surveyed all the zk languages and zinc was one of them but do you feel like are you moving a bit away from zinc as your core language and focusing more on the solidity use or are you going to really be

promoting both of those things i think the short term solidity will be very exciting to most people because they can immediately port the existing applications got it and this is why we're gonna put solidity in the foreground for now but we're still continuing development of zinc and zinc will be available from from the beginning from from the test net in may uh we think that long term rust based languages will win and we might even proceed from zinc to native rust at some point in the future which which is relatively easy for us because we use llvm and we can use any language which compiles with lvm front-end such as c plus plus or rust or

golem or python or something like like haskell but we think that rust seems like the best candidate long term for a smart contract based volume uh we see this with with other platforms embracing rust uh such as uh aelio and polkadot and near and uh facebook's team previously libra so long-term effing cross will win but short term of course we want to support the existing ecosystem and let everyone migrate seamlessly on zika sync and this is why got it like even like on day one when you can choose between using zinc or solidity does zinc offer some benefit like is there something

that makes the programming better easier does it offer anything like clo is it closer to the zk proofs or something yeah well it offers exactly the same functionality just the language itself is better suited for building secure applications you have immutability out of box by default you have a pure functional programming style with no side effects and so on and so on you have things like the the syntax is a lot nicer you just like produce you need to write less code and this code is going to be more secure than if you approach it with something like solidity which is coming more from the direction of imperative programming

but from this functional standpoint it's going to offer the same scope of of capabilities got it so i'm kind of curious like there are some new solutions that are coming out also using planck such as aztec i mean they're kind of the developers of that concept um their focus seems to be very much on privacy and i'm wondering like how are they different and does zk sync have the ability to also provide privacy or is this like a secondary is this a secondary benefit that you're not as focused on this is something we're not directly focused on because our main concern is now scalability and compatibility of the existing applications uh but you can easily build privacy on

top of zika sync because it's it's coming naturally out of box of the design which we're offering because we will have a knob code for recursive proof verification and those proofs do not need to go on uh ethereum call data and they are very cheap to verify like with with as with all roll-ups the cost of call data by far overweights the computational cost of producing your knowledge proofs so if you want to build a something like tornado cache or any other privacy preserving application on top of zika sync you will be able to do it the same way you do it now on ethereum just a lot a lot cheaper your transaction costs with

like into onto another cash you will have to pay something like 100 times the cost of a normal l1 transaction or maybe 20 times when you think it's going to be roughly as expensive as a normal zika sync transaction so it's not coming in the base layer of the protocol but as a like layer three you can easily build anything there okay in our last episode we actually did talk about this idea of this roll-up existing on its own with validators and like having somewhat of its own ecosystem and i know that in that conversation we did have quite a bit of conversation about data availability and i'm kind of curious here what you've described with the z let's call it ck evm in zk sync

if actions are happening in there and they're not kind of reporting back to ethereum like is that then fully a standalone blockchain of its own with validators writing to a chain like are they acting as sort of the connector to the to the main chain are they actually doing something else in this case well i think it's uh similar to all other roll-ups i think that it's fair to say that all roll-ups are standalone blockchains that are rooted in ethereum and that use ethereum network to broadcast to propagate and make data available so in this sense uh yes it's a separate chain with a separate state but it

completely relies on ethereum food security so as with any ziki roll up the protocol offers exactly the same security guarantees as layer 1 as the main because you can access the data but you have to go and fetch data from the archive nodes and download the transaction inputs and then reconstruct the state from there if you don't trust the validators like do you have in a way your own consensus mechanism happening there anyway like or are the validators doing something more passive than what we see in normal pos systems so with z here all up and with the roll up roll ups in general you strictly do not require a consensus mechanism

but you can build one you can have one if you want and this will provide this is interesting to me yeah this is exactly the question i have because it seemed like i always understood ck rollups as not needing the consensus mechanism like that was the thing that the the l1 provided but now i'm hearing something else and this is what i want to explore a little bit like this sounds like a like an evolution of thinking around these these architectures well there was this idea of progressive decentralization that you should start with the minimum decentralization required for application then proceed gradually because it will give you faster time to market and this is exactly what we're doing so we're starting with a single sequencer a single of validator and then we're going to introduce a decentralized consensus

