Anna Rose & Kobi Gurkan: Zero Knowledge Proofs – State of the ZK Ecosystem - Part 1 #476

Transcript

Anna Rose is the founder of everything ZK so ZK pod DK Summit DK validator ndk hack and Kobe is the head of research at geometry um and also works with Anna on DK validator and CK hack and there's also cryptography advisor at Sea Lab so lots of hats here before we before we speak with Anna and Kobe about the state of the ZK ecosystem um let me tell you about our sponsors today our sponsor is Omni um and Omni is your new favorite Mighty chain Mobile Wallet it supports more

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other side it is crazy isn't it I was I was recently on um Sebastian's podcast to talk about noses chain um and it's really funny because it's so different on the other side of the show actually yeah I've been so um fantastic so we're here to talk about the state of the zika ecosystem because obviously it's been um there's been a lot of changes over the last year or so and it's been extremely difficult to kind of keep up for me as someone who does not pay attention to this full time but maybe also for you guys so maybe definitely we

need your help but um before he kind of dive into the ins and outs of this UK ecosystem and let's get some background background on both of you and I'd start with Anna all right so what what how far back should I go maybe skip kindergarten okay no kindergarten uh okay okay so I think I'll start the story with um over 10 years ago I think or almost 10 years ago I I was the founder of a web 2 startup and I was you know learning I was working a lot with engineers at the time but it was very web too it was

video it was good good experience good education and then come 2017 I sort of started to enter this like blockchain world and it was really like going back to start like everything I had learned in the previous Tech phase I sort of had to unlearn and at the same time like I wanted I remember like 2017 I wanted to actually do a new project I wanted like a second Technical startup that I would that I would start but like right then um at least the people that I was coming into contact they were working on like deep client software like it was like the deepest 10 most technical stuff and it was like yes there were some people pitching these ideas for like you know

denta coin or like yeah we'll use blockchain plus XYZ but it was so it was so kind of like funny to really get involved you kind of needed to be like an engineer you needed to be like deep in it and so I was like okay I can't really be an engineer I can't really even do product at this point so what can I do and somebody I so I joined parody sort of for like a special project just to get a taste for what was going and Frederick who became my co-host pitched this idea like why don't we do a podcast we're both new in the industry we have a bit of a technical background why don't we do it and so that's where the ZK podcast starts and that's where yeah if I think if anyone's listening and if they know

anything about what I do so I think that's where my work probably starts for them but the ZK kind of uh family kind of proliferated or at least yeah I mean you started with with um the ZK podcast but now you have uh the ZK Summit and CK hack and DK validated and they're all like um in independent but interrelated kind of project right yeah you also just you introduced me just earlier as like the you know in charge of all things EK that is not true there are so many projects that start with DK that I have nothing to do with um and actually I mean I always love telling the story of like why did we call it the zero knowledge podcast like

a lot of people ask me like oh did you work in cryptography before it's like absolutely not I was around Engineers a fair bit but we for like and if anyone listens to the early episodes like I think until episode 11 we just refer to the podcast as like this podcast because we had no name and we like floated some really like crappy crappy names before for that and then someone kind of came around at some point and said hey why don't you call this like we know about this weird form of zero like of of cryptography over there like this it's called zero knowledge you have zero knowledge why don't you call your shows your knowledge it was kind of a joke nothing about this might as well be

upfront about it the thing is we thought why don't we do it I mean literally at the time the only people who were listening were like the people in the room with us so it really didn't matter what we called it there was very low stakes um but yeah so we picked that name and then around that time I wanted to do an event in Berlin actually about stuff like with some of the people I was meeting in the ecosystem so I just wanted to throw a small blockchain event but because the name of our show was Zero knowledge I called this event the zero knowledge Summit and then I shared that event with a bunch of people it was like people could

apply to talk and I shared it as far as and wide as I could and it reached the ear of or the desk of Howard Wu over in California and he got that like oh there's a zero knowledge Summit this is awesome and then he applied with like eight of his friends and I at the same time had contacted Zuko and I did get strad from from uh Z from the ECC now to come over and so even though it really just started as like this podcast Summit but called zero knowledge Summit it became by the time we actually had that event the first zero knowledge Summit and I actually do get to claim first because there was an event called ZK

