DeFi by Design EP#105: Unleashing Hyperchains & zkRollups

Transcript

foreign [Music] by Design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and then Rich what's going on guys welcome back to G5 by Design episode number 105 uh in alignment with our name the roll-up we're here today Alex the co-founder of ZK sync matter Labs they're building out a really really cool ecosystem uh ZK roll-up that is now live has some really cool projects and tvl growing there this is kind of part of a broader educational initiative that we're pushing forward

here at the roll-up really trying to understand the impact of ZK technology so today's episode you can expect tons of really interesting takes from Alex about ZK Roll-Ups the innovations that this Tech enables what they're building at ZK sync um some fun uh conversations that we had in Paris as well as some of the impacts that we're trying to make here in the broader D5 space so yeah good morning Rob what's up man um where are you calling in from how you doing good morning good morning it's another beautiful day in Florida um been hopping around a little bit behind this virtual back on I'm in a new spot so that's exciting and uh yeah we've just been we've just been like leveling up consistently which has been really really fun

um it's like the market conditions have shaken out like all of the weak Minds which I think is is a fun consequence of uh the recent market conditions so all that's left is giga brains um which is which is really really cool really interesting and uh we have one here today Alex absolutely uh pleasure to talk um and welcome to the Roll-Up it's my pleasure guys thank you for having me cheers man so so let's let's dive into it like um maybe uh a good place to start um is from the beginning right so like so I would be interested to know like what your origin story is like where where did you come from why why did you uh dive into building a a protocol a

layer one uh maybe we can touch on the fat protocol thesis if that's something that you hold near and dear to your heart um and and kind of like what what is your what is your motivations and and why are you really what why are you building the the thing that you're building ZK sync um to me blockchains in general are a really interesting intersection of Technology math and and uh programming um business ideas and kind of these potential to transform Society in ways that can bring more freedom more equality more power distribution to the people and you can imagine this Venn diagram with these three circles intersecting that's that's the world of

blockchains and those were really like all three things that brought me in there from um technology my background is in computer science and software engineering uh I have been co-founder of a couple startups uh in my past life um uh it's really interesting what blockchain can do to the um you know to overall the world of value the like how it can extend internet with a layer that brings uh everything really like the touches value from Finance but also to tickets and invoices and all these things uh on the uh on the internet in in a much more composable way uh but what what's really

the core for me this this idea that blockchain can improve freedom and this is the mission of easy to advance freedom for the world using this technology and to me it's uh really important because I was born in a very unfree place I was on Soviet Union in Soviet Ukraine I grew up shortly after the collapse of these like about massively centralized uh um state with uh a lot of Institutions collapsing and not being functional and I have seen the impact on the society and I realized that the more freedom you have at every level at the national level at individual organization at any kind of group uh the better of this group is going to be on on average so

like for me it's all of that and uh why blockchain why are roll ups why why is it kissing is a roll up and not a layer one uh we have to look at what's the core value proposition of crypto and to me it's decentralization trustlessness and we have spoken we recently published a Manifesto of values and mission statement for the kissing Community as a kissing project called the ZK credit we go in in detail again a very specific manner about the properties that we want to see preserved in the blockchain and so this decentralization trustlessness is something that that's really the core job of a layer one the main purpose of

the layer one is to create the most decentralized the most resilient most inclusive infrastructure for uh for blockchains and I think ethereum has done that to the by far better degree than anyone else and it would be really really hard to compete with ethereum on that because it's not just about technology and about the ability to have like tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes of validators of full nodes that just verify the chain but it's also about the community and it's about the decentralization of the stakeholding you know the distribution of The Ether token around the world uh geographic distribution uh distribution of like a

mind share of businesses of uh of individuals around it so like it would not be possible but ethereum has a problem of scalability it's obvious that the technology that that the layer One is using and it has been obvious to everyone for the past five years and it was obvious to vitalik where he came up with with ethereum's roll-up Center called map uh this core technology since you focus on decentralization about like in the pre you prioritize it above everything else you can really do other things as good and this is where roll ups come into play and we can deliver scale and we can deliver other properties that uh layer one cannot directly have such as a privacy for

example with with your knowledge proofs um and roll ups are the only technology the only approach which we have that can scale layer one without violating the without destroying its core value proposition so we have two types of Roll-Ups optimistic and ZK I'm obviously biased because I'm building Ezekiel roller but I started building it because I believe that ZK is is the the most magical the most interesting transformational technology that for for the coming decade uh or or even more uh the properties the super powers that it gives you enables in the roll up are unbelievable and and so we can talk about them in in more depth but that

