zkSync's Technical Roadmap | Alex Gluchowski, Anthony Rose

Transcript

they should not and should never trust us for being like for having Integrity with in any matters that have not changed the whole purpose of blockchain is to eliminate trust assumptions and like this is what the kissing is all about all right everyone welcome back to another episode of zero X research the show is made possible thanks to our incredible sponsors chain analysis and flip side uh we're recording this episode on December 12th and we have a great interview coming with two members of the matter Labs team Alex and Anthony and this is the team behind ZK sync we kind of dive into all uh all things uh ZK sync and kind of explaining that that

ZK role that they're building and getting into more of the technical details of like what that what an L2 and L3 environment looks like uh in in their Vision but before we dive into that interview we are joined from by Matt and Westy from the bloggers research team and we're going to kind of hit on all the latest Market happenings and a little bit of the the world that we are all living in in crypto Twitter uh Westy can you kind of kick us off here and I know you got some someone on the hot seat for us yeah definitely um so yeah for my hot seat I have sushi it was a little shroud for cash at the moment so sometime last week Jared gray who's essentially the CEO Sushi the head chef he uh had a forum post um that essentially outlined their

finances basically saying since he joined their Runway was cut from 9 million to 5 billion but that's not enough because they still only have one and a half years of Runway so that's what seven and a half million dollars left in their treasury to pay employees um so the the idea they had and that was outlined in the Forum post was to direct uh all revenue which was originally going to X Sushi holders and actually direct that to the treasury to be able to pay out other developers um which is pretty interesting because it's really the first sign of a dow that's basically said yeah we're in trouble and we sort of need to cut back cut costs and figure out like more

sustainable model to go from here and so I wonder uh where do we go from here with other dials that are struggling do they also come out and start to direct Revenue instead to their Toca holders but to their treasury um so yeah it's an interesting case I hope Sushi comes out of this fun they do have one and a half more years of Runway and I hope you know Revenue helps there um but yeah struggling at the moment I think it's interesting I mean it's definitely sad to see that they're running out of Treasury funds you know Sushi has a great team of developers supporting a whole bunch of different products shoyu which is their nft Marketplace I've heard rumors is going to launch in the next couple weeks or months so that's something to keep an eye

furo I believe it's called which is their Dow payment streaming platform just reached like an all-time high in tvl so like sushi does seem to still be building and you know working hard I definitely support their team and I kind of hope this this proposal does pass I think it's far more important to have long-term sustainability and have these developers on board than it is to you know have uh I think it's something like maybe 50 or 100 000 a month going back to the treasury customer check not sure what it is now could be even less so I think it's good you know build up the treasury it's it's definitely a roadblock but I don't think it's the end of the world for the sushi protocol and uh I definitely hope to see this governance proposal pass yep Sean agree here with Matt I mean they're kind of

like an OG in the defy space and a lot of people use sushi on a lot of different chains so rooting for them and I also think it's it sucks to put them in the hot seat here because I think a lot of other protocols in the space today will probably you know ultimately face the same problem if they're not you know accruing value back to their treasury where they can then pay out developers to keep the thing running for the longer term so I I don't think this is you know the last that we'll see um it's just kind of the first big one that we're we're having our eyes on with this problem do we know if they're doing anything to kind of compete a little more so on the trading volume side of things right so like obviously uni swap V3 is really kicking everyone's ass in

terms of volume but curve has their V2 protocol as well for concentrated liquidity uh Matt I know you're kind of more of the the guy in the weeds of the sushi protocol do you know if they have any plans like a concentrated liquidity approach or anything of that nature yeah so Sushi has already built a concentrated liquidity amm and the technology that goes with it it's called Trident Trident is deployed on I believe uh I don't want I think two or three chains it just deployed on arbitrum and the reason it's not deployed on ethereum Main net yet is they are waiting to see you know have like a longer trial on these smaller tvl chains see how it goes make any tweaks necessary before it eventually does go on Main net I was actually having a conversation in their Discord this morning about that and

asking about when that might happen and it definitely is still expected in 2023 but uh it could be a little while before we actually see it occur on mainnet I don't want to put you on a spot here with like a very specific question but do you know how Sushi competes in terms of deck swap volume on arbits room last I checked they had a large portion of deck swap volume on arbitrum as compared to on ethereum mainnet or sorry a larger portion on arbitrum but I think a lot of that probably has to do with airdrop Farmers which we've kind of talked about in other episodes and people just playing around with lots of different protocols and you know trying to kind of maybe it's not a it's not volume that's just native people actually looking to swap assets

it might be more like manipulation and things that aren't really long-term sustainable yeah that'd be really interesting to watch that kind of like dive into when that gets launched on mainnet and kind of see if it can compete with like even curvy too kind of like generally comes around in that that second second uh Second Place spot I think generally speaking to the reason for that you know Sushi dominating volume on arbitrum is it's a little bit harder to launch like a V3 pool on uniswap than it is like a typical xyk pool on sushi so like that's why Sushi is seen uh quite a bit more volume just tokens typically launch on Sushi before uni V3 there but Matt I'm curious who you got in your uh Hot Seat today my hot seat today is binance

um you might want to call it fud I don't know what you'd call it but there's a whole lot of rhetic going around post their proof of reserves audit so basically Finance at a proof of reserves audit that was supposed to prove if you have assets on binance they are backed so binance actually has those the ability to to go and fund 100 withdrawals if every deposit went withdrawal they actually have the liquidity to you know so that everyone gets their money back out of the exchange first I believe Jesse Powell who's the founder and CEO of Kraken pointed out that there were some things that he didn't love about the proof of Reserve audit so he said that they grouped together btcb BT bbtc and BTC as one asset so both of those other ones btcb and bbtc are binance wrapped Bitcoins So when you say okay we have let's say a

thousand Bitcoin that's you know some of it's any any of these three types of Bitcoin whether it's native Bitcoin or the other two you would hope that you could actually see the Bitcoin backing those wrapped assets um that was not the case so maybe it's not you know you can't really it's hard to 100 trust that those big rap Bitcoins are actually backed by Bitcoin we would prefer to have seen the actual Bitcoin uh that was backing you know all customer deposits another thing that he pointed out and this is Jesse Powell again um that it's the total they had 97 of their Bitcoin deposits collateralized and they said that there were a hundred and one percent collateralized over collateralized if you include other assets there's no transparency on what those assets were a lot of people on