proofs uh just a month later but we were I think I I'm pretty sure at the first yeah and then from then on like I was doing this twice a year so like the ZK Summit also just introduced me to new ZK topics new ZK people and that Community grew and at the same time the podcast like it really I mean and I really don't recommend anyone listens to the early ones they really suck but like they really aren't very good but um I think we're only like around episode 21 that's where we actually first start mentioning zero knowledge Tech and we do like an intro to ZK um but from that point forward as we were learning more about it so now we're

talking like 2018 right it's still really early in ZK there's only I don't know maybe a hundred people in the world who know what this is really so it's like it just was kind of Lucky yeah I'm really glad we picked that name and the last one you haven't talked about is ZK validator yeah okay sorry yeah it's okay ZK validator zika validator started in 2019 uh I met my co-founder will and I had pitched him I mean I actually it was on my show I think it was the Bison Trails guys sort of pitched me on being a validator they were like you could be a validator too and I'm like really anyway I pitched it to him and then we started and there we

started validating on Cosmos and then polka dot near extended and then yeah I mean it was this was super cool because it gave me like I still think like if you go back to that earlier part of the story like I have always wanted to be building something in this space but it's been really hard or was really hard in 2017 to figure out what that was and this validator role was like a really good way for us to start engaging in actually doing something like participating adding value to what we're what we're talking about um and it was a great way to also be introduced into Cosmos and polka dot and understand deeper I mean I kind of already poke it up but like these other ecosystems what was happening who are the players

um it definitely influenced like my thinking about the entire space it probably changed a little bit like who I would have on his guess what I was curious about um yeah and and that's where well and then zkv has also developed so we expanded past uh just sort of Cosmos and polka dot and we actually started working with Kobe in 2020 or 2022 officially but I know we started talking about it in 2021 yeah yeah what what we hadn't been able to do before because we had been really partnering with existing infrastructure providers before that right like we worked with bison trails and chorus one

and uh but when we joined with force with Kobe it was like we could actually start to be early on the networks and actually run the infrastructure ourselves and learn even more what was happening and it's been really really exciting so that's ckv and this is also a super nice way to actually hand over to Kobe Kobe tell us about you know you're part of you know the story what happened so far before you met Anna and you know started working on DK validators with her sounds good so I'll I guess I'll also go 10 years back or something yes as I said skip kindergarten uh yeah but that's also like quite around the time where I

got to professionally work on cryptography so you know kindergarten [Laughter] but yeah so I I like about 10 years ago I think like I kind of had this opportunity in my master's degree to give a lecture about any topic that that I wanted and you know I heard about Bitcoin fears before that like I I I heard about it in a podcast actually like the Security Now podcast and how about how he was trying it out and how how cool it is and how it was mining 50 Bitcoins on his personal computer and that was cool

um but they never got into it and like that's like when I got into it like back then and got to understand how it works that kind of what captured me but since then I left my job back then and started working on uh this space like I've done some products in Bitcoin like multisig bullets and things of that sort um but quickly after that I doubled down on cryptography because that was my favorite topic um and like going forward a few years I also discovered the topic of snarks which I really like and um

it was like looking very deeply into zikash and how things work there because basically they were the only ones that deployed snarks back then like nobody else knew how to do that and um yes I was trying I led the development in a startup that was doing snarks for about two years and and afterwards I joined sea Labs leading the cryptography there we were doing very interesting things around light clients with snarks which are starting to become more common now actually

and also we worked with then a bit there like we can share about it later [Music] um but yeah that's that's where I kind of got to to even do more advanced cryptography and like create products from scratch and deploy them to users um so around this topic of scenarios but also threshold cryptography which is a topic that I also really like and I was working with ATM Foundation a bit around this and jumping forward again last year about a year and a few months we and I started the geometry with Tom and

that's the main thing that I did today but also the ZK hack and the KV with Anna and others actually there's four of us yeah we should mention our co-founders on that which is Philip and will um so there's four of us who do it yeah maybe Kobe we just you just sort of hinted at this thing this so the first project we worked on together was The plumo Trusted setup yeah um and it was I had been doing sort of a series on the show about trusted setups like finding out how everyone was doing these things and like everyone had heard sort of the Radiolab version so that's the earliest one that zcash did but there was like advancements by the time