to avoid any potential for censorship and to to have the system fully controlled and owned by the community and not by any single party we don't want to be a single party that provide the proofs and like have all the responsibility and be subject to some political pressure we want it to be owned by users so this is coming for the kissing got it and like right now the zk sync that we've used on with git coin that is like currently there's a single validator into you guys this is true okay i mean i know that other constructions like hermes they also have a way to decentralize in a way that that connection point between the the l2 and the l1 but how would you compare then to like

how does the validator community or consensus community of zk sync compare to something like hermes well in here as far as i'm aware of their design it's still a centralized sequencer but then you can you can kind of decide on layer one who is going to be the centralized sequencer for the next epoch but then throughout ebook it's the same what we mean with the consensus that we are building is that every block is decided upon by the consensus of validators so that you don't have not only you don't have a potential for denial of service by by any single validator so with in in the harvest design if the validator

who gets the next slot the right to produce blocks throughout the next epoch just goes offline then you lost that slot then the entire system will stop and wait for the next slot to arrive but with the design that we're building uh if some of the validators are faulty it's going to be byzantine consensus anyway so like it will still continue as long as you have the majority of the validators who are live and functional you will just move on and this is important if we're talking about a network which secures operations for millions of users and handles thousands of transactions per second you can't really afford a downtime of even some minutes also something we talked about in the last episode was about data availability

on the main chain is that still the same setup that you have today with this kind of evolution or has that changed oh this is a very very exciting part which i'm really happy to talk about we're we're publishing the post by the time the episode is live we will have details about this new construct live and indeed for zika sync 2.0 we will start with the architecture called ez key porter to with ziki porter approach the users will have an option to have their accounts on the zika roll-up site or the zika portal site and the zika roll-up users will have all the benefits all the upsides and

downsides of zika roll-ups so they will pay normal easy roll-up transaction fees and they will enjoy the full security guarantees of l1 on the zika portal side if you choose for that account type you will have slightly degraded security guarantees but they're still better than optimistic roll ups and we can talk about that uh but you will pay minuscule prices this will not with indian gas prices because the data availability is going to be stored off chain but off chain secured by a a consensus of many validators broadly decentralized and the

interesting thing is that the both account types will remain fully transparent to each other and seamlessly interoperable so for example imagine that you will have a uni swap on the zika rollup account so it's fully secured by uh like just like like main one and all the big landing partners will have their accounts also on the ezekiel up side but then you will have millions of users on the portal side who can interact with this union swap just the way they would interact with with the like normally with the swap just like making a simple click in metamask and they will have to pay this very small transaction piece so this is what dk porter gives you so

the zk roll up construction so there's these two it's almost like two versions and you can you can opt in or you can choose which one you're gonna do but the zk roll up does it still have the data availability set up that we talked about in that last episode and by the way everyone should check that out potentially if they want to i keep referring to it but like there you had explained how it was written on to l1 is that still the case for the zk roll up version exactly yes so for each update in the ziggyrop account we will have to publish the final state of that account on uh ethereum network so anybody can check that and if something happens to the validators you have full guarantees that you can

retrieve this money uh you can reconstruct your state and then provide the proof of ownership and fetch the the funds from this account got it and with the zk porter though it's off chain consensus and i guess like that consensus actually determines state and all of the data lives there well it's it's independent so we'll have a separate consensus for the state for for the blocks that will go to mainnet or like for all our blocks in general uh but this data consensus is only securing data i see okay and this is why the threshold of entry is going to be very low you will be able to participate in this consensus with with a simple laptop i mean your participation will be meaningful

you will be making some money from providing this data availability to the network and we will be able to collect signatures from 10 000 validators for each block it doesn't have to be synchronous we don't have to collect those signatures within three seconds we can take it can take time it can be 15 seconds half a minute because the blocks that go on mainnet are asynchronous anyway we still have to wait for the zero knowledge proof to be generated which is still some a few minutes probably so we can wait for all the signatures to be collected and we can set the threshold very high so we can have a quorum of a super majority of the staked

token holders for every block to go on main app it's important to know that all transactions concerning zk porter accounts are secured by the same zero knowledge proof state transition function that we use for executive roll up in other words the validators can never steal funds and it can never corrupt the state so the only bad thing that can happen to ziki porter accounts is that the majority or super majority of the token holders will sign some valid state transition but will withhold the data and not inform everybody about what this new state is okay in which case all the accounts in dk porter will be frozen