Twitter seem to be speculating that it might be BNB and you know this just were so okay first of all 97 backing is pretty solid if you compare that to like the fractional Reserve banking system banks are not required to have nearly 90 97 of your deposits backed by actual liquid dollars but at the same time I think that most people in crypto do hope that these exchanges have 100 of the actual assets to back that there is no fractional Reserve that it's a hundred percent reserved so seeing that this like was 97 97 collateralized by these BTC BTC and the two rap Bitcoins I think might have worried some people a little bit so according to nanson there's 300 million dollars in outflows just in the last 24 hours from binance so this is

really why in my opinion they deserve to be in the hot seat you know whether or not the assets backing it I think less but definitely people are worried and withdrawings of 100 in my head that's why they're in the hot seat I think lastly Travis Kling who is uh the managing director of the now defunct crypto hedge fund who lost most of their money on FDX tweeted today that binance stopped allowing withdrawals I believe on Ethan BNB chains not I forget on on two two on two evm compatible chains uh and he just you know is pointing out that this isn't a good look and that this could be you know scary sign in my opinion and this is such a I I hate saying this now especially after the last six months or year with you know oh there's a slight chance that FTX is

insolvent well as we saw you know they were insolvent saw the same thing with Celsius we saw the same thing with blockfi so now I have a trouble saying you know but in my opinion I think you know at the end of the day get your money off of centralized exchanges learn to do self-custody it's worthwhile if you're doing it safely you're lowering your risk so there's no reason not to and that's all I'll say I guess yeah I would agree with everything you said Matt everywhere there's been smoke this year there's been fire I think that's what Ryan from bitwise said last week on our episode Dan so I I agree they deserve to be in the hot seat and yeah I think think it was just a binance smart chain and ethereum for usdc withdrawals so you could still technically get you know native Bitcoin out of the exchanger

or native eth out of the exchange but you know who knows how this uh how this actually changes considering we're recording on Monday December the 12th and it'll be uh the 15th by the time this this actually airs so good chance uh something chains changes between now and then but I can move on over to my uh cool Throne I've got Vance from framework Ventures his take on Twitter last week I thought it was really good it's related to the the FTX drama so they basically had zero Bitcoin and very little eth if any by the time the last snapshot was taken in terms of their Holdings on the on the chain and he kind of made the case that the alt L1 rotation was inflated as a result because it's highly probable that FTX Alameda overtaking customer deposits or

even you know dollar deposits from bank accounts that were supposed to be buying certain assets and instead of buying those assets for their customers and custoding them they were actually buying Soul serum you know their VC allocated uh bags so that kind of like pumped those prices pumped other one all layer One prices and then on top of that uh you've got all these different l1s that are launching here in the future like Aptos um sui or after it's already launched I think but regardless I think that all of those l1s that were seated uh in the you know aftermath of the layer one season I think they're kind of grossly overvalued and that's what Vance said on Twitter so he definitely got my my cool throne for the week yeah I mean it's pretty wild that at that last snapshot for

bankruptcy there was Zero Bitcoin that they held um that either means that they sold all the Bitcoin that people had in their exchange or at least enough so that when their Mass withdrawals it drew essentially their reserves to zero which means like you said that they must have been selling Bitcoin and buying other assets and I think we can pretty fairly speculate that that was Soul serum all the tokens that they had as collateral which is pretty pretty wild when you when you think about it and yeah I agree this definitely does mess with valuations for these l1s um and maybe even l2s as well compared to the base layers that we know have

value and that's Bitcoin and eth um so I wonder um you know in the next cycle does that continue how much adoption does an L2 or L1 need to have when compared to eth for it to actually have a similar evaluation it's pretty tough now given youth Supply Dynamics after the merge in eip1559 it's it's really tough for another alt one to sort of compare to that especially with the amount of activity and the amount of l2s that are building on ethereum um and so yeah I can't agree more it definitely messes with those valuations going forward yeah and they're still on that first before you make like that

there is zero Bitcoin left right with all the billions of dollars of use customer deposits that are still stranded on FTX surely some of those were held in Bitcoin right so like it's hard to paint a picture that there wasn't this like commingling or funny business whatever you want to call it with customer deposits like that seems like a Smoking Gun to me like if you go back to you know some of these funds that had their their uh their deposits held on FTX to for security and custody like you're telling me all those funds had zero Bitcoin exposure like I just find that super hard to believe I'm consistently impressed with Vance and Frameworks takes um framework being the VC fund that he's I believe a co-founder managing director of

framework has invested in layer one so to hear him say this I think it it hits even like a little bit harder than maybe just anybody else but uh yeah I would just Echo that he definitely deserves to be in the cool throne and I'm always impressed with him and haseeb and their VC funds and just kind of how how uh finger on the pulse they always are and have great takes yeah and on that last uh cool drone I think I got a good one for us and it's really uh those Starbucks nfts right so those launched on the eighth and they're doing a pretty cool little program with those right so it's essentially like an odyssey where participants kind of go through what they call Journeys and going through these Journeys you essentially collect these points and those points are then redeemable or as well you can uh like

earn or purchase even so nft is called Journey stamps that like are effectively redeemable for these different experiences right so I think some of the ones that they uh have highlighted are like at certain Starbucks reserves which are like the high-end Starbucks if you will there's like different experiences you can get in store there's like you can go visit some of their their coffee farms in Costa Rica if you I assume uh are a a die-hard nft collector for these these Starbucks nfts I'm sure they'd be quite hard to get but it's pretty interesting to see this like really like these on-chain loyalty programs especially from such a big name um I know like the Starbucks loyalty program is is a massive one they have a great app that makes it super easy to

use and interact with with their loyalty program so like kind of testing out this beta of a like a real world use case for nfts is really interesting uh it's cool to like actually see this come to fruition after being talked about for a few months I think it's really important to note that this is all kind of going down on polygon which ascends essentially seems to be you know we've seen like it was Biz Dev announcement after Biz Dev announcement and now I think we're in the a couple couple months out of all those announcements or you're gonna be like actually seeing the the products that were announced all these months ago which is is actually really exciting to to see these things kind of come come full circle one thing I think is really interesting about the Starbucks nfts is you know as someone

that's super crypto native like all of us we all spend a lot of time we know a lot about a lot of different nft projects you know like oh the pictures are stored on centralized servers you know there's so many things that we could point out as this is negative this isn't really what we look for in nfts but I think if you ignore all of that for a minute and just look at this is a loyalty program and just like a very cool new thing that people that are already using the biggest loyalty program in the world are going to have access to I think it's a really really cool Innovation and that one that should not be faded or ignored yeah I think it's a really cool experiment and it has me think can you apply something similar to other rewards programs a lot of

bigger ones so I think Amazon Prime is a great example um but yeah there's plenty of rewards programs and the biggest brands in the world and so like how do you apply crypto to that and so if Starbucks is successful here I can imagine we see a lot of bigger Brands start to tack on and either create you know nft Rewards or maybe something like Kohl's cash becomes an erc20 maybe that's jumping the gun a bit um but yeah I think it's a cool experiment and I'm excited to see where things go yeah me too I'm super excited about this one I personally go to Starbucks a good bit like once a week and like the rewards program is awesome I get a free coffee like every month so I'm definitely uh gonna gonna take part

in this Odyssey thing and I already signed up for the wait list I also think it's cool that they're using Nifty Gateway and like letting people use credit cards to buy the nfts so like there's an actual Marketplace and it's not as crypto native so like you don't actually need a wallet or anything like that so definitely excited to see how it plays out and I also just think like every other company is probably watching this super closely and if it is super successful like you said Westy I think it was like everyone's gonna have to develop a strategy around nft loyalty then you want to get our flip side chart of the day pulled up yeah let's do it uh Westy while I get this while I get this uh pulled up do you want to give us a little bit of a background on what the