we did it and plumo this this ceremony like Kobe was it the first time that we did like that that parallelization or like the batching was happening I think so there were other forms of it that were happening so Aztec was doing something that was also optimizing by pipelining so you that you start that the subsequent contributions start before you verify the fully the previous ones but in plomo we did do this out of order execution where people could contribute in parallel um but if any of them fail then this whole batch is like failed and but if they don't fail

then you get like 10x times better performance so that was that was cool I I'm not sure anyone else is doing that today um especially because Plum was a huge setup like it was more than like a few hours like even more than 10 hours in some computers for every participation yeah I took I took part in the abstek one that you just referred to basically you were given a slot um and you basically had to be online at that point and because you had to have like your your Docker image running and basically it was it was very um and mine happened to have mine was on I think mine was on Christmas um and so clearly a few years back I

don't I don't remember when exactly it was um but yeah I remember kind of having to be there you know at the right time and kind of getting everything started then took a couple of hours and yeah it was uh I think ignite that was this the Aztec one I think that was 2019-2020 I got a t-shirt I still wear it to bed every now and then so yeah my my my husband's always particularly excited when he gets to go to bed with you know like ceremony participant which it says on the T-shirt so it's uh yeah no no unfortunately there's no there's there's a private key on the back but basically it's not yours I mean there's

a key but it's it's all the same one but uh ah okay next that would be a pretty intensive swag print actually that would have been really really cool yeah so um let's talk about um the ecosystem as it is oh Anna oh wait wait there's one more thing that we haven't talked about though so I think we've both shared like I did podcast Summit Kobe's done Kobe geometry yeah have we covered yeah do you want to talk about geometry a little bit because I would love to yeah I really want to talk about CK hack that's what yeah I do

too but let's let's talk about geometry a bit Crystal yeah we started geometry last year um it's kind of a combination of research house where we do many cool cryptography things that we try to show how to use new kind of constructions or protocols in a way that people may not may have not seen before and maybe Inspire building new products around those and but also it's we invest in companies that have this kind of deep research DNA within them so there is a bunch of cryptography related companies some Bridge related

companies um some of them around scaling and some of them touch other type aspects of cryptography or others and but yeah basically we we like to talk about with all these Founders that have something unique in their approach to how to build work products that utilize interesting research in it all right can we talked VK hack now let's do it okay I wanna so DK hack is like the project that for the last year at least I've been super excited about um ZK podcast is sort of General CK Summit is very much new research ZK validator

is running validators on various networks and then using some of those funds to like do events and bring more ZK into the networks ZK hack and this is something that came from I guess a brainstorm with you Kobe I had wanted to do a ZK hackathon forever and it is happening it's still coming but I've been wanting to do it forever but it was like late 2021 and it was still too early to really get people together on such large scale a lot of teams weren't sure they weren't ready even like the tech wasn't quite ready um and so we were talking about this it's like I really wanted to do this hackathon what could we do instead and Kobe had this idea of doing a like CTF like competition where you'd break ZK

protocols you'd find a bug and you'd exploit it and it would and and it was it was like very very challenging and then around this we designed this event called ZK hack which is like and we've now done it a couple times but it's usually like a weekly or bi-weekly Workshop Series so you have like every week a workshop or twice a week a workshop and then during the sort of break between these workshops there's a puzzle competition running and we did the first one in 2021 kind of through ZK validator actually and it was seven weeks and it was super intense and it was super good because what we found out is like you find out who are the experts in in these different teams like people you might not really know they

are not necessarily at the events they're not necessarily presenting the papers some of them are but like but then they were hacking and you got to know their work and it was really exciting um it introduced I know both of us to a whole new group of people that we hadn't met before yeah definitely hacks oh well so so far we've done three I think we're gonna try to do them twice a year so we just wrapped one up we just wrapped up ZK hack3 which we decided to do four weeks this time which was like probably a better more sane amount of time to be running these events um and we had three puzzles and I think we had almost 30 hackers so the thing is the puzzles are really hard so they're