including the stake of the stock holders so the the only thing they can do is kind of like take everyone hostage together with their own money and freeze and destroy their stake so it will be suicide it stops so we are talking about a you know for this system in order to remain secure and the funds to remain accessible we need a not an honest majority not an honest minority but a just a rational minority so we need a minority of people who are sane and don't want their funds to be lost from the token holders if you have that it's it's going gonna be fine but like when you mention felidium and i know

you're like it's not like validium but it's a bit like validium um like in there i know that there's a committee and here i guess it's this validator group and in both cases there's this assumption that it would be suicidal to like you'd have to wreck yourself for no reason and sure many people would have to do that at the same time in order for this to be corrupted is that sort of the link part except that instead of it being a committee it's more of a validator community that's exactly the difference and the the problem with the committee is that you have a few validators there because if you have a lot of them then how do you manage how do you govern the participation for whom i was supposed to wait like for all

of them for half of them like it must be a small group of permission participants and if it's a small group of permission participants all they have at stake is their reputation which can be a lot but it's hard to quantify but then they might have some some some different incentives which you like they might be subject to some political pressure imagine regulators coming to to this known group of small validators and telling them now you have to introduce kyc and aml and people on this list we just want to confiscate their money and they will have to comply they won't be able to confiscate the money immediately but they can freeze those accounts and

then do an update at some point and take this money but this is a very plausible situation we know that this happens to the exchanges we know that this happens to a lot of centralized projects because they are known they they have a clear set of owners and there are a few of them and it's really easy to come after them now with the decentralized data availability we are in the same situation as with ethereum there are a lot of nodes so it's really important to have this threshold low and to allow people to participate with minimum hardware requirements and also the decentralization of the token is going to be very important because you want the

super majority or even simple majority of the token holders to be as broad as possible not to be controlled by 20 nodes but maybe by 2 000 so in this case it's going to be very hard to come after all of them it's it's a truly decentralized system and this fact is what makes the ziki porter actually more secure than the optimistic roll-up so this this is a very interesting and nuanced compare and uh some people might disagree with me but let me let me explain the let's just examine how the security assumptions work in in an optimistic roll-up and how they work in the gk partner so with an optimistic promo roll-up

there is a broad notion that you need one of an owner's participants for the roll-up to be secured so this is not the full story the full story is that you rely on on two different assumptions one is that you have at least one honest validator who will catch the fraud and submit the fraud proof to ethereum and the second one is that this fraud proof will actually be mined on ethereum by miners you will be able to overcome any censorship attempts on layer one so let's consider both parts separately with one of them honest validator assumption it will practically mean

that you just need some small amount of notes to be honest like you you will require all the validators to be honest but you will realistically have like not so many validators because the requirements of running an optimistic roll-up node which is running at full capacity and providing like 200 tps on ethereum will already be very high you won't be able to participate and validate the optimistic blocks with a simple laptop you will actually need a well secured very powerful machine running somewhere in the cloud or on your premises with a lot of memory at least

because the uh right now the ethereum throughput is limited by the capacity of access on the database because you have to do a lot of random access streets in the database to reconstruct the merkle proofs and verify all storage excesses and you will have to do the same thing so like to accelerate this and be beyond the limits of ethereum you need at least a lot of memory i mean this to me is something i'm i'm hopefully going to get a chance to talk to a group who's building an optimistic roll-up soon so i can actually explore this even further there but like are they running just from your from your understanding are they running like just a full ethereum node and then having like an archival node or

like are they running multiple nodes i'm kind of confused as to why there would be such high requirements there like i always got the impression it was like zk proof generation computation would be like the heavier thing than a fraud proof the sdk generation computation it requires a lot of resources but those resources can be run in parallel whereas to run a sequencer it doesn't matter for optimistic curl up or for exact you have to run like what essentially is a normal ethereum node okay so you have to execute all the transactions sequentially and if you go higher than the threshold which is currently set for ethereum like let's say 20

transactions per second you go towards 200 2000 transactions per second uh you need a fundamentally faster hardware to pros those transactions got it and the bottleneck there is storage access you just need a like really fast storage so essentially probably you need to store all of the blockchain state in this case optimistic roll up state which is going to exceed the ethereum state by far since it's the scaling solution otherwise it doesn't make sense we have to keep all of that all these gigabytes of data terabytes of data in memory not on the on a ssd and in the zk roll up context you're just writing it's the same thing it's the same thing