ape staking is for the uh board ape Yacht Club in Co yeah I can do my best uh none of us are bored AP holders so we're not exactly experts on the mechanism here but yeah essentially uh ape is the sort of the the governance token of the board API Club Universe you could say and they're trying to implement staking to essentially distribute the token uh to more of their active users um and essentially you know give them a reason to lock up the token to give it more value and essentially if you have one of their nfts whether that's the board API Club themselves or they have

mutant Apes as well as uh Kennel Club which is their dog nft um if you hold one of those or maybe a combination of something like the the new napes and the dogs uh you can get a higher APR on your staking and so those aprs are upwards of 200 to 300 percent which is pretty attractive and there's actually a trade going on where a lot of the boardial holders aren't exactly D5 native like we are and so they see 300 APR and they think it's really really attractive not realizing it's inflation but they also don't hold any ape they just hold the end of T and so they need to buy into eight to then stake it and earn that yield

um and so yeah staking uh I think went live or is going live um but yeah we can look into the data here awesome and yeah one of the there's a lot of great data on this dashboard it's uh created with Flipside data which is the most comprehensive on-chain data in crypto and it really gives you the insights that you need to work smarter and so this dashboard was created by with some custom with some custom queries built on the mostly the erc20 transfers data and so we can see where these ape tokens have been allocated in this case stake 2. there's a great dashboard we'll link to it in the show notes but one thing I want to highlight here is this chart on the far right and for those listening rather than watching Along on YouTube this is the

distribution of ape stakers by their total staked volume so basically how many tokens does uh what like basically bucketing the ape stakers into the number of tokens that they have staked in a particular pool so there's like uh you can either just take the just stake the ape token to a specific pool by itself or you can pool alongside your nft and so you can see like the board a yacht club pool here the mutant Apes here and the Kennel Club here and one thing to note between the two is like the more expensive nfts right the Border clubs themselves those gen one nfts have the like this red color here is uh ten

thousand to a hundred thousand tokens staked and they have by far the the largest state uh ape stakers right so there's way more in this bucket roughly 60 percent of uh all board ape Yacht Club pool stakers are between ten thousand and a hundred thousand ape Stakes so it looks like the whales are really hanging out uh in that pool which makes sense again because those nfts tend to be costlier than the others but one more time just want to give a shout out to Flipside for being able to you know make this day data free to everyone to query and we can end up getting great dashboards like this one again we're going to link to it in the show notes but alongside that you also see a custom flip website challenge or a bounty posted to earn yourself some usdc and so

give if you're someone who likes building queries and building dashboards definitely be sure to check that out and you can earn up to 75 in usdc as well as improving your querying skills yeah I just want to take a second too and and thank our other wonderful sponsor chain Alice's they're one of the leading crypto analytics providers that are helping provide the tools to Industry professionals to help legitimize our industry they enable investors to track funds on chain with ease and they also have some great uh research on their site which can be found there for free so we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes as well they offer some really cool courses on some really Niche Topics in crypto that really can't be found anywhere else and and that's pretty important in my opinion so that they actually educate people on on you

know all things crypto so yeah again just go ahead and check out chain analysis we'll put their link to the website and their research in our show notes and uh we'll catch you guys in the interview alright everyone welcome back we have a joint here by Anthony and Alex from ZK sync a teamwork working on scaling ethereum through their own zkevm really excited to have you guys on today I'd love to kind of dive into what all it is you're building and the details especially on the more of the technological side as well but first if we could kind of hit some of these recent highlights you had a pretty big announcement coming out around a 200 million dollar raise as well as some other things but if we can kind of dive into you know what was the mean of the 200 million dollar raise as well as the

the partnership with open Zeppelin what all does that entail uh absolutely really thank you all right guys for inviting us really happy to be here and uh happy to talk about this topic so I find them extremely important at matter Labs we've been building ZK sync now for four years we started as a very small research group and we've been gradually focusing on the technological side of the product just doing research and zero knowledge proofs and their application to scaling blockchains to solving um different technological challenges of of this capability breaking out of the scalability of tree Lemma and we were always very conservative and very you know like down heads down doing doing the the research work because there were a lot of Unsolved questions in the their

knowledge proof space with protocols were not mature enough we didn't have Planck we didn't have Starks like everything was kind of way but recently with with all the recent research and development and our work on on zkvm specifically with were the pioneers of this technology uh things are now very very clear like it's we have a very strong Vision on how to scale ethereum in a way that will allow ethereum to reach basically everyone in the world uh at very affordable costs and what we need now was just like Get Enough resources on the engineering side and on the product side to fully implement this Vision so the phase of research is over and now it's a phase of

pure implementation and once we realized that we we figured okay now it's time to scale and now we need much more resources than what we used to have in the past and we reach out to the investor Community to to the backers and we closed the 200 million dollar round uh were led by blockchain capital and dragonfly with uh participation of our previous investors so one recent Horowitz and a lot of our folks that who are important in the space but we we made sure that we don't sacrifice the values that were the fundamental the core of our project from the Inception and we always wanted ZK sync to be just an extension

of ethereum and we realized it's going to be a separate Network a separate layer on top of ethereum but we wanted to make sure that the community preserves the ownership of this you know because there are a lot of projects who people are uh degradingly call with BC coins things like oh those guys sold their soul for a lot of money and they are now just like gonna pump it down to the Token whatever we never uh you know we never wanted to to go in this direction whatsoever like we were never eager to introduce a token we were just Building Technology um that we will then use to to scale it and like if token is a necessary part of it we're going to use the token if it we don't need it for some functions we're

not going to use it uh we came to a conclusion that we will eventually need the token to decentralize the sequencer and we will talk more about this in this conversation but the the best way like we don't have to reinvent the wheel we don't have to reinvent every single technology every single approach which can take whatever works and focus on the core Innovation which is zero knowledge proofs and scalability we're using sucks so we realized like the best way to decentralize things today is using tokens for creating Community validators but we made sure that in all our you know in in like all the commitments we have all the promises we make to anyone uh we made very clear that two-thirds of whatever initial token Supply is going

to be created will be reserved for the community and we made sure that the community has you know that that's that's necessary but not a sufficient condition because if you have something that uh can eventually be accumulated in hands of a few people if those few people will have tremendous power then it doesn't matter that you give the rest to the community or whatever so we wanted to make sure that the community Remains the guardian of the project and of the project values and Ethos and that it always remains in sync uh with the values that neatness of ethereum and essentially Remains the same thing that is why we're doing full open source with MIT Apache License which is a full permissive open source

not some fake invention that will say oh yeah chord is visible you use it or like oh yeah sure it's open source but you can only use it for a project you know like we that would prevent people from being able to Fork the project in case the original inventors or like The Operators of this dividers of of this network at some point would become malicious and that is extremely important that that gives the ultimate control to the community no matter what token distribution no matter like if if we became you know like people can change over time people can just go crazy and to completely uh unexpected things and uh just say like oh no now I

changed my mind I just just want to get rich and I don't care about Community we want to create mechanisms that do not require people to trust us we want to be trustworthy we want to create trusts for our users for for developers who are building on the product platform in the first line is the trust in um you know in our vision and in in in our ability to execute because people have make commitments you know like you you decide which platform you want to build on obviously you have to trust that team to to perform to to the standard to which you expect but they should not and should never trust us for being like for having Integrity with in any