not like everyone come it's like only the most hardcore can really do that it's the most stubborn yeah but the the workshops I think we had over like 2 000 at least 2 000 unique sign ups this time around for the workshop so we like these are the workshops are much more focused for people who are either beginner or beginner intermediate who want to use the tools they want to learn how to like use Noir or you know what exactly some of these architectures look like under the hood so yeah it was really fun so seeing that they're like several weeks long uh I assume they're all online it's like yes the big playlist yeah

super nice and there's the Whiteboard sessions right that oh yeah yeah we also started to create content around this so we partnered with polygon to do the ZK uh whiteboard sessions which are like and actually and then we got Dan Bonnet to do the first three so it's like a mini ZK course and then a whiteboard session sort of inspired by the near whiteboard sessions I always want to give them the shout out because like yeah we were really into we were like that's awesome why don't we try doing it for ZK um yeah how do people access this is all on the Zero knowledge podcast YouTube channel so they can check that out there's all the playlists in the show notes

fantastic are you guys ready to talk about the state of the ecosystem let's do it fantastic so um we had the we had our first Euro knowledge episode seven years ago wow with um Eli uh basically I think it was uh it was very yeah it was definitely it was seven years ago um and obviously back then I mean in the next couple of years it wasn't all that difficult to kind of keep up with things that were happening because there weren't are there many right so basically and even maybe like a year or a year and a half ago basically they

were like it was stuck and that there was Mata Labs with um ZK sync there was Ms um that's now part of a polygon with um the zkevm um and then there was maybe ad stack and tornado but in in the realm of kind of like ZK stuff that was more or less it right yeah there was so in like fall of 2019 there was this like flurry of papers so around that time there was like all these new ideas but I think you're right that like the implementations I mean there was

there weren't that many of them they were maybe just like academic implementations and those companies really came out during the bear Market the last bear market like and I remember like some of the hackathons like the global hackathons that's where some of those teams actually formed for the first time like the they would have like done these little projects that sort of like tried to take some of this research and put it into practice and those formed the companies that you mentioned but yeah they were still only a handful as well yeah and I think one one thing that you know made it made the change or like caused the change was the fact that the tooling developed a lot you back then if you wanted to build something that is best best on ZK you had to

take let's say zika's implementation and try to write your own smartphone or a contract that would verify it and you would have to write your own like JavaScript implementation and a competitive web assembly or whatever it was super complex but around that time like and that's actually came both from the ATM foundation with Socrates but also from the identity which is now their mess team right and from Jordy they created this circum environment and those two made a big difference in terms of tooling because now you could build something that was end to end and you could have client implementations

Sprout from it and then verifier on ethereum and it unlocked this ability for a lot of people to create DK Solutions and the thing that made a big change Anna you're nodding you agree yeah I mean I think it's it's what I think a lot of people when they thought of the idea of ZK stuff they kind of they did leap ahead to the use cases and then as they started to like try to do those they were like oh wait there's like none of the stuff you need to do that at all and so it was like catching up with the dream over the last few years and those tool kits are so key um and there's there's new ones too that have come out since then like yeah there

is many yeah there's a ton I mean if you look at ZK dsls even there's just like we've done entire talks on that because there's a there's a map of the dsls um yeah actually just give a talk about it and like ZK proof and I I had a list I couldn't cover it all even like there's so many so yeah yeah it's crazy the I mean it's it's also it's super exciting and maybe let's talk about the OD OG said we just mentioned where where are they at now so give us which one do you want us to start on um maybe like any one of the layer twos in whichever order you want so uh CK

saying stockx uh ckevm uh you know add stack to a certain I mean I think tornado is the one that we have covered um you know to a large extent on this podcast before but we we both had someone from tornado on before uh the recent events and afterwards we had some lawyers on so I think tornadoes probably were good on that but uh yeah let's talk about starknet meta labs uh zika evm that's Tech well I think we can say that like if you look at matter I mean they a few years ago they were like they were building they were building a DSL there