that gives us the ability to reach the um the Holy Grail of scaling uh which we can Define as mass adoption where anyone in the world can have access to blockchains in a uh inclusive easy accessible affordable manner wherever transaction is like negligibly cheap and you can do whatever you want better than than you can do in the internet and easier with greater ux but most importantly with preserving your sovereignty over your assets self-custeriality and full freedom to do what we want this is why we're here yeah it's base uh if you had to describe ZK Roll-Ups or ZK in a couple sentences

for somebody who'd never heard of it how would you do it I can try it's a um so we we have to make a step back uh ethereum Embraces modular approach to its architecture you can imagine an architecture like any kind of Monolithic architecture will suffer from um inflexibility in its designs if you want to build something modular you're like you don't build a Boeing 737 by by making a single uh drawing of all of its parts all right you decompose it into subsystems you say like oh hey we have wings we have engines we have avionics and so on and you have different teams working on those different subsystems and then you combine it all together

the ethereum has chosen the same way I think it's the the wisest way possible to build scalable uh uh fast growing fast developing um infrastructure technologically and roll ups add a layer of scaling computation and storage so what rollups do is instead of submitting all the transactions on layer one we bundle transactions together in blocks of chain and then we we do some pre-processing we compute the cryptographic commitment to the state which um which we uh get after applying all the transactions in this block and we

only submit one single hash on layer one which corresponds to this new state which is like we call it cryptographic commitment whenever you change anything even one bit in the state this this hash will completely change and it's not possible to fake because it's cryptographically strong Collision resistant and pre-interest and hashing and uh with this one one hash anyone who can observe this hash on layer one can can work with this state can make the next transition and withdraw funds can deposit funds uh but the the uh the state is actually held off-chain in a much more scalable way so we derive the settlement properties from ethereum the finality from ethereum and roll ups also

you unlike other scaling approaches attempted in the past roll ups share all of the information about this the uh kind of necessary to reconstruct the state of the new block through the ethereum network so we we use ethereum as a data availability network not as a storage network but as data availability so we only use it to like make the the new state available inform everyone about like what what's changes in this block and so having those two properties relying on ethereum for for finality uh Reliant ethereum for data availability and and also a third property which is gonna complete this picture is relying on ethereum for the validity of the transactions how to make

sure that the this new state which we commit is actually valid that we followed all the rules of smart contracts of the signature verification of everything which is happening in this new state and so and this is the the magic part which Roll-Ups perform like how do you do this verification easier cheaper or it is cheaper for from from the perspective of full nodes on ethereum then if you do it directly on the theory and to explain that uh we can remember that whenever you send a transaction on ethereum it will be replayed by all full nodes because we have this maximum of don't trust verify so you have to re-verify every single transaction and that doesn't scale because if you have like 10 like or a thousand times more and more users and

thousand times more nodes you will have to do one million times more work which is unsustainable so we call it quadratic complexity of n Square mathematical terms and this this would just go quickly grow beyond anything uh feasible to to actually practically Implement scalability so what we do with Roll-Ups is we we we we kind of like I will not speak about optimistic Roll-Ups now they they do it in a peculiar way but uh with ZK proofs with ZK roll-ups we have one entity compute something called the proof the compute the snark a proof of computational Integrity for this entire

block so one entity makes a little bit more work than everyone else would do individually to just natively compute this uh the new state but then they produce this succinct proof that you know what this new state is actually like valid and we completely followed all of the operations all of the functions that we wanted to execute and then we send this short proof to ethereum and we let it be verified by a smart contract which is the gatekeeper of this new state once this the snark this this your knowledge proofs is verified uh then only then will the smart contract ethereum allow the state transition to happen so what what this means practically is we do much less work and it scales

almost linearly with a number of users like the amount of work just like if you have 1 000 times more transactions you'll have to do 1000 times more work not one million time or work but every single full node every single validator on ethereum still practically verifies all of these transactions that happen there even though they are doing like just a fixed amount of operations on chain and you only pay a fixed price for for this verification uh which is borderline magic to me like this is why there are knowledge tools have been called like magic movement because it's it's a bit counterintuitive how can you can achieve that but it's actually not

as complex and there are many really nice tutorials meanwhile which go on and can give you some intuition on how this works mathematically yeah and so that enables tons of new Innovations on ZK sync and for all ZK Roll-Ups talk to us a bit about how that that technology enables innovations that may not be possible on absolutely so we'll start with a sheer scale that will be possible once the we reach the full maturity of the Ezekiel Roll-Ups um to to talk about full scale will like we will we can we can talk separately how we reach this full scale because it's not trivial and it requires one more step and we can talk about it in

speaking about Ezekiel stack but imagine that you can have it uh you know like today on ethereum you can process training transactions a second imagine you can process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second without losing any of the properties that make ethereum ethereum uh what you can do well and each of the transaction is like really cheap it's like a fraction of a cent to to compute it or maybe like one cent if it's like really highly secure transaction you can finally afford to bring real world users to uh to the systems without fearing that you will bring the network to its knees and it will just collapse once you have you know a huge like one million people mint and mft or or like a