matters that have a known chain the whole purpose of blockchain is to eliminate trust assumptions and like this is what the keysync is all about this is why we're using snarks and provide actually like snarks or like zero knowledge probes are a bit of a misnomer like the scientific Community prefers to call it something like uh proofs of computational integrity showing doing the computation in the correct way while no one is watching and enforcing all the rules of contracts of whatever people agreed on whatever I was committed to without anyone being responsible and being like caring caring actually like the the uh execution of this trust on his back so this is why

full open source with MIT Apache yeah that that makes a lot of sense and actually segues me in pretty well into kind of like an overarching question between evm and compatibility and evm equivalence obviously that's kind of like the Talk of the Town right now between all the different ZK VM teams in the race can you kind of explain the benefits in the trade-offs for the two uh I'm happy to start an event and you can can add more flavor to this so we see this uh we don't see it as a binary choice we see the solutions potential Solutions in the design space as a spectrum between like full evm equivalence where everything just is exactly like ethereum with all the good things but also with all the bad things with all the problems

and bottlenecks of ethereum on the one hand on the other hand it's a complete uh diversing from ethereum and going in a completely different direction using different programming language different virtual machine not following the standards and conventions right and all the projects are somewhere between like none none of the projects in the system the ZK roll-up space on in the roll-up space that I'm aware of are like on on the extremes like there are no projects that are 100 equivalent and there are no projects that are 100 not compatible with ethereum because even if you take starknet they follow some contentions you know the calling conventions is similar the the idea of the contracts and calls Etc some things are similar

it's pretty far from evm but like it's still somewhere on you know on this far part of the spectrum so where we are on this spectrum is uh we are compatible on the on the uh source code level today you can take any contract written for ethereum in solidity or in python or sorry on in um in Viper uh you can compile it without modifying the contract in like 99 of the cases we don't support a few functions we can talk about that but if the code compiles it will execute and it will perform its functions exactly as it was meant by the creators of the contract and we we paid a lot of attention we actually had to

make some architectural changes to to enable this um what will not work apart from the things we don't support are for example self-destruct which is a function that that is not recommended and ethereum is getting rid of it there is a it's well I think already scheduled for inclusion in some of the upgrades uh if you are the minor functions that that are not frequently used uh but that means that like most of the tooling will work out of the box you do not need to make any changes or you need to only make small changes in the scripts you know like replace the compiler or change the API to something else Etc uh there are some things that will not work like

the binary code level tools like bytecode debugger will not work so we will need to re-implement them or when we are working with Partners to integrate the support of the key sync in those tools fortunately for us those are very few and very there are there are used uh however we recognize that there is a need sometimes in some rare cases for like full byte code compatibility one good example of this is where you want to take an existing contract and preserve the address compatibility across multiple chains you want like you know you want your noise saved to be like safe uh Multistate to be Deployable in any chain regardless of where you deploy it at exactly the same address

this would require bytecode compatibility with ethereum and this is something we're considering this creates an overhead like all the projects that are following more closer um you know we're trying to go in any direction of more equivalence by code compatibility full follow-up on on the big Compass Etc uh they necessarily pay for this with the performance and this was not a trade-off we were willing to make because we are aiming our mission is to scale uh to accelerate the mass adoption of blockchains of ethereum specifically for personal sovereignty and that means like onboarding millions and potentially

billions of people but that requires the absolute optimization through the maximum of the performance characteristics of uh for Proverbs so we had to follow like on to be on a more performance side but it's possible to also support full bytecode equivalence for some specific cases and this is something we're working on and then you do you have anything to add to this honestly not a huge amount I think that covered it uh very nicely I will say just to highlight this was a very deliberate Choice when it came to the design of ZK uh sync B2 and it took all of the learnings that the team I mean GK sync version one has been running in production for I guess of the order of two and a half years at this point the cryptography team is a lot of experience

in what will work what's easy to do in DK and what's obviously very challenging and when we were designing the system for version two it really was this key question around you know everything is a trade-off to a degree when you're building these complex systems we did not want to compromise on performance and the design of the system is such that this really is one of the things that we're really optimizing for so between performance and reliability like these are the two sort of combined All Stars for the engineering team at the moment and you know these have been guiding principles right from when we were iterating on the design you know thinking through how do you go from version one to something general like version two yeah that that makes a lot of sense um do you guys mind getting a little bit deeper into the like the approving

process and the kind of the sequencing process in terms of like building blocks and how that works and what are the main challenges with decentralizing that process in in the longer term yeah sure so I'll talk a little bit about maybe where we are at the moment talk a bit about how we're thinking about decentralization both of the sequencer and approval so the first thing I'll say is kind of rewinding 10 or so months back to roughly when we deployed the first version of the system the version 2 system test now the question we really took a step back to try and answer was you know what's the shortest path between having the version of the system that we had at that point running on testnet and like really giving something to the community like really building a

production system that was the skeleton of the system that we really think this thing will be in the fullness of time so and broadly actually I would say that the roadmap that we made public this summer is a sort of external representation of that internal roadmap and obviously when you're looking at this system it's no secret that this is complex there is a lot of work to do to make these systems functional there is a lot of um risk that you have to think carefully about how you manage as you're building the system and to build the decentralized version of the system to begin with it's just like obviously strictly harder like probably orders of magnitude harder that being said we you know it's very important to us to make sure that we design the system in a way where we are not locked into having a

centralized version of the system that runs forever and are being thoughtful about the roadmap and thoughtful about our investments on the long like long lead time research items such that actually we are like making progress on them today even if we don't expect to see them in production for say six months or 12 months so internally at the moment the sequencer is fully centralized the proving is centralized too so for the first version of the system we will be operating the stack um both of these things are planned for decentralization they are well I mean it's a question of priorities for us at the moment the decentralization of the sequencer I think is going to come first I don't know necessarily that this is the most

important thing to do but we're already actively working on it and we are um building an internal test net with a decentralized version of the sequencer partly it's like a mitigation strategy against like overfitting the centralized version of the of the system that we have today but one of the major things that we're planning on the proof size is you know for for us today the hardware required to run these provers is um they're they're BP gpus right you're not going to have many people operating these things at home like sat on their desktop PC so we are planning and I've actually already started on the cryptography side of a major upgrade to our proof system and a big motivation for the upgrade to the proof system is actually to lower the hardware

requirements for operating approver so as part of this you know obviously relatively recently a large number of gpus became freed up uh with ethereum going through the merge we really want to get to a point where we can distribute and decentralize the proof Network as well as obviously decentralizing the sequencer so both important for us we really wanted to make sure that we you know there's a lot of value in when you're building these systems to make sure you're building them in a way where you're getting feedback from The Real World it's really important like to me personally to the engineering team that we didn't attempt to kind of go heads down build the perfect version of the system over the course of like however long that would have taken us and you know do this fully in isolation do this without the community so getting

the system live in its first version where the architecture was correct but we knew regulatory um where the performance was correct for where we needed to be today but we know we can iterate like all of these were things we're optimizing for but we do have a team kind of actively working today on the internal test net where we can take the centralizer and we can desync that yeah so take the sequencer and decentralize it we are not actively working on decentralizing the proof Network until we are gone through this upgrade of the proof system but this will obviously be a huge priority for us and you know it's a yeah the decentralization of this of this system is incredibly important to the engineering team so we're guarding against technical decisions that lock us into a centralized version of the system today