was like a lot of the core research so I actually had them on the show a ton then to talk about like circuits and exactly like that part but then since then I think like as far as I've seen they've kind of gone heads down to implement and ship so it there's a shift often like it's it is much more about delivery and it's a little bit less about experimentation I mean this is projecting but this is what I sort of what I what I got from them um and I don't know Kobe you can probably talk more about the Stark net emergence yeah yeah I think that um starknet was uh what was a nice development let's say from starkware ecosystem like before we had Stark net

which I think started like end of last year like August something like this if I remember correctly I'm not sure um before that if you wanted to use the offering from starkware you basically had to partner with them and they would build with you this custom solution based on Stark X and starknet was giving this ability to people to participate in a general purpose Roll-Up so that was a big change like that was a really major thing um I I think that back that back when starting it started um I didn't understand what it was like I didn't understand the documentation

but when I tried it I like it clicked then I got it [Music] um and the ecosystem there grew very rapidly and there's a lot of there are a lot of people that are learning Cairo which is the language that is running inside starknet and and it gives you a lot of flexibility and power um I still think there's a long way to go like it's still not decentralized like most of the l2s today um like there are some failure modes that are not very pleasant like things can get stuck that's fine like still

early days in some sense um but it's a very welcome and necessary development to to give this power to to users that they didn't have before to run things at scale and applications that they couldn't run on L1 and so that that was really cool they were really I mean I think they were incredibly influential on the ZK VM team I mean the ZK VM teams there's all these other zkvm teams now yeah and I think even like in the conceptualizing of this like super fast environment that's still connected to a blockchain but you can like do a lot more it inspired people to like be like oh my God I could do this kind of app or this

kind of app and it goes so much further than what you often could do on blockchain but um yeah I know that there's a number of different teams like approaching that problem usually still using Starks actually or features of starks like they're using some step that Stark like um but yeah you have over at polygony of maiden and you have risk zero which I think kind of Falls in that category as well yeah what about um her mess and uh the ZK VM that does that uh is that kind of like yeah where's that at well I mean so ZK evm we just did a wrap up episode actually over on my show and

we talked about like the summer of ZK evm announcements um there was this funny week in July where like all the teams were like we're doing ckvm but I think I mean they all have different approaches I think they do work together fairly well I think there's like a friendliness in it um yeah I think they're trying to find a way to really scale ethereum I think that's a very ethereum focused solution it's like you can you're it's solidity you don't have to change the workflow the style you can really redeploy things and I think that we don't know yet if there's a winner or if they're just like a these cool separate environments that all have their own unique benefits to using yeah I think it's it's actually Kobe we were talking about this

like do we know what phase they're really at like I think you can sort of do something with them but they're not necessarily like full-on yeah I think like from like if we go even higher level we have like two major approaches to ZK VM today like there was the one that um was taking and the one that starkware was taking which was called warp there that they say you know you don't need full compatibility you just need to take solidity programs which is what people write and compile them to some ZK VM so some people also you know thought about what the term evm means like is it compiling solidity or is it running evm

codes like is like there was this uh I think there is still is this battle around this term um but other kind of teams like uh scroll and Hermes and pulling on zero they're taking another approach which is actually running the evm byte code directly and which is which ensures greater compatibility so it's not like full compatibility still because you know some things are more expensive when you run it in ZK like hashes so you have to sometimes modify gas costs but maybe you can carry over some security analysis maybe you can carry over

um a lot of the more special functionality that you've developed maybe you've even written some evm assembly code so you can use that um but yeah I think that in the last few months we've seen a bunch of them launching test Nets which is cool so a lot of them are functional like you can use scroll public testnet you can use Hermes testnet and all of them are it's some at an increasing level of compatibility I think each week so you can run things but sometimes not everything is proven like not all the op

codes are supported and so you will get the feeling of how easy to use it so you you have the appearance of a proof being created but sometimes not everything is being actually proven so it's more like sometimes the simulation of the experience um but it's going it's like an honest simulation of the experience like this is what they aim that basically you can use every tool you and you have today and it will work as is um but yeah I think that's that's the state where they are today like they're functional they're usable not maybe fully compatible and nearly not not at all audited like the or their audits are