like the validator is required to have a very high very powerful hardware profile okay but not the validators of ezk porter the validators of ck porter only need to store blocks of data this is a lot easier so the optimistic roll up required like memory requirements of a sequencer is comparable to the verifier of a zk roll up as well but the zk porter using this sort of lydium one i know it's not but like in that direction would require a lot less is that correct yes okay this is correct yes would you say though then like with the optimistic roll up versus

vanilla zk roll up is it actually the same amount of memory and computational power needed to run those nodes so the sequences are almost identical okay then on the zika roll up side we will need to prove to produce the proofs for the blocks that have been compiled which have been produced by the sequencer and this can be done in a completely untrusted cloud which where you can provision ins like a lot of instances on demand so anybody can do this you just need an account on on different cloud providers and eventually it's also going to be decentralized but this for now it's it's it's a solved problem just go you create 100 nodes they produce the proof you collect them together and then you

submit this okay but the sequencers are going to be of essentially the same way but to come back to the story if your sequencer is highly expensive like very very powerful has a lot of requirements then only if you really motivated value data school around it so you as a user just won't be able to run it right so like it will boil down essentially to just a number of validators running those nodes and it's going to be a small number and yeah all of them will have to be uh malicious to to do anything wrong with with the system or malicious faulty but yeah with with the zke porter uh it just the pure number is going to be much higher

got it even though the assumption is not one of an honest minority like less than super minority operational validators but then on the optimistic roll-ups comes the second part where you actually have to submit the fraud proof to ethereum and this is far from solved so right now we described an attack on optimistic roll-ups that will cost right like at the current prices something around 100 million u.s dollars nominal cost of this attack and the actual attack is going to be a lot less and we will publish a link to this in in the in the comments to the show and it cannot be mitigated as long as

ethereum remains on proof of work so like the it's a threat which hanks on optimistic rollups and the assumption is that it's a lot of money with a lot of uncertainty so nobody will attempt this attack well if you accept that argument then you're just much better off with the zika porter where you know exactly how much money someone will have to burn and this stake might be up to like very very high amounts because it's like 70 of all the stake in this network but then you will have like super low transaction costs i kind of like you just hinted at the direction i want to take this interview next which is you know currently eth1 proof of work

there is i mean there's in the last week or so there's been these you know proposals for actually how to move it to proof of stake what does the eth2 world look like with proof of stake and these ck roll ups like have you and i know it's been discussed quite a lot and people have have given various perspectives and and ideas of what this could look like but i'm really curious what it looks like currently to you like what does that future look like what does even the transition look like i don't think that a lot of things will change soon so first of all we'll have to wait for the merge to happen which is realistically still significant time away because in ethereum you have a lot

at stake and these things cannot move as fast as some new solutions and once this happens we will still have to wait for sharding to arrive which is probably still some years away after the transition to proof of stake and before sharding arrives essentially nothing will change we'll have exactly the same system as we have now just more eco-friendly right because we don't have to burn all this electricity uh but from the point of view of protocol and data availability nothing is going to change once sharding arrives we have to see how exactly is going to be implemented and then potentially will have just higher capacity

for uh for roll-ups okay but like a roll-up wouldn't become a shard they kind of are like shards right they are like cars they are exactly like sharks today yes yeah that's what's so interesting about that and they show the the limitations of shards so with if you have multiple shards they increase the overall capacity of a blockchain but at the cost of making interoperability between different charts harder and less efficient and less convenient and this is what we would have with roll-ups if we have multiple roll-ups on ethereum well not exactly roll-ups maybe but because

they still share the same block capacity but if we had multiple l2 solutions like multiple zika porters for example then sending funds from one of them to the other will have to go through l1 or through some complicated mechanisms with liquidity providers which is going to be an impediment for uh it's not going to be seamlessly composable yeah so you will only have seamless composibility within a single sharp and i think it will remain the same in f2 but we'll we have to see the final designs got it okay but going back let's go back a little bit to what you were saying about the fraud proofs on proof of work from optimistic if there is proof of stake

does that change a little bit like the problem there like does that make it easier or maybe easier is the wrong word but does it make it more effective are they able to actually like i don't think it's roll back but are they able to actually like call the fraud proofs if it's proof of stake uh they will be able to like uh coordinate the community and say okay we know exactly who of the validators participated in this in this attack and we're gonna punish them uh but this is also like you have to agree on these things beforehand it's really hard to change rules of the game once the game is on and we see it with eap 1559 so like let's first get 1559 push through and