um because we know this is where we want to be and obviously this is like uh important for many properties of the system they want to achieve I'll just add one sentence it's not just important it's non-negotiable for us we are building a protocol that will be owned by Community like the community cannot depend on one company to operate it's a concept like it's it's it's it's a completely obvious thing it's just a matter of priorities of like do we build something with that is perfect but is not available or do we give the community something that they can immediately use and when then we upgraded to the full version but like it will be done in a very short term now when you think about the actual process of decentralization do you are you thinking about how a token fits into

this role outside of just distribution like is it actually involved in in this actual in the process itself or do you just view the token as like this distribution method to to give everybody uh to give the community ownership of the Protocol no as I said in the beginning the we we only introduced the token in the system because there was a need for a token it's not that we we just like we took the system uh like we're some like technology it's separate and then the token thing is separate the community is separate no the token is actually required to operate the system properly in a fault tolerant way in a Byzantine fault tolerant way in order to make sure that the anyone can become a validator or anyone can participate in

the consensus of these validators so that the community does not rely on any one particular and like if someone is faulty or malicious even worse then they can easily be replaced by by the community and then we have the ultimate nuclear option of the community to Fork away if author didn't work but that that should be like that is expensive imagine so like we're building a mechanism to enable people to submit transactions from layer one if they feel centered if their transactions are not being included by the validators and we are making this mechanism we're designing it in situated as to support mass migrations

so if an entire fraction of the user base is being censored for whatever reason they can just coordinate and submit a big batch of transactions and and just like migrate to a different network but you can imagine that's costly like any time you need to rely a fallback on the social coordination it must be an extraordinary event you're going to do it every time a server goes down or like an organization is for whatever reason like gets becomes bankrupt or or when you just takeover or whatever so like you need to build Technical Systems that provide pretty good reliability and security and redundancy in the very adversarial environment in which we find ourselves within the blockchain world

and then have this fallback mechanisms where you rely on layer 0 essentially on the community to like keep it keep it in check makes a lot of sense um I want to get into l3s a little bit because Alex I believe you're potentially the one who came up with the idea of ZK Porter I might be wrong on that but you guys have since pivoted over to opportunity to launch that on test net hopefully in q1 or Q2 next year how is that going how do you see this Vision playing out um Steve one of your colleagues has talked many times about you know the Grand Vision of l3s on like a unilateral proving system so just to hear about that and some of the advantages and a status update would be fantastic

I'm happy to start and again at uh let Anthony add more uh and I want to begin by giving credit to like I was not the one who like invented ZK Porter from from scratch like in every invention you are standing on the shoulders of giants like every invention is just one small step one simple idea that makes the previous Technologies like a little better so um this applies to the keyboard and by the way ZK partner has not much to do with lyric it's it's a separate technology it's um it's about data availability and making sure that we can build something that it will scale like it it has application in L3 world because it allows L3 to become

way more scalable like unbounded scalable but it's it's in addition to L3 but regardless both ZK Porter and alfreeze are ideas that are built on many iterations of other great people so like for zika Porter star core team came up with idea of volition where you have ZK Porter oh sorry Ezekiel rollup and validium and you can interoperate we added the idea of like using tokens to make it permissionless and have data availability uh uh you know adding Guardians who can anyone can run the software and make a system a lot more reliable with layer 3 our biggest Innovation is not the idea of Liberty itself it was was kind of obvious it was

on a Surface stock market came again they were the first to announce this again um the biggest breakthrough or like maybe the biggest design choice that we are extremely excited about in the key sync for our version of L3 is what we call um hyper chains connected by hyper purchase that's an extremely interesting idea so the um we probably will we will take an entire episode just talking about that but in short um if you make every layer 3 separate from each other and like anyone can deploy their own version that's

going to be one world with a lot of diversity but if you say let's standardize some aspects of this protocol like everyone can do whatever they want they have full freedom and full sovereignty and full customizability over how the chain is going to work uh how they're gonna like using how are they gonna sequence transactions uh provide data availability build privacy or not build privacy or like use roll up or Decay Porter or pure value or whatever you can do all of that and introduce your custom rules but if we all agree on the same standard for bridging and for for for for proving the the uh the circuits we get some extremely interesting

properties like all of a sudden we can build a network essentially the the internet of value where any user on any of the hyper genes can send transactions to any other user on any other hyper chain with zero trust assumptions zero Capital requirements and um essentially at the cost of a simple transaction between within each chain so that is the most exciting thing about our vision of of L3 yeah I can add a couple couple pieces uh specific to opportunity if it's useful because I think Alex covered a lot of the things that we find really interesting I would say there's also a lot of value in US working on this sooner than maybe it was

obvious even a few months ago there's value in terms of figuring out what and how these things are you know speaking with Partners who have ideas for use cases that maybe we wouldn't have come up with ourselves it's been really interesting and hearing about the types of uh layer 3 that people may want to configure it gives us a lot of ideas for like actually how to prioritize you know problem solving from an engineering perspective I think there's a lot of value in US also going through this exercise now in terms of even making the layer 2 better so for example there were certain pre-compilers we hadn't prioritized for uh baby Alpha because we knew the system was going to be in this closed State we haven't needed them initially with like things that we would want to add but to be able to do you

know verification of a layer 3 at Layer Two you need these pre-combats so it like forces us to do some of these things and these things are not um they're generally useful right these are useful for any other protocol or any other project that wanted to take advantage of verification of lead to more than that I think there's some other things that you know if you think about it from a purely engineering point of view or really interesting you know how do we design the system in a way where it's sort of agnostic to how it's being deployed in terms of the environment right like Layer Two assumed ethereum is the layer one but in a world where you're deploying a layer three or maybe a layer four or who knows what can you build the system in a way where it's easy to deploy these systems you haven't

got to build these you know it's not over fit to the original idea for the layer twos as we take on projects that we mentioned earlier around decentralization of the sequencer how do we preserve the ability to deploy and configure these systems in different ways where you know some uh use case may be the I don't know party X wants to deploy a very centralized version of the layer 3 while if we've like fully decentralized the layer too like have we lost something that actually would have been useful for one of these people at some point in the future so yeah from us uh from our perspective I think there's really interesting engineering challenges how do we make it easy to deploy these things tear them down redeploy them and like really iterate on on building and testing ideas in the space I think partnering with people in

the ecosystem both Builders and users will help us actually get to a point where opportunity delivers something that we can start to see much further into the future for as we really understand layer threes and then part of this stuff you know you have a lot of great ideas on the Whiteboard but like building things testing things and like really thinking through the problems and actually having a real prototype well I think really give us a lot more clarity over the future of how these systems evolve and um how they fail this is another thing that we're really interested in like where are the new problems that we'll find at layer three that maybe are less obvious when you're thinking about these systems in a like more abstract way so when I'm thinking about uh the l3s right so I think about you know the ethereum