going to be very complex yeah I want to talk about audits definitely later just because it seems like such a fraud uh the thing that yeah that could go wrong I didn't didn't they just I think Jordy just shipped it off to audit right yeah so like like I think that they shifted off to Audits and like I think Jordy has kind of been or like Jordan the team right they've been I think kind of training Auditors in some sense like they've been teaching them about what it means to audit that code um so yeah the I think things are starting to be audited but and that's that's polygon Hermes that's the next

project you had asked about Frederica so that's I guess the stage that that one's at so if you if you kind of zoom out and kind of look at you know the landscape of all these different air tools um I I think kind of the the high school question uh you know you know your essay question would be like contrast and compare how they I mean so basically if if I'm going to deploy on a ZK layer too how do I decide which one to deploy to how are they different from one another wait question for you Kobe but if you're writing solidity code would it look very different to you to deploy on any of the ZK EVMS

depend like if you're talking about like let's say the hair medicine scroll variants it would feel very similar like it would feel I think also similar to how you do it on ethereum you just need to change the RPC basically but also basically those just kind of just uh transliterate like op code by op code right so basically it's kind of like you you just translate like word by word and then basically using the same grammar that you use before you just you know put them one after the other but that's different from from from say stagnet and uh no yeah exactly they there they just transpile solidity into their own VM so that becomes very very different the

security analysis is very different um there you have to audit the compiler from from like this transpiler that's what you have to focus on and then also their VM but uh yeah it's it's very different so but let's maybe let's let's not talk about the audits now so I think we we we're we're all happy to agree that you know audits um are important and difficult and we will talk about them later so say everything is audited and in principle we know that it works as designed how do these different layer tools differ from each other sorry I'm I'm I just I think I Kobe you explained it didn't you it's

this idea of are you transpiling or not right yeah I mean like do mineral Tools in general like or EVMS no just the C K1 so I mean I totally get that there's like uh that there's uh that there are some that kind of uh transpose them up code by upquote and some that don't but other than that kind of they they um they arrive at the byte code differently um do they have advantages and disadvantages um yeah so I think that's uh if you compare the ZK evm ones uh I think that's it remains to be sealed so we don't know yet basically

um maybe some teams will go further in the decentralization efforts and they will do that earlier maybe they'll create some more interesting environments for validators or provers to participate in and maybe some of them will have better performance although I think all of these teams are extremely strong and will reach adequate performance and and maybe some of them will be more receptive to feedback or will do upgrades faster or have better bug bounties so I'll be more confident and things are are more secure there but I think with Jessica ziki evm is really

hard today there is one more difference maybe to mention and maybe correct me if I'm wrong here Kobe but I think that like on the starkware side it's all Starks under the hood like full Starks the way that it was kind of originally presented whereas on I know some of the other ZK VMS they're using like fry right like they're using like there's like one step that's sort of like starkifying a snark but it's quite a different thing under the hood yeah I think that basically every team is taking another a different approach and so like you say stockware is doing Starks like pure Starks with some additions

and the Hermes team they're taking this kind of layer approach that you mentioned so basically they're doing long but with fries so like they use this transparent polynomial commitment that came from Starks but they use it with Planck so that's interesting and then they do snarks on top of that to optimize the verification and the scroll and ethereum Foundation teams what they are doing they're doing plonk with this kcg commitment which is it's a trusted setup but it's a universal one so that you can reuse it and they're doing a very complex architecture of many circuits

that interact with each other and they do kind of a recursive layer um composition until they reach the evm itself or the layer one itself where they verified um but just just as a side note there is a very good write-up from a real gabison that describes how you go from air to wraps which wraps is kind of long and it shows how similar Starks and along with fry are which kind of bridges this gap which

um which we chose how like that basically everything is very very similar you just latch on another thing and then it becomes long with fry instead of Stark so it's really cool wow okay if you if you got none of this we will link to the especially the paper that Kobe referred to in the show notes um so basically me can I can I kind of um summarize this with um in principle all of these editors do the same thing and which one is best remains to be seen when they're alive and operational and some of them have failed or not failed and you know gone up in Flames for ziki VM I think that's true yeah yeah it's best by which