then talk about some collective punishment for validation okay right because like we see that there is a lot of contention and it's not that easy we also see the situation with parity multisig where it was absolutely unambiguous it was a mistake that costed a lot of people a lot of funds and it would have been easy to make an upgrade which solves the problem if the community really wanted to to cooperate and was able to coordinate such things but we did not see this happen right so like potentially theoretically from the protocol perspective what proof of stake gives you is the ability to coordinate but the coordination still remains with the community and it's far from seeing this coordination like

really actionable immediately so i'm still skeptical there and i'm also skeptical that such a coordination should take place i'm very strongly against relying on human coordination for something that should have been built like more reliably in the incentive structure of your system like with ethereum miners are essentially free to do whatever they want right from the practical perspective they can do whatever they want they are not like they did not sign any contract with the with the society that we're gonna do this and that they just have some incentives to behave in a selfish way which will benefit everyone

yeah because it's there it's in in their own interests include transactions and get the fees full of transactions right so you don't want to change that you want to build systems that are resilient from the underlying perspectives with like taking everyone's incentives into alignment and i think we can build such systems i think we can build something a lot more secure from censorship and front running using of course zero knowledge proofs so we have uh this this interesting developments we have these ideas uh such as time locked encryption where you could encrypt your transaction and submit it to validators in an encrypted envelope so the

validators will include it in the block without knowing what the transaction actually contains and this will only be revealed after the block is finalized and supported by the stake of validators and i think this is a much better approach to like to solve both censorship and and throughout the front running than to say like oh please guys don't do front running and don't do the like or censorship and otherwise we're gonna punish you maybe somehow like with collective action but is that is that something that you've actually built what you just described there is that something you've actually built into your kind of validator rules or or not like is or is that just sort of an idea for for more of like an l1 or an eth2

construction well it's it's an idea that we definitely want to build so for now we focus on the basic uh scalability but we definitely want to have this built and this requires like which which part does that live in what you just described does that have to remain at the consensus part of the protocol so in our case it will be at the consensus level of amongst these valid editors and users eventually i wants will probably embrace this as well because it's just a great technology it's the only way we can ensure that long term we don't have any censorship and any front running so i want to like one topic i want to kind of touch on is the partnerships so we mentioned git coin that's the one that i've actually

used but like what's coming up for zk sync in terms of projects that are potentially going to be working with it because i mean if you look at the list of investors that you recently brought on there's a lot of d5 projects there and i'm curious like how far are you in talks with those folks are they just sort of like supporting are they potentially going to be using it like maybe share what you can on that front sure so we with all the partners who invested in zika sync actually are interested in using zika sync for their for scaling of their products we have three types of investors in this strategic round which we just we just had and we by the way we only had strategic investors in this round the first type is wallets

who want to scale the the operations for a transfer swaps for their massive user bases so we are currently doing integration with uh argent uh my key i am talking with other wallets following we have a number of new wallets who directly build on zika sync and second category of projects is exchanges and on-ramp offline off-ramp platforms where we want to integrate and allow transfers or like on-ramp from fiat and off-ramp to exchanges happen directly in l2 oh wow by passing l1 so that the users can can just like go purchase some some eth or tokens

uh go to l2 directly and then start trading and and transferring because we it's just not sustainable to let all of them go through deposit withdrawal mechanisms it's very expensive but how would that actually work i wanna i want you to continue but i wanna just explore that for one second like you would buy eth but if you're buying eth you're buying ethon l1 anyway aren't you even if you're buying it on an exchange if you buy it on exchange maybe you buy it from someone who already has it in zika sync or maybe you buy it from the exchange and then exchange can patch multiple transactions together and or maybe the exchange has already some liquidity in zika sync and you just get this liquidity directly from there and then the exchange can provide more liquidity by doing one l1 transaction from time to time which

is not going to be very expensive it's not like doing thousands of transactions for for thousands of users that makes sense to me so you don't have to go like you don't individually have to do that lock up on l1 and okay yes cool and and continue sorry i cut you off there and yeah the third type of products who invested in zika sync uh are d5 projects and they are simply waiting for for our upcoming version 2 where they will have smart contracts cool so you're saying they're all kind of looking at it is there some like official ones is anyone already like working on it do they have something uh sure well we we're we're building integrations and and test kits and we the first