sitting at the base layer providing the security to the l2s which the l2s then take that security and provide scalability to the l3s and then so if I'm thinking about l3s what are what are the main appeals of this ecosystem right would that be like the customization that you'd get at this point uh and the fact that you know you'd have like a web uh in some sorts of interconnected chains at that point yeah I think in the again this is something where value comes gradually In Waves so the it's going to be something that you can use immediately and then there are longer term implications of this technology uh the first intermediate value that we will create is yes the you you can build your own Dev chains that fully inherit security from ethereum but you have

control over how you want to structure them um with regard to data availability which determines the costs of transactions and like whether or not they depend on the data available different ethereum um it's about the sequencer it's about the approach to Mev uh and very importantly it's about privacy because currently we're not using the zero knowledge aspect of zero knowledge proofs but it can be used it should be used and it's very important for it's very important for for um you know like for normal consumers making payments but also for Enterprises for banking for doing you know you can make all of the financial activity of the world

completely public to everyone at some point you need to introduce privacy and this is something that is very easy to do with uh uh with layer three you essentially get it out of the box for free all you need to do is to make sure that the sequencer does not publish data on chain but instead they keep it private and they only publish the root hashes or maybe encrypted data or something like this so like but but the the technology to create something private is the same exact Technologies just to build a generic lettering over time yeah more of the other values materialize such as yes we're building a

web of value that will allow to scale ethereum indefinitely to arbitrary number like it's going to be limited just like internet is limited only by the amount of Hardware sources by number of gpus or A6 or whatever you need in the world to to make the computations but you can add as many of them as you want and the system will still be growing if you can't tell we love data here block reach research and chain analysis the leading blockchain analytics company shares this passion with us we use data to extract Alpha and find the next thing coming in D5 but chain houses is doing the gritty work and building trust in blockchains to onboard the next trillion dollars of capital into the industry we need to grow safe consumer access to cryptocurrency and promote more

Financial Freedom with less risk chain analysis has some of the most comprehensive and reliable data in the space and they use this data to power a full Suite of their solutions that can be utilized by industry professionals Best in Class training and certifications are also led by Chain Alice's and some of the brightest Minds in the space if you haven't heard of chain analysis you gotta check them out and we'll link to them in the show notes I don't want to pry it this too hard because I'm sure it's still getting figured out I mean we're all kind of figuring it out as we go here but uh I'm just curious because I hit Bridges so like how does that work like how do you have a completely trustless way to go from chain a to chain b in a layer 3 world um I can recommend so I can give you

high level technical overview and I I will refer to a paper called slash uh from geometry guys who explore this this topic in depth and we we have the exact same idea we're at the paper and we're like wow this is this is a really really good write-up of of the idea but essentially if you uh the idea is not new if you look at the Privacy chains such as zcash the pioneer of privacy the way they work is you make a commitment to your transaction first and then you you kind of redeem this transaction so first you you create a node in some Ledger in your Mercury saying like I have spent some amount of my Z cash here and you

provide this year knowledge proof that this is valid and it's added to the Ledger and then on the other side uh once the recipient wants to redeem this tokens they they again they they provide a proof that they're easily entry on The Ledger somewhere such as uh someone has sent me this amount of office tokens so I can can claim them and and add to my balance so now you can do it within one chain to achieve privacy or you can do it between multiple chains to achieve scalability because you can it's very easy to concatenate Merkle trees concatenate in Mercury is just taking the root hash of one and putting as a leaf of the other so like all like it's very technical and

like for maybe less technical audience what it means is any layer 3 can freely read the state of any other layer free I mean the last finalized State not maybe not the most recent state of validators but the last state that was finalized and was propagated down to ethereum uh but like they can read arbitrary account arbitrary points on on any data and they don't have to have full state of all the other hyper genes all they need is a short Miracle proof of a particular point on a particular chain and once you have this point you can say like oh I trust that other hyper Gene because it has exactly the same circuit as as me or as is the chain I'm building

on so like for me it's it's the same as trusting myself it's it I I know the the it was produced running exactly the same code as I'm using so I'm just going to add this this balance to my account and this is an operation which takes place just in two chains and like doesn't affect really uh you don't have to propagate all the data down to like Layer Two or layer one all you need to propagate is one hash per chain and it just like logarithmic is compressing okay for more details again please refer to the slash paper yeah that bit makes it makes a ton of sense and it's exciting to think about like that type of world and when you say they're running on the same circuit is

that like there's gonna be I think earlier you mentioned that there'll be need to be some portion of the L2 stack that becomes uh like widely adopted uh what exactly is that and you know there's multiple people or multiple teams that are actively working on building out you know what their version of the zkevm and so all these l3s would need to live within the same uh circuit then so what what exactly a piece is it that needs to be standardized it's actually has to be the virtual machine itself like the the the the the most basic circuit or essentially like the thing that executes transactions so this is a really interesting question on how we can reach interoperability with other chains like

um it's yeah I I think I I I look at different competing approaches more like experimentation we're in a very early phase of creating the KVM so like we built the first KVM I I think we introduced the idea two years ago and and we we built the test net launched it internally a year ago and we opened it to the public uh in February last year so it's running now for how many like 10 months so uh all the other approaches were much later like they they came up with something like some test Nets were announced around um uh public test Nets of like a polygon and scroll or announcer on Devcon so

um we will see how this this approaches work and and which one is most efficient and eventually I think we will all Converge on one single bottle tested and most efficient approach to The Click you know it's it's like I can compare it to the to the IP protocol that powers the internet in the beginning of Internet there were multiple competing protocols IP was not not the only one we were stream protocols they were packet protocols there was AP there was UDP uh tcpap you know like it's they're still being used but there were also competing uh protocols to the Internet Protocol

itself but eventually everyone realized that if you use one standard you can create one giant Network where everyone can talk to everyone else and this is not a disadvantage it doesn't mean that you need to close down uh that you like your data is going to be transparent to everyone else and the only way to guard your data is to build intranets no just build firewalls you encrypt your data you use as a SSL you use https Etc but you need to agree with this one single piece which is common across like different Hardware different channels fiber optics wireless networks uh like modern connections all of them agree on this one single piece of Ip and this is

how we see the circuits that that will eventually crystallize okay this is the way and the this version and you you're absolutely right it's like it's important to Define what this part is and the smaller it is the better we want it to be as small as possible and have as many eyes as possible looking into it and into its security and making audience so that like it's easier for everyone to agree on this one step you know coming back to uh what Alex was saying earlier about our open source strategy like all of this is consistent right we want to get to the point where we've opened the protocol enough eventually you know our aspirations are to be one contributor of many to a protocol that does uh converge on a standard and we can actually start to

talk about how these systems go and scaling away where it's the community scaling up so no it's again it's informed open source strategy is really how we think about things at the moment winding back a little bit I know you guys just launched your you know Alpha main net open to developers how is that going are you seeing good traction what applications are you most excited about would love to get your thoughts there yeah I can say a couple bits and then Alex if you're going to jump in um so at the moment the state of the system that we're really excited we hit a huge milestone that for us had been something we were pushing hard to achieve which was to have a version of the system that was you know our real MVP the version of the system that we were comfortable deploying to mainnet