by which metric is probably also worth because there is that aspect of it being decentralized or not like you might actually suffer you might suffer some performance but you'll get like a more secure system in a way yeah but all of them currently I mean none of them actually have a decentralized sequencer right no not yet so all of them have like a centralized choke point so it doesn't really I mean if as long as you have like one centralized choke point doesn't really matter how many more centralized choke points you you add right depends it really depends because if you have a centralized sequencer then you can do so much damage like you can do all the damage you can still if the if

the L2 is designed correctly you can still Force the sequencer to take transactions in so they can't forcibly censor you and they um they can hurt liveness but they cannot hurt security because the security is guaranteed by and the proving proving process itself so um there's so much damage that this centralized choke point can do which is a really nice feature that that's what's really compelling about this kind of zika roll-ups because you can limit the damage that the centralized party can do um

yeah so in in in the on the scale of decentralization where do all of these sit very early all of them okay like but I think all of them at least have the intentions the right intentions and I think they have dishonest intentions to do the right things but it just they need to ship what they have first and move towards decentralization later when things are functional so yeah I mean I mean we all know that this is incredibly um complex technology so um yeah yeah um so we've just one thing so we talked

a lot about l2s but mostly ZK EVMS exactly yeah but there is Aztec which we haven't talked about which we might want to say a few words on so like Aztec first of all just a team that I adore I think there's such great people I love hanging out with them when I'm in London and they created they launched ZK money I think in the last two years um they recently have like launched sort of a I don't know if you call it competitor DSL to circom what do you think Kobe [Music] competitor I mean if you treat all the CK dsls like all the languages as

competitors then sure but I think it brings something really new to the table uh so I really like it yeah I think that's the day like and they they do talk about private computation but I wouldn't put them in the category of zkevm no I think they're they're very different kind of structure they're not the ZK evm they're not even a ZK VM and but and they did not have this recursive power yet like that would allow private smart contract structures and but that's where this new language that Noir that they released is aimed to

to enable that so basically would write these the circuits with Noir which looks like a normal programming language and then you would be able to deploy it inside their ZK roll up and that's why like they call it a ZK ZK roll up so that you can verify within their ZK roll up more ZK so that's what they do um so that's what Noir would give them yeah but basically before we move on just to make sure that we gave the right uh picture there are other l2s right like there's dark net and there is uh um like you say ZK sync and all of them are not even evm like they're just VMS and if you

want to choose them it might be for other reasons right like you would choose them for the reasons that you're willing to learn a new language or a new environment um and you want to enjoy this greater performance that this gives um but you suffer from maybe other um other other reasons because maybe you need to do new security analysis maybe you need to train more Developers and you're taking a bet on a new VM maybe it won't be as expressive as you want because in the evm you know what you can do and what you cannot maybe hear you will find that you can do more but maybe you'll find that you can do less so there you just have to do some homework and maybe experiment and see

whether it even fits your use case so how is how the performance different if I go to uh sorry Hannah go for it right I think isn't it still I mean Kobe can you answer that is is there clear metrics on these no yeah I think it's a community this is one of the things that we need to develop like I actually had a chat about this with Tom today like we need to develop some framework for benchmarks for all of these altitles like so it's it's interesting like to do apples to apples comparisons here yeah absolutely so basically if if you know I'm gonna build a um an app that I want

to run on one of those l2s and basically it's going to need a shitload of compute or it'll need lots of data availability and so on and basically kind of having like this click through experience where basically it tells you you should definitely uh deploy to stocknet or something so I think that would be uh super interesting yeah or even some like common use cases and like create all this this common use case on all of the different uh ltos and just evaluate how how performant it is that would also already be big progress I think um so we've talked about

um I'll choose for a bit now let's talk about n1s yeah it used to be that zcash was the ZK L1 and everything else was sort of like building ZK on top of things but since then I mean we have ilio we have Mina so there's a lot of teams that are like uh also they're maybe in other ecosystems like penumbra or Manta uh yeah let's talk about kind of where the other ones are at and what what their usage is uh like and whether they're whether they're live at all or whether they're kind of in proof of concept stage because basically the the um the Legacy privacy preserving everyone's to me that would be secret

