David Schwartz & Jordi Baylina: Polygon zkEVM – From Mainnet to Mass Adoption - Part 2 #487
17 Mar 2023 · 54:02
Polygon zkEVM tech lead Jordi Baylina and CTO David Schwartz join Epicenter hosts Friederike Ernst and Meher Roy for part two of a conversation on zk rollups and Ethereum scaling. They compare the use cases across Polygon's different zk rollups, the stages of transaction submission and costs, the open source licensing of the zkEVM prover, and the unresolved question of sequencer decentralization on the path to mass adoption.
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welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica Antz and I'm here with meher Roy and today we're again speaking with David Schwartz and Jody bylina of polygon for part two of our episode on the zkevm we did an intensely technical episode last week and today is more about the business and adoption side of polygon ZK VM so before we talk with David and Judy again let me tell you about our sponsor this week Omni is your new favorite multichain Mobile Wallet Omni supports more than 25
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at omnidot app and without further Ado let's go to the interview let's talk about the network itself so um there's already a test net life and the mainnet is going to launch next month that's in March um so first of all super easy question um what's actually the relationship between polygon zkevm and polygon because polygon is kind of is kind of this Standalone sidechain kind of thing and polygon DK evm is going to be like a proper layer to on top of ethereum right so what's kind of the What's um what's the relationship and what are the plans for kind of chain architecture
and planning for the future well polygon POS is the the product polygon is uh you know running now this is the chain uh polygon is providing service today the the relationship is clear because we are shipping a new network um we have a building this CK roll up model which is a complete Layer Two and we are in the in the beta version in Mainland next month so it's the the first release and we have planned to just let this these networks you know um be be you know work together in in parallel because they are different uh
Services one is uh as I change with um cost model and the running service and we will have a different technology with a different cost model and a different characteristics So the plan today is to start this new network and we'll be providing let's say this whole Vision very soon uh from the from the polygon perspective how this connects together how the POS connects with the ckbm with the supernets with uh with Maiden with zero all these projects working together we have a strategy to to connect all of them and to provide let's say a good portfolio of solutions or options for
users depending on the requirements of the application but at the same time being connected and being a let's say useful in terms of uh compostability and you know you know the deployment of apps that can be can work together in different Networks so when I go to the polygon website right the main polygon website and I go to Solutions there's three things listed under under you know like ZK one is polygon zero one is polygon maiden and the third is polygon CK evm which is which is your project the project we are
interviewing right now what's the difference between evm and polygon 0. yes well we have a polygon was investing in CK teams in 2021 and this was the announcement of the emergency Network which is our project there was also the acquisition of uh the Mir protocol which is polygon zero now and also the setup of the protocol sorry the project polygon Maiden The the approach was kind of a strategy of this diversification in different approaches because as we discussed before uh one year and a half
ago two years ago it was not clear which was the good approach to follow and with this model polygon was basically hedging on the three approaches which we discussed today so it turns out that we were the first team to ship and the 10 the first team to to get to the position of shipping a minute which is amazing but the other teams are also working in parallel and we had during this time we had this uh this contribution total contribution because Jersey explained before we were targeting uh big computation pools to to make this visible and in terms of course we had a lot of doubts but with this internal contribution especially polygon
0 we were able to accelerate the blueprint like 40 times so we have today the the high performance and the low cost we have so we are in a combination of different approaches together with internal collaboration and we are getting to the point where we will you know defend defining well with what's the let's say role model the model for deployment Department of polygon networks and as I said we have uh this this type 2 ckvm solution which is hours we also will be targeting type 1 and we also have a new VM approach so all of these projects makes sense for for us
and still as we discussed today we feel like no single solution will fit for everyone because there will be different needs from different applications uh Our intention is to connect all these Solutions as we are able to finish these projects and you know get this kind of internal collaboration and we are living a lot we are getting a lot of experience from this CK collab development and this is kind of uh you know the commitment of polygon is to scale ethereum to build the best solution uh for for you know the ethereum space and we are following this strategy that's a little bit you know the specification to to be you know
leading this uh in many ways so but what I can say is that this strategy will be explained very soon and the the idea behind this is that we can provide connected ecosystem in polygon so we can have different types of service um for for any application but CK will be kind of the the basis for all this strategy this is we're getting a lot of experience and and let's say learnings and we have a very strong team on this aspect CK is going to be there the driver for this evolution of the the portfolio of solutions of polymer cool cool that's really interesting so
there'll be like the polygon POS chain which is the currently operational chain and then there will be the Super Nets so there might be a lot of different super Nets then there will be a polygon CK evm Network which is the network you are launching specifically and then there might be other CK based Networks maybe these two of them um that might come into production later on and of course as in the future the polygon team may launch even other networks as well so yeah uh it's a it's a it's a very large Vision right at the end is a scaling ethereum
we provide very areas and more tradition in terms of how this connects together but as you see we have several initiatives that we want to just connect so so the polygon ecosystem becomes let's say simple and clear today with this new uh Network we are we are preparing for launch is clear that this question makes total sense but uh medicine will be will be just explained and clear because today we are focusing basically on this achievement and we are just uh you know all the forces would test just together on this uh initiative to to be successful okay so let's let's then zoom into this
this network that you'll be launching uh what are kind of the different roles in the network like for example if I think of Bitcoin I imagine how the miner is a role mining pool is a role and node full node is the third row uh to understand your network what what are what are kind of like the important roles that that we that we need to grasp we have we have to yeah we have mainly two rules okay one is the the sequencer call it centralized sequencer but uh just to just to be clear the network is going to be the centralized or with a lot so with a lot with a sort of the
centralization sequencer the only thing that can do is just uh select which transactions uh are inserting in the network but uh for example the network is going to be censorship resistant that means that if a user wants to send a transaction on this uh centralized sequencer running don't wants to include this transaction the user can always do an L1 transaction including the cell two transactions and then the sequencer will be forced to include this transaction that's what the sequencer have two options either include these transactions or do nothing but if you don't do nothing then it is a time more than anybody can be a sequencer okay so uh this is not I mean if you are a
little bit police this is not fully decentralization because the sequencer has the right to kick people out of the network you know it's like it's not a universal service okay but the sequencer cannot steal the phones or even lock the phones of a user okay so that's the the model that we have it's not perfect but like uh it's it's a long it's a long way to to so it's a lot of the properties of the centralization you you have it with this network okay and the only the other role is the approver or the Proverbs you know and here in the Proverbs the idea is what at the beginning uh we are going to be the main proverb but at some point it's going to be a kind of a market of the proverb but this proverb they cannot do much they are just uh taking a state
that's already so the transactions are already on chain and what you are doing is just generating the proof what this is converting an implicit state to an explicit State and pushing that state on chain so that the people can Withrow okay it's like consolidating the state and change but you but the state is already defined the transactions are already there anybody can compute this state so it's it's a state it's a the state is already known so the plural cannot modify the state cannot change the the network they can uh you know they can uh delay you uh this uh this publication of the state but that's the maximum that that can do and I mean we're always going to run approver uh uh
even on just a Saba cup okay so that's the that's the thing and it's going to be here a market for that so it's going to be some money that's going to be in the network and uh first come first serve so if it's some money if you have approver you just made the proof and somebody will somebody will prove it there is a full mechanism you can maybe read more on that but it's uh it's going to be a market for the program in in the midterm at the beginning we we are we are going to be the ones that so like there is that in the beginning the smart contract we're going to be the only approver as far as we are following them as far as we are creating proofs if we stop creating proof then anybody will be able to to generate proofs
this give us a lot of warranty for example this this approach allows us for example if there is uh an issue in the soundness of the of the proof uh I mean we are gonna so okay uh we could generate a malicious proof but we are going to generate the right proof so we are not going to prove something that's wrong okay so this give us uh so if the user trusts us so that means that even if the approver is bad is is if the system is bad we are not going to generate the proof that symbolic so this give us a some confident uh confidence so some some confidence if you have this trust you can get this confidence of using the on using the network it's not the final goal because the final goal is
to be fully decent right so that you don't have to trust us that we are going to run the malicious proverb that's why it's important that the proverb is okay that's why it's important to audit the proof and that the prover is okay but uh at least for the launch uh we have this warranty that the users that are going to use the launch if there is something wrong in the in the proof and we are not doing crazy things then uh the they will not lose the fonts so so if I imagine it like this so let's say you know like I'm a user on a mobile and I have some assets on on this network when I create a transaction um I can use whatever Mobile Wallet I am already used to for a Serial I send the transaction
the difference to ethereum will be in in this case my transaction is going to go to a sequencer and there's only one at launch so it goes there that sequencer is kind of receiving transactions from users and it's like creating the blog it's batching them and creating the block at publishing hey here's the block then there is approver which there's only one at launch but in the in later there'll be many and these These provers are taking the block and they are then running the CK AV improver and then they're creating sort of a certificate saying hey this block uh these transactions are genuine and this block takes the state from s to S
Prime and here's a certificate for uh for that and then on the other side if when I'm on my mobile I can essentially ask the polygon Network hey tell me your state and give me a proof that that state is correct and the polygon Network and can do okay your network can do that on the other side there are three stage three stages you describe two but there actually is a three stages uh thing it's like if you are the user you create a transaction you send this transaction to the sequencer and the sequencer will create the block immediately so here you will have a finality maybe of one two seconds this is I mean this is as fast as far as
you are trusting the sequencer this is going to be final you know this is going to be the so the sequencer is gonna it's promising you that's gonna publish that transaction of course it's a centralized model you need to trust a sequencer if you don't trust a sequencer you cannot do anything with that information but if you are trusting the sequencer at least you know that that that this is the first stage okay the second stage is the sequencer will put this transaction uh on chain okay but we'll not generate the proof it will put this that availability at this point the transaction is is final you don't need to trust a question so you know that this transaction is going to be executed uh so actually because you know that that transaction has been executed you can compute the state
okay you can actually you can manually and any user can check that the state is is is is is is is is the the current one the only thing is that the network the the chain don't know which is in the state so the only thing that you will in this stage the only thing that you will not be able to do is withdraw funds and is a third stage of maybe 170 half an hour or whenever okay it's going to be a proof that will prove all the all the blocks that are in the middle and we'll put this okay the current state at this point is this one okay this is the Consolidated state so the state is going to be that in the network and this is that point where you will be able to withdraw the to withdraw the funds okay but actually is this
three three three three stages one is finality of one two seconds that's the sequencer you trust then another that's gonna be I don't know the numbers yet but it's going to be every few minutes I don't know maybe two three four minutes that's gonna be a a a a transaction with all the uh with that availability with all the transactions that uh will need to be sequenced and a third and a final that's really half an hour that it's like this Consolidated state that we will allow you to Withrow this is all the the three stages let me kind of dig in here a little bit so I'm not so worried about the proverb because in principle anyone can run approval right so basically even if
there's only one at the network launch I could build approver and I would be economically incentivized to do so so it to me it's kind of akin to kind of having people who liquidate underwater loans on make or something right so basically this is kind of to me a very similar um proposition um I'm a little bit um more skeptical about the centralization of the sequencer because I mean you said that I can always kind of force being included by sending this to L1 this is correct but in a way I'm still economically locked in if it's not economically viable to actually send
this to everyone it's kind of like saying um okay you're on an island and there is one um there's one airline that actually Services the island say it's Lufthansa and Lufthansa kind of refuses to give me a ticket um right and Lufthansa says and I say well I'm stuck here now and Lufthansa will say well you could always rent a private jet and I mean obviously this is true I could I could chart a private jet but it would be very expensive much more expensive than just being included by Lufthansa and for many transactions it wouldn't actually be viable to kind of escalate to layer one so technically you're not locked in but economically you are right well I mean yeah but you know the the
you will have to pay this this ticket but and you probably you are not gonna go to that Iceland anymore okay but at least you are not going to be stick there so it's like lufthans somewhere and tease you so it's like it's not like a private I would not say a private uh jet is like a Lufthansa you have a way so you haven't this case is the layer one but you have a like a judge that can force Lufthansa to sell you a ticket for a limited price which is the layer one cost so I mean I need to pay the judge right you need to say yeah exactly yeah yeah it's gonna cost you but so this is so this is why it's not uh perfectly decentralized this is not the perfect but at least you will not get a stick in
the island you will leave the island and your brother will not come back I agree oh definitely will not come back exactly no not a good Island experience but it's not but the important is that you are not gonna get a stock in the in the Iceland okay so that's the important part here so that's the yeah the the idea here is to to preserve the properties of uh sensory persistent uh because we are launching this network um it was a testing sequencer it's a single one so what we want to provide is you know this this property so everyone is just uh you know relaxed about I have the option to do it of course the sequences will process of all transactions but at least we have provide this mechanism
that you don't need to trust anyone here because you will be able to do it in some way but the next step will be to decentralize sequencing also so okay we have to kind of have a decentralized sequencer yes exactly so I assume Jody this is going to be your next job after uh all the optimization I don't know if it's going to be my job but for someone being polygon for sure yeah so yeah that's important yes it is an important piece here you can an interesting way to see a a sequencer is uh it's a consensus it's a consensus uh it's a consensus system of course it's a
centralized system is I would say it's a dictatorship uh consensus system so it's the the consensus is what the centralized it's a consensus okay I mean it's very trivial or consensus way but you can substitute the sequencer with any consensus mechanisms you want to put here okay so you can you can put a proof of authority you can do the proof stake even uh you know you can you can put whatever whatever consensus uh mechanisms here and and it it's I mean then you have the limitations of the consensus okay maybe you will not have the same finality and so on and you will get in that dilemma uh uh in the Dilemma balance but it's perfectly doable on
here in polygon we have a lot of experience in in consensus in creating consensus uh consensus Networks let's let's talk about the gas so obviously all of this is not for free so you need to pay the sequence of the prover and you also need to pay the layer one right because you have these periodic check-ins where obviously kind of data stored on L1 um so how how does the gas model work on DK evm so from all right let's see we got two things so from the end user perspective the model is going to be exactly the same that uh the uh the layer one it's going to be gas and you pay for for we
put a gas price and so it works exactly the same and we are using and the way that the smart contracts work it's very equivalent so it's like uh so although codes is going to cost you so the in in gas quantity is going to cost you exactly exactly exactly the same okay this is super interesting I would have I would have imagined that there are up codes that are more expensive on dkvm just because they're difficult to implement and I mean mispriced up codes is really it's a danger for them for the network right if you actually offer up codes that are more expensive for you to actually process then people are paying for them but we can't regulate that with the gas price so maybe the the idea is that depending on the transaction that
you are doing so in general the transactions are gonna are gonna cause you the same because at the end is a kind of an average okay so the sequencer will work but if you are doing exchange transactions for example transaction that's doing a loop of catch X or a transaction that's putting a lot of data availability in there so if you are doing this kind of transactions what you can see is that the sequencer they may ask you for more uh for a bigger gas price okay so basically it's not it's not a fixed price so basically it's not a fixed price it's gonna be a fixed price for if you are doing crazy things if you are you know just doing normal transactions uh should be modernized the same and the sequencer decides what's crazy yeah well it's if it fits in the blocks
or doesn't fits in the block on how it it occupates that yeah if you are look for example if that availability the cost of that availability is going to be the same so a call data uh it's the same if you want to put the data in the call data that means that the cost is going to be the same for L1 and L2 here you will not have savings okay so if you are putting transactions with a relatively normal uh uh call data okay um it's called Data in general is like uh less than one percent of the of the cost of the transaction so it's not going to be what the the cost would but if you are creating a specific transaction that puts a lot of data then maybe the the the the the the the sequencer has a right to not
include the transaction or to charge you more but we are expecting that the normal users will not see any difference on that oh yeah absolutely I totally agree that agree that within normal use shoe at all it's just that if you have I mean so in many respects kind of governance minimization at these layers is kind of a great goal and basically saying well if anything's too crazy the the sequencer can can um uh can throw it out or not include it or charge more um it kind of it opens a Floodgate in a way so basically I I um yeah it's a centralized sequencer yeah
yeah maybe it's not it's not that big a deal it's just uh yeah I mean if there's a clear if if there's a clear way of it attacking the network and it could only react via like some governance mechanism yeah but okay yeah I mean I I mean kind of sequence and decentralization so you don't have anyways there are some denial of service attacks there to the sequencer that's this is one of the important topics to deal so there so you're right here that the the you need to but you know I mean normal web page it's like like a normal like any other centralized service you know a normal web page is also exposed to the needle of service attacks okay and I mean
absolutely so that's it's a centralized system and they will have protections like any other centralized system so it's a centralized sequencer this is what it is when we talk about the centralized sequencer then things just the rules change okay but sorry I I kind of interrupted your explanation about the gas in the so basically kind of you you kind of pay um a uh proportional amount of gas for each op code you use and that's kind of what the user sees but basically what the network does is kind of it has to pay like different actors so the sequencer the prover as well as the L1 as a service provider and so how is that handled well the sequencer just did just well it
has an economic economic engine somehow but the idea is uh uh how much I will get it's the same like a minor you know it's like how much I will get if I include this transaction and if it's profitable they will include it if and if not it will not include it and it will take just the most profitable transactions uh as much profitable transactions they can in the in the sequencer it's I mean at as easy as that and if you want as complex as that because you know how much profitable is transaction then you need to check the transaction and you need to you need to and this is where the all the complexity of the sequencer comes but it is very simple if you have a back pool of transactions you select the ones that are more profitable and you need you need to pay all the
costs okay you need to pay the the gas the approver the that availability which you need to pay all the all the things in there you need to take that in account so um the gas cost for the user on polycon polygon zkevm they kind of they rise in lockstep with gas costs on L1 right because basically if committing these um things to everyone rises in price kind of there's no way for you to not pass this on to the user do you see that as a limiting factor well somehow it's it's going to be a direct correlation so it's going to be a direct correlation between the price of
L2 in the Pro with the price of L1 definitively is going to be there especially for this you know for that availability because so a lot of the costs uh most of the costs actually are are related to the layer one so yeah it's like uh yeah the cost of Transport depends on the cost of the oil well yeah transport you need you need soil so that's it's it's important no that's the the benefits the benefit of having data availability layer one is also yes for this problem because the the security of uh you know putting on this transaction to layer one is higher and you know the cost of Ledger one um needs to be you know included in the cost for the username Layer Two
so um you talked about this network of different networks earlier um you know within the polygon family um will there be like a flowchart um on the polygon website where basically I say I want to deploy adapt that kind of has these and these requirements and this is kind of the security guarantees I I would like um and you guys will tell me okay then do not deploy to uh polygon dkvm deploy to I don't know uh polygon POS yes exciting this data objective will will come for this year so what kind of applications do you see living on polygon zkevm in the in the
mid to long run well uh we have this path of two two optimizations was saying we have a lot of in the backlog we will close in some way a release to to launch this first version but uh the 60 VM has the constraints of uh the proof in letter one which is the capital normal model and also we have them the constraint of data availability layer one uh for us the the proving cost is becoming a little part of the the course for users every time we optimize is slower and lower so basically it's data availability then most of the course will be that also there will be some fees for the approval
you know this this normal things the the network needs to get some kind of benefit for for the participants in some way but at the same time uh we we have a plan also to optimize data availability cost and the idea here is to to just uh specify which are the benefits in terms of finality throughput cost for users uh we feel like the the applications that require better security in terms of datability like for example for example defy they are very very interested in ckvm because we are bringing this uh higher level of security both in you know it's a layer two but do have so
much smart contracts but you have data on chain and you have this uh proving that provides a super fast finality because we are talking about finality under one hour more or less so this for for this kind of applications is very important to have this uh you know fast movement liquidity applications with a lower values and sections like gaming I don't know this probably will be a better fit in the in the POS or other metaphors that have data of chain but we see that uh there's a big Market of on high value transactions that are very interested in the city nfts it's also they are having a lot of
interest in in that you know for all these nfts markets and the movies that's real value you know it's an entity that has a specific some some value in there and you want to guarantee because you can have the nft in the later one so you don't require the breach and and and then you are uh moving in and working it in Layer Two that's another important application that looks like it's coming but you know there are many and it's it's not it's a you know it's a chain that survival change I'm sure it's going to be a lot of applications that I don't even I'm aware of one of the interesting topics in the whole ZK space is the question of Licensing
so the novel novel novel part of this of the system is uh the approval right like the thing that will that will essentially take the blocks and generate the the proofs uh for the correct State transition what is your licensing approach as polygon ZK EDM for your approver yes well they do something we are discussing uh but our approach in the long run is going to be open source for sure because uh everything we build is open source we are building with source code available since July last year as we said we are sharing a lot of ideas and and the the code with the with the whole community for us there's a path towards you know
decentralization also that we want to accomplish now we are involved in the audits it's about security also but then we have a plan for backbounties we are launching this vitamin net we have a path of the centralization and we have also to include uh baliacular formatting token into this ckbm so that's a the project is not over in terms of the full Prelude and uh we are just uh you know thinking on on the license we want to put uh because we will put a license uh that kind of uh specifies the the use you can do with this code before the minute so it's something we will do very soon but uh the spirit for us is that this
becomes available eventually because we want uh to cover with our roadmap and we also want to make this a public available good as we are just using some other you know technology from other teams we are happy other teams can use our technology too in fact the only the only repository that doesn't have a permissive license is the approved for the rest as I said before the whole tooling the client all of this is open source and anyone can just use this code so this is not something that's important is because first so uh that the code is available is probably the most important thing because you know if you want to trust the system you need to at least understand what's what's going
on and you need to see you know you need to you need to verify so anybody should be able to verify that what you're running is what it is so the first thing is that the code needs to be available we have in we open we open all the other reports in in July and this gives us a lot of uh uh confidence you know during this uh six months or or eight month uh many developers have checked that and now have issues and for uh uh checking box or for even for doing proposal so this has been available from there and this is very important from the security perspective and this is a must you know the system must be open uh so you need to see what's what's moving and needs to be verifiable you need to check that
what's in the network is actually what's what's in there so this is the first step and this is already there okay the the second thing is all about the knowledge you know all that you know all the so that we are showing all the knowledge and but not only that all the tooling you know right now all the languages to write that or the tooling that we use for write that all the um the verifier the pillow star the star generation so that's all the all the tooling that's usable by Third parties you know for for other projects this is already uh in MIT and Apache listens so anybody can use that okay so the only piece is that the proverb and what here what we're just trying trying to protect is just having some opportunistic uh person just creating their own token
just couldn't pasting the the coupon pasting the same way that happens with uni swap or that happened with buba networks or happen in this space we don't want to we don't like this model we don't want this to happen and this is what we are trying to avoid besides that if you are doing a project that's a serious project you want to use that I mean this should be open and the spirit is that so we are against the just the opportunistic people that just taking profit of uh others uh things work uh by that that's what that's the only thing that we want to protect and but besides that everything should be open and and visible and usable and learning that this is the spirit that's behind the the the licensing that we are trying to to
to to achieve but again we are deciding that and it's going to be available very soon yeah so from from my perspective yeah it makes sense that you're trying like one thing that you're trying to do is prevent somebody else from launching a roll up with your technology before you do and getting the Press attention and that makes complete sense right I would even go one step further I mean it need to say you know six months after for the first six months after your main net is live the prover is not open source you're
trying to get some kind of competitive lead on the market before it becomes open source and other people can can use it that is also actually to me understandable you've put in a lot of effort you want a Competitive Edge right like the the question I I mean this the central element of my question is the time Horizon beyond the sixth month where I see projects in the ecosystem which are trying to say okay the approval is open source but the license is such that if it emits a proof it can only be verified by a white list of approved verifiers there are projects attempting a
licensing strategy like that which is existing Beyond the six-month scale Beyond getting the early competitive Advantage do you have plans in that direction no no we will know that I mean once the licensing says applied it's going to be full of controls so no no plans for limiting you know this kind of things or model is not a license it's not a license based so or the business model of course is not a license plate so we are not selling licenses or uh I mean or or charging for royalties or things like that this is not or model and this is not what we want to do we are just so
the thing is that so we we are based we want to open source we are want to contribute we want to contribute to the ethereum space we want to contribute to the blockchain space we want this to be opened it's already open you know all the tooling is already open and we are just trying to protect uh you know it has been a huge investment in resources and in money and effort and it's a lot of people that have trust in in polygon and they're just trying to protect this investment for a while so that nobody just take profit I would say uh unfair profit uh of that okay and you know uh if this never happened in the space I would argue that okay why are you doing that but the problem is that we have we have I mentioned some but there are a lot of
examples uh in the space that this has happened and this is I think it's a bad practice it's something that uh we need to avoid and we need to have uh to respect that so that's this and this kind of Licensing I mean other projects has been forced to do that problem for me is it's hard because it goes even against my principles uh having this you know I would love to to do everything open source from the first day and also that but I understand that there is this these things and we need to protect against these things and and we need to have to do something okay and I think this is the less the the best thing that we can do for that okay that's just the that's just a decision and in the case is going to be a
temporal thing so in the very beginning you guys told us that all of this kind of started as a side project while you were trying to to create a decentralized identity tell us about this did project and where is that right now because it never really stopped right I mean it's still going on yeah it never stopped and uh probably will never stop because it's uh something we wanted to do from the beginning can explain better I would say now is uh inside polygon also we have polygon ID as part of the portfolio we are
developing we are creating this kind of infrastructure on identity it's also of an identity blockchain based uh we'll be focusing a lot on the web 3 space because every time we understand better that the apps need this identity Ledger and basically what we want to do in this project is polygon style provide a public infrastructure that can just uh enable the development of the ecosystem of participants on this identity infrastructure like issues of trust consumers of trust users the apps all of this around around polymer and probably around polygon and that would mean
around ebm to be honest because it's beyond polygon we are in the in the ethereum space and this probably will will the the areas that it becomes a publicly good that every a project in the ABM space can reuse but yes this is how how it is today privileges we can explain better how this started or why it makes sense for us well self-solving identity is an important part of decentralization I mean is way to see it is like the login so any application needs a kind of login I would say most of applications needs login maybe a payment application don't need a login but that's probably the exceptions you know if you want to do
any application you need some some sort of login reputation identity you need to prove something to do things uh to do things and this is what the identity project was about and and this is an important part it's an important layer that needs to be solved and in item three I mean we started that we realized that the privacy in this layer was very important and so we started with zero knowledge then we moved to relapse but the the the spirit of the identity has been always there and right now uh cell polygonry is an important team that's continuing and working in in in that in that direction right now yeah they're doing a lot of progress right now on
that I'm a little bit the sight on that because I'm focusing there's a KVM but I know that there is uh very uh amazing team that that's that's pushing hard on that and having great ideas and and yeah following the this this project so obviously building a decentralized identity is super hard unless you want it to be completely public so I mean it's it's it's kind of it's also CK based um there's there's a lot of um questions as as to kind of how do you go about the Civil um
problem um who kind of gets to attest what and so on how do you think about these questions because it's such it's such a large problem space that is difficult to even know where to start let me explain you how I see identity because we are talking about in uh at least oh I see identity is a very infrastructure like a very basic layer okay so you can understand the identity as as identities you know users if you want public private key if you want to do it super simple okay so you have your your identities represented by your private key and your Public public key that's the easiest way to see it okay then you have a a database of uh claims so a claim is or attestation is
something that you say in general about some other identity but can be anything okay this database is a decentralized database you hold part of these database and and some of these are the part of the database maybe on chain but most of them should be off chain and it's going to be maybe if you are doing a clean over David you will hold part of this advice and it will hold this part of this this other database okay and it's uh so and then there is that each identity owns their own data their own their own information okay so that's the idea of us are somebody or here okay and with this database then data is approving system that's running on top of that and if you own is a query system like you can ask for a specific information and the other can prove that
this specific information is is is valid so we have this proving system that's running on top of these otherwise this is what it is the basic the infrastructure and with this you can build anything you can build a reputation system I mean you can do a centralized login or you can build uh uh a proof of individual or you know maybe if you hold 10 people with reputation you can do every everything you want but of course building the specific uh uh reputation system or application system or how you are going to use this uh basic identity this is going to be depending so it's going to be a application specific or user specifics and
some but the for me the basic layer that needs to be solved is this that uh Universal that anybody can create uh an identity or as many identities as they want an identity is nothing more that uh that like a public private key or it's a maybe a little bit more but that's that's the basic thing okay anybody can do claims on any other identities and this is the reason notary notarization system so this is database and correct in the blockchain so that when you are when you are doing a claim is you know that the disclaim at this time and you can always prove that okay and this is the you know this is the basic uh infrastructure the basic idea of either three and at the end the original item three project was to build uh this basic
protocol and now we are uh leveraging so we're using this either three protocol just to to build polygon ID which is all these services and all these libraries and all these tooling to to to work with this protocol yeah our idea here is to to connect all these uh issues of trust there are many amazing projects working on solving the problem for example of civil resistance or proof of uniqueness this kind of uh utility that actually the applications need uh to operate especially in the blockchain space so or as Jenny was saying we were building this we're building this infrastructure layer but we have to to interesting properties to trying to attract all this ecosystem of
uh development around identity which is a let's say connecting the the format of credential verifiable credential that's based on the standards we have a model of presentation of these credentials that serum friendly and this concept we are able to use CK to prove attributes about users in a private way and we we have it from the beginning we took this privacy as the main property of the protocol and this is the the origin of silicon on the CK was a journey started but we have this as a embedded property with a specific language to connect between issuers of trust users and
applications and also the second properties that we are we have solved the on-chain interaction so the the identity protocols we have a lot even based on blockchain but basically the operator of chain because the the way the communication happens between users wallets and applications and issuers in the in the unchain interaction is complex so we have managed to connect this format of referral credentials with the launching interactions so here's what we expect that we can trigger a lot of impact in the ecosystem of Y3 as polygon we have a lot of applications the apps are really using polygon Network and we expect that we can create
some kind of reusable reputation built on top of these credentials so users can reuse this this reputation across many applications that makes it so much easier for the user but it's also a great value add for the network because it creates like the stickiness that otherwise you might not have so uh I think we probably doing an entire episode on a decentralized identity system this is probably what we'll have to do at some point um let's kind of stick with your predictions um for the ZK ecosystem for this year next year so what um what are your plans for the rest of
this year after mainnet launch and how how do you see this space progressing or when they say the next two years or so we have a very clear plan actually I'm I know I'm I'm a little bit uh nervous even because you know right now I have like the team uh stop it's not that's a stop because we are preparing the launch and we have a lot of work in the audience on lunch but we have a lot of things to improvements to do and and we have a lot of things in the backlog that we want to improve we want to improve uh the costs we want to improve the the the compatibility you know we have to implement we go we are going to layer type one so we want to have a so we have some pre-compile smart contracts that we
need to implement and we we need to do some uh uh to to grow in this compatibility there is also this undistralization and there is a moving to centralization the centralized sequencer and and so on so this is a clear roadmap for the for the end uh for the next year is very clear very specific I would say uh on that uh David maybe you want to complement the polygon side no no you say you're already sick we are we are closing a release because we're going to as early was saying before we have been auditing for three months already so this means that we froze the code a lot and we have many interesting things in the battle to implement uh because in the end this
this project was about scaling ethereum so we need to follow this path of acceleration of you know providing more TPS providing big better cost and providing let's say more equivalents uh also other other objective is to to complete decentralization in a minimize and to provide value automatic token as I said before so for us this is the the whole year in the perspective we have today fantastic and where can people go to find out more about um polygon ZK evm so to to learn how to build on it uh to join the community uh to hear about updates where should they
go and there's a polygon Wiki site with a documentation for all the polygon problems uh if you go to the suit page of polygons you will find also the information of the problem documentation and how to interact uh for us the team is excited about this launch and uh happy to to just answer questions for or respond to inquiries yeah there is also the repositories and all the repositories are public so checking especially if you're a developer you know just checking the code and the repositories is a lot of information there that you can check and there is also I you know if you check uh in general I used to give uh to give a
conference or a talk or something like every month or something like that so there is a lot of uh conference that you can also check just just Google me and and it's a lot of information on there hmm I love this uh Davis David's take on how to get in get in touch with a website and you know go to the contact us at the section draw the oh good job put a requests that's the easiest way you had it here first thank you guys for coming on um it was a super fun very long episode um and I feel like I learned a lot about
how the ZK ebm works and um how it's going to complement the ethereum ecosystem thank you very much thank you so much