after having run to Alex's Point around 10 months or so at that test on testnet major improvements over that time major challenges solved um but we had the first production version of the system we wanted to deploy it onto mainnet for a number of different reasons and I would say they're like broadly bucketed under security and performance so the moment the system is still closed in the sense that we are the only ones who are able to access the system it's running on mainnet it's live but it's live in a very very restricted way it's not like a full live production system today and external developers can't Deploy on it yet what we're doing right now is we're going through a

series of activities on the security side including audits we mentioned opens up in earlier layer one I think we published the findings Somalia one audit relatively recently Layer Two and multiple other pieces of the system are under audit at the moment um and then we're also working on the proof of performance so this is a pretty tricky technical problem and you know using our GPU resources efficiently is important to make sure that the system runs in a sort of economically efficient manner so we have a bunch of activity going on the security side we ran a code Arena contest we have a lot more uh to say about things that we'll be doing on the security side um incentivize hacknets and various different bits and pieces like having

the system live on mainnet learning to operate the system and really iterating on the performance of the system or where we are today we are very close to the next major Milestone which is what we've called Fair onboarding Alpha so at this point um projects and I think there's more than 200 projects who have registered to use the system today including many exciting big names across defy gaming nfts you know kind of um a big cross-section of the community they will be able to bridge value into the system deploy their applications kind of you know have a period where there's no sort of first come first of uh effect it will be everyone is able to deploy at the same time they have you

know some period which we will Define and talk more about and have more detail on soon where they can test knowing that at the same time everyone sort of goes live uh instantaneously so the first Milestone will be developed development teams only there'll be some period And then after some relatively short window will uh release the constraints on the bridge and actually users will be able to bridge value into the system and simultaneously essentially the entire ecosystem goes over once which is I think um yeah pretty exciting uh Prospect so we are not far away from any of these things we are in the closing weeks of one of the major security audits that we are working on at the moment obviously we can't commit to being like you know we'll get this thing on June oh sorry uh January X we'll be

live on January X plus one we want to make sure that we've got a window to evaluate any findings Implement any changes the GPU performance work is ongoing and uh we'll likely be publishing a blog post soon we want to publish we want to make the system and the engineering that we're doing a lot more transparent so we we're aggregating all of the work that we're doing we'll be speaking very publicly about some of the changes we made the effect on the system and we'll be slowly opening up a lot more of what we're doing on the engineering side um but yeah coming months we'll see these two exciting Milestones first developers and then users I'll just just add that we see a lot of developer activity on on our test net which is running since February and is very stable and we have hundreds of projects

building there we have uh over I think 200 Partners committed to launch on the launch day as you can sync which will make the key sync the largest launch of of a minute in blockchain history so far to the best of my knowledge so I am personally excited about all of them we have some really big names starting with Union Swap and Ave balancer curve you know all top T5 protocols a lot of really interesting Community protocols that are less known of a lot of new things that people experiment with on the kissing because it's uh you know it's going to offer a very interesting properties using snarks

and it can create communities based on that uh like we have zigzag exchange launching on the kissing version one and the whole Community was like people who are excited about is your knowledge Pro scaling uh so I I don't want to give preferences I'm I'm genuinely excited about all of them you mentioned snarks like multiple times throughout the conversation and I think you know a lot of people contrast things that ZK AVM teams are building with things that starkware is building not to say one approach to put on the other we're still figuring it out but I guess what are the main trade-offs and why did you make the design choices did not try and use a more performant language like Cairo or you know using snarks over Starks like starkware has oh that's an amazing

question so first of all uh it's a matter of terminology like technically Starks are a subset of snarks starks are also Stars so like we are not bound by a particular technology or a particular is your knowledgeable protocol right now we're using Planck uh but we have uh came up with a proof system called redshift a couple of years ago now then the the guys from near protocol now part of polygon um uh made a uh like took this idea and made some changes in the parameters came up with something like plunky 2 which is essentially redshift with uh with a smaller field and a few interesting properties so the protocols are evolving

and I believe that all of the teams will eventually converge on something that is more most efficient like right now we're in the face of a Cambrian explosion of geological protocols but at some point there will be consolidation and the you know we will be coming slower too um the asymptotic like Improvement like where where the the pace of innovation is not as wild and it's like more stable and then everyone can see okay this is the way to do it because Starks depend on the efficient hash functions that are both efficient in circuits and on the on the processor there are some candidates for such hash functions that are currently being tested like once they are available it's going to be a lot cheaper to use them but for now recursion is like probably

cheaper uh you know on on the seller system so we are not dogmatic we are we are completely agnostic and open to to whatever the latest research will be and we will just switch to this processes but the great thing about all of them plonk it's not Starks plunky two like uh uh hyperplunk all all the things is that they basically all use the same format to represent the programs we call it in in the world of snarks we call it arithmetization how you transform your byte code or your logic of your program into a like polynomial you know in a one huge polynomial or like a matrix of numbers in the finite fields and this

format is like strikingly similar like it's essentially the same thing between starts and like or or very similar so it's very easy for us to transition from what we have today to a new proof system without changing the circuits essentially so um the right now what matters for ethereum is scalability and low cost of transactions and relatively high frequency of uh checkpoints of uh the speed of finalization of your blocks on ethereum so if you look at specialized Ezekiel roll-ups such as easy async version 1 roll up for payments and swaps and nfts and starknet sorry Stark uh

or the Stark X the the specialized DK roll up for uh for for an exchange uh both of them are uh producing make making very similar things but in ZK sync version one you have blocks like about 10 times more frequently finalized in ethereum than in stock net and the reason for this is that like we're using Planck which costs half a million guests to verify whereas stocks require five million guests to verify so you have to wait for a lot more transactions to accumulate in the block to justify the cost to verify this block in ethereum because the verification costs are the same no matter how many transactions you add there right so this

is one important trade-off uh in in the future again like we will be using just the most efficient thing and uh uh in the in a in a long longer term future it must be something fully transparent I cannot imagine like all of the world's Financial systems relying on on some trusted setup no matter how many trust participants and reputable participants were in that setup has to be like a completely transparent system with uh something like uh Friday stocks or um uh or Halo or like you know similar things yeah not much more to add except to say as I mentioned earlier the the cryptography team are already looking into the next version of the proof system and as part of that are looking

into things like yeah Prime base proofs hyperplunk moving away from a trusted setup like a lot of the things that Alex talked about are things we're actively thinking about um and really the question also comes down to you know how do we optimize for not so much the specifics of the proof system itself but like the things that really really matter at the system level like how do we optimize for security how do we optimize for Simplicity and ease of modifications ease of extensions like those things really matter and yeah so we're balancing off balancing trade-offs between um what we want to see in the proof system and also like how easy it is to kind of keep iterating on the system keep delivering for for users with zkcb2 yeah account abstraction's been been a Hot Topic recently and I'm curious you

know with when that gets implemented then it gives the ability for a transactors to be paid the gas per transactions to be paid in any token and I'm curious if that's something that you think about when you're designing systems like in L2 that ultimately are paying back paying settling transactions on the L1 and of course paying gas is is that something that you've you've considered yes so uh this is implemented and live today so we support construction natively under casing version two this has been I think one of the most exciting and interesting features that um really highlights how we're thinking about you know crypto becoming something that can really scale to millions of people when we're talking about usability and not just scalability

right what you can do with account abstraction um what the tools you know with to your point about giving flexibility to development teams to think about you know do we want to pay for transactions on behalf of our users do I want to sort of configure my payment interface to accept some subset of tokens that I care about uh like the level of flexibility that I think we'll see developer teams um have at Layer Two is just much richer and really it lets you start to design wallets I think you know there's many good examples of people who are innovating on wallet design I think Argent is one of the ones that obviously is very close to us we've seen some really creative and uh compelling features they're just you know you can't imagine

um that you know many of us today like as cliche as it is it's still early and the user experience at layer one can still be pretty rough right like you still um may want to send those test transactions or double check that you know like copy paste errors are not there and really when you see the Innovation from wallets leveraging these account abstraction features at Layer Two you can start to actually see a world in which millions of people are going to be using this thing because to a large degree I think for most people the blockchain should be abstracted away I mean really like in the same way as people using Facebook today don't care necessarily about the internet protocols on which it's built like many applications are going to want to be built in a way that people don't care that there's a blockchain involved and I

think account abstraction is really a bet on uh yeah about on bringing crypto to a community that you know doesn't or can't engage with it today um and it's not just scalability at the level of providing an execution environment that can handle those number of transactions but also providing a user experience that that can support people who don't or aren't interested in um you know learning about the technology or protecting themselves in the way that they might need to so I I I I want to share a story about this at least like a few weeks ago a friend of mine uh calls me and says Alex I I was like I received the crypto payment from my employer they agreed he will be paid in crypto uh here received usdc and he was like I was trying to like send it to an exchange uh but I couldn't because it

said like I need to pay some gas with like whatever and like I don't I don't understand it it's like what what does it mean like it says I need some ether I don't have ether so I try to change this usdc into ether to pay for gas but I can't because I don't have either to pay gas and the problem is like in in in in the erc20 standard there is no way for him to get uh to make this transaction without having uh ether like he cannot just like let the wallet to to pay for it he he actually must have ether in the first place so he must ask someone to send him either and only then can he authorize the transaction or like they need to do some chain over there so like this illustrates perfectly how you get something if you don't think about the

user experience in the end uh it's like you're gonna get some mess and for us I just gonna repeat it because it's very important and like we we keep doing everything we do is centered around the mission and the mission is to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto and mass adoption means usability like as Anthony just said the ux is at the core of it like the mass adoption of pgp never happened what happened is like Mass adoption of signal and telegram with like I'm not sure how how secure like how encrypted telegram is like let's say signal or like even a WhatsApp right why pgp was there for 20 years but it was so complicated that even like the most

advanced cryptographers in the world are not really using it between themselves because it's it's just too too cumbersome to to deal with that is a part of mass adoption and everything we're building a DK sync we're having the end user in mind this is how we build version one this is how we're building version two like we're imagining if this thing is to be used as the standard of the internet of value is going to be usable we have all the functions sufficient for it is going to be affordable like can we scale it you know like all the aspects are done with this final vision in mind and this this obviously includes the account abstraction this is why we did it

as the very first thing diversion from ethereum because ethereum's EAP forecast obstruction was like heavily discussed in the community it was not final and we realized like we cannot launch without it because it's not going to be something really usable by for masses for millions of people yeah I would venture to bet that all four of us on this call have bridged somewhere at some point and not have the gas token when we got there and it's very frustrating um but uh you guys have been super generous with your time so I just want to round it out with one more question what are you guys most excited about in crypto broadly it can be anything you want ZK sync related or anything else over the next 12 to 24 months let's call it I mean for me uh it's hard to look beyond our roadmap I mean as cliche as

it sounds like we it feels like we are right on the precipice of of really un you know being able to open the gates to something that we've been thinking about for a long time to Alex's point you know years of work have kind of led up to the point where we have this version of the system we are really kind of in these last moments of you know thinking through like have we uh crossed all the tears the dotted all the eyes like really if we like have we showed at the early risk from a security perspective like have we really pushed the system performance to where we feel comfortable to launch it um we have a large number of Partners ready to use the system and for me I can't look much beyond the next couple Milestones I think it's going to be

challenging exciting um but ultimately you know we're we're right there with um with the system which I thought many people would have expected uh to take much much longer um an enormous amount to do but looking forward to doing it in production and uh with the community it's kind of similar for me I'm I'm super focused on on what we're doing in uh you know like we're scaling the the company in the skating teams who are doing a lot of research development uh uh brainstormings uh but in general how I feel about crypto is what I'm really excited about in crypto Are The Brave things that change the status quo that like some innovations that like kind of do this creative disruption of

of the way uh all systems used to work and some examples of this are like obviously D5 which is like a radical innovation in finance um uh things around identity I'm really looking forward to the identity solutions that can replace and I mean just just like passwords and uh the way you you authorizing credit cards like every time I go to a new city and have to ride a bike you know like the scooters I have to feel like a thousand forums and at my credit card and like SMS confirmation all that stuff or like you're trying to buy a a plane ticket for the new Airline you have to do the same process over and over and over

again she can be just replaced with one single click click connecting wallet and like authorize some some data and you just confirm that you you're willing to provide this data in a uh privacy preserving manner but also like authorizing you and saying like yeah you're a real legit person and you are not a fraudster and you are willing to pay and provide your identity all at one all in once without like passwords which are like notoriously and insecure right so uh so identities um things like you know industry disrupting thing ideas like design centralized science like where all of a sudden you can you can compete with huge Pharma concern concerns on like uh this

big organizations uh because you can directly be appealing to your cons to your future users to Consumers something like what what uh crowdfunding did in the past but like specifically applied to like patterns and and scientific ideas and scientific innovation because I think the result there are a lot of problems in Academia like people from Academia I speak to are like all very worried about them and assuming we can transition to something decentralized where people with genuine interest and passion for science you can just go and get funded directly like bypassing all of these bureaucracies and inefficient processes uh that's going to be really really cool and I I I I know a couple of projects that work in this direction that are

really interesting um so like the the things in this direction there are many more but like I I which I'm not aware of because I'm super focused on tickets awesome yeah crypto is definitely exciting it's moving quick I'm excited to see how it uh you know pans out over the next 12 to 24 months but thank you guys so much for joining on we'll have to do this again sometime um but if you want to tell people where they can find you that'd be great sure you the best way to follow us is to go to Twitter and search for ZK sync one word and uh all official updates everything we we share is is posted there first in real time uh we are building the teams we we offer raising a really big ground now and especially in

the bear markets it's yeah um it's you know it's a good place like if you are passionate about freedom and trustless Technologies and and I think the recent events highlighted again how important is it to build systems that rely on math and publicly audible auditable code and not on individual people who can be corrupt or can become corrupt like misbehave at some point uh so if you are passionate about those things and you are a blockchain engineer or you you just acute you want to explore we have a number of positions open so if you go to zikisync.io you will find the link to our uh jobs page and you you can see

things there or you can just apply if you feel that yeah you you can be useful in a different role maybe it is one thing to add as well we have a very active Community Discord um developers users lots of people that are building on zksync V2 today on testnet if you want to get involved there's also lots of tutorials um yeah more feedback from the community is always welcome and there's a team that always happy to chat about what we're doing awesome thanks so much