lot of people on board to Define start using it or like everyone just switches to payments for payments to blockchain and then you you can replace credit cards with blockchain payments which are much cheaper because you only pay a fixed amount per transaction and not some percentage which is way beneficial to the merchants and to the consumers so like just this this this scale um is one thing the other thing which is possible then with with specifically ziki Roll-Ups implemented in the right way is privacy Now privacy is kind of possible in ethereum today we had some protocols that that already deployed on ethereum that supported privacy like on the odd stack protocol or the infamous tornado

cache which was banned for political reasons like the I think those it will be solved and we will find ways to you know both make Regulators happy and also preserve the true privacy for the users but it was working right like you could like have perfect privacy mathematically like perfect obfuscation of all the transactions of all the like no one could learn any facts from from the transactions on chain but it was incredibly expensive you have to pay like hundreds of dollars uh to interact with tornado cash and yeah even if even with like something like optimistic Roll-Ups where you have to put all of the data for each transaction on chain you like it would be still relatively expensive ZK Roll-Ups can allow you to

make the Privacy transactions as cheap as as any normal transfer because you don't have to publish the the data you only have to verify it recursively and recursive verification these days is is costing close to nothing like it's it's negligible compared to the cost of production so you get scale you get privacy uh and then basically you we just fulfill the full potential of blockchains you can do whatever we were we're going to build on this Technologies at huge scale when you mentioned the the recursive uh nature of recreating these transactions that sounds like a

fundamental difference between ZK Roll-Ups and optimistic roll-ups so you also mentioned that that the data to recreate these proofs is available on ethereum so how how do ZK Roll-Ups uh achieve this scale whereas optimistic rollups do not achieve this scale this is a great question so like uh let me let me formulate it more precisely uh we don't publish the data for reconstructing the proofs or re-verifying the proofs are very very fine transactions themselves in fact the architecture of ZK sync specifically and here we differ from all the other zkdm projects that are currently in existence the only other

Ezekiel roll up that follows this approach is start net um we published the state diffs so we don't publish any of the inputs of transactions we only publish the final changes in the state like we touched these storage slots so the new value of the storage slots is X and we only publish that so we can discard all of the inputs you can have a very large input which can contain a lot of things like you can have account abstraction and all the parameters of account abstraction and sums the custom signature scheme which you sign from your mobile phone which may be like is large you can specify some preconditions post conditions some security things all of that will be taken as an input of this transaction will be processed by

the roll up but it will be discarded like you don't have to publish it on on chain because it it's not directly going into the the state changes the state changes will be only derived from what would you actually accomplish if you make a trade make a swap of a token then you like you you subtract the balance of the first token and you add the balance the second token then you know I have to post this to final storage uh updates maybe like the update of your notes right so by doing this we get some some really really interesting property we can now decide whether we want to publish data availability 100 on ethereum for all accounts or maybe we want to split our accounts in

the valuable ones like in like super valuable ones where you have hold a lot of money maybe like D5 protocols maybe users savings accounts where they hold all or like most of their savings and uh you can create a different account type which let's call it like validium account like we work on the architecture called ZK Porter which implements that and those accounts can be used for things that are less important like you you still get the full benefits of the validity proofs so all the transactions touching those accounts are verified by ethereum so you cannot fake anything you cannot violate rules smart contracts but maybe you have Oracle contract there

that you know like if the the data disappears nothing bad will happen to this account or maybe you have some small account which you're only using for testing or like you you just want to play around with blockchain you want to create something or maybe it's a game where like it's the state is still like fairly centralized so you just want users to have like rules of the games enforced but not uh like the the the the the tokens or the nfts there are not not as critical so then you could use the this validium or Ziggy partner type of account for this uh which has slightly less security like the security the only difference in security is that for for this validium accounts you don't have 100 of security of data availability

guarantees from ethereum so potentially data could become unavailable if the validate or some Illusions right but for those use cases it does not matter as much and these transactions can be way cheaper but today on all the Roll-Ups if you look at the prices the fees for transactions are in the range of like several dozen sent right from 30 cents to one dollar to like a few dollars they fluctuate with ethereum gas price the higher the gas price the more you pay why they follow fructured why are they bound to ethereum gas price because with the bulk of these costs is going to ethereum for data availability so all Roll-Ups on ethereum share the same bottlenecks the same bandwidth of data

availability available uh for for the roll ups and even if we extend it and there are plans to extend it with ap 4844 it might make this the space larger it's still going to be limited and we'll we'll always hit this limit and the price will will always go up so if we want to build a system that that can scale limitlessly