test net application we had built was for with uh curve uh it's life on easykissing.curve.phi you can try it out it's been built with zinc with the previous iteration of zinc language but it just as well compiles to the new virtual machine got it like could you actually use that though like as an end user already could like i go and do a like a stable coin swap on that yeah you can you can do this but it's going to happen on testnet okay so you can you can swap testnet stablecoin yes okay got it so it's not you can't quite do it with the real with the real thing yet will you you have to wait for for our mainnet which

we're targeting for august this year oh very cool it's coming up fast yeah so i think one thing we didn't get a chance to talk about yet is the matter labs and the team that's actually building this because i imagine over the last two and a half years this has evolved a lot as well so like what is the matter labs team do you divide yourself up into like specific project teams like is there a zk porter team and a ck sync team or is it all under one umbrella uh well yes we we have different sub teams uh the matter labs is organized uh on the principles of ownership and responsibility and we have a lot of smaller sub teams working on different things right now we are over 20 people and

almost all of us are engineers have engineering background and we are actively expanding the team we are hiring engineers who are who have experience in rust we are hiring a junior engineers who are brilliant and bright and ideally have experience in programming competitions in olympiad in informatics acm icpc contests and so on and we are also hiring photographers applied cryptographers uh researchers and we we recently also started hiring non-developer positions what we need most is uh someone on the communication side and uh business development side so if

you feel interested in what we're doing and you feel aligned with our values and mission please uh talk to us and shoot us a message cool how did you build the team like how did you originally find the co-founders and teammates this is just actually a question because the topic of onboarding folks into zk tech is something that i'm focused on right now and yeah i'm just kind of curious how how you first did it well the the first class are of course very tough so i m i found my co-founder at the conference so i think the the the greatest environment for finding co-founders is conferences and things like this where

a lot of like-minded people come together and it's just like you you have people who are interested in something and who are passionate and active enough to do something and actually like have a lot of affection man i hope i hope we get to have conferences in person again really soon because what you're saying is it's so it rings true like and the online versions don't quite cut it i think it's it's not just like oh it'll be fun to travel again it's sort of like necessary for this exact thing absolutely you you have uh you're missing out on serendipity it's it's really on being online is very different because you cannot just randomly run into people but it should not be too random it has to have some

contacts here you you need events like this but that's for co-founders for the teammates the early teammates we hired were exclusively from not from the blockchain space we were hiring very smart developers so what we're doing we're hiring people who have very strong math background and developer background and who can program at very uh like very fluently and being able to maintain very high complexity but they did not have any blockchain domain specific knowledge or any zero knowledge specific knowledge before us we have to teach them this sounds like it would be really intense like you'd have to train people but i wonder if by doing so you also

encourage new perspectives do you do you remember that like did you notice like they might bring actually a very different maybe a very refreshing perspective compared to what the general community is doing so i would say that to have a new perspective you first have to come up to to speak with and like to to observe all the all the knowledge so like if we're talking about the product ideas then you actually have to understand the market really well okay right so it takes time to get there if you're talking about the technology then yes those people who we hired were coming and pointing out to like directions which we would not originally think so i i think it it has different

levels we were hiring the most scarce niche which is like very smart technological people because that's the hard part to make things execute to actually deliver this is why it took us longer initially to get up to speed but now we are like really fast because we have this big team who is very creative and very very knowledgeable now nice and i think to like 20 people is a nice that's a nice number for a team i feel yep i agree i i don't i i would not want to work in a company where i don't know everyone personally and like have relationship with every one person yeah cool well alex thank you so much for coming back on the show and sharing

with all of us the update to the work that matter labs is doing zk sync zk porter um one thing i didn't mention throughout the episode is um you actually recorded a video at the zk sessions last month all about zk porter so i'll add a link to that in the show notes if anyone wants to catch that up and you did mention you're going to have an art like a blog post published by the time this airs and we'll also add that into the show notes if people want to find out more thank you anna it was really exciting as always cool and something i want to do different for the first time ever i want to say a big thank you to andre the producer of this podcast as well as henrik the editor of this podcast

for the last few weeks andre's been with us this has been really helpful and henrik has been editing this podcast for the last year and i feel like from now on i need to do a little shout out at the end of the episodes so thanks again and to our listeners thanks for listening