and Monero um and it's gotten a bit quiet around those but obviously the ones that you just cited they've gotten um a lot of press recently so where are they at yeah I mean maybe just one thing about the zika so Monero I was never I've never really explored very much but I will say it's something about the zcash crew it's like in terms of research they released Halo 2 and it's been adopted by almost like like just all over the ecosystem so in terms of like output on Research they're still really top in a way um but it's true that like I think a lot of the other projects are bringing because they're often at least exploring

programmability or being able to deploy things on top of them and not just being money transfer a lot of them are also proof of stake or they've like evolved the consensus to to fit a little bit more of The Narrative of today um I think so the one that went live probably the earliest of that batch is Mina they went live in 2021 I believe and yeah side note I'm an advisor to them so disclosure there but yeah they have been so they used to present this idea of snaps and this was like ZK apps on uh like on Mina but they've rebranded that so it's ZK apps now and as far as I know like there are there's a cohort of

people building things on testnet now so like it's if you want to start really playing with these things it's it's there to play with it's maybe not yet live on the mainnet and I don't know what it's going to take to get there yet but um yeah that's that's kind of cool that's part of the reason why I think the ZK hackathon idea can come to fruition this year because there is finally environments where people can really build stuff without like having studied this stuff for months and months and months in advance and going on I mean okay so alio is I know they're in like test net three I Kobe I don't know have you tried it out I don't know actually how much you can do yet well I've I haven't tried the Test match 3 itself but I've like

doubled with the tool chain that they have like they've like Leo tried to develop a whole stack of things so they developed a new language they develop this new blockchain that has programmability in ZK and the language that they have is also very interesting because it combines both the blockchain part and the circuit part in the same syntax which is really fun to see and really fun to to work with and so I've tried that and that that's really cool um but uh yeah it's like it does have like this concept of proof of succinct work which is an interesting approach to to mining because like they're kind of a hybrid I think right now with proof of

stake and proof of work and and like they use this part because the proof of work itself uses snarks so they use this part to basically incentivize creating Hardware accelerated snark provers in some sense so it's kind of a whole circle and so that might be impressive yeah yeah we might want to mention actually so that the Elio team also like they put together the Z prize this year which was an attempt to like push and fund Hardware acceleration which makes sense with their product and I think the results just came in we did a little Alex did a presentation at CK hack last week

so yeah there's like I think and from what I understood like there were actual there was progress made in Hardware like ZK proving it's pretty cool that that worked that it happened it was like industry-wide zkv partly sponsored it too so like yeah we all got involved to try to push that yeah I think like Hardware acceleration like the results maybe were surprising for some people and you got better than expected and you actually got some interesting breakthroughs like in even in things that we haven't seen progress in like decades so and people know that they see that the market is serious about paying them for

Hardware acceleration they're now looking at this and actually making interesting breakthrough breakthroughs so that's really cool to see there's also a few teams that have emerged like projects that just work on X like Hardware too like omer's project whose name I always mess up there we go um yeah I should mention ZK validators as an investor in a few of these projects and I think geometry might be as well so yeah geometry is [Music] there's other projects like other l1s but they live within the other ecosystems so we have penumbra that's like going to be a privacy decks within the cosmos ecosystem like using IBC uh you have a Noma which I feel like sort of is

in Cosmos sort of is in polka dots like also this like bridged to other ecosystems project and I know they're doing a trusted setup right now that's do going really well from what I could see it's like a lot of people wanted to do it uh we also have on the polka dot side you have Manta that is like their ZK environment and actually I will say a little plug like ZK validator we're actually doing a workshop series with them to use xcm with Moonbeam so it's actually called privacy and Moonbeam and it's using Manta and Moonbeam and it's cool because like I think by putting the project out in the world we sort of pushed the developers on both sides to make sure that we could like actually

make exactly this combination this so so actually there will be applications building kind of over that uh through our workshop at least like experimental applications um but yeah yeah and like beyond the ones that are let's say ZK focused you also have more and more support in other l1s that are not generalistically focused but they add ZK support So ethereum started with that like that that was a big big leap but the cello did that and I think so is then that and Falcon to some extent are using like I

think they're also like maybe the biggest snark consumers at this point maybe by like proving power so you have this kind of deep ZK integration in a lot of these other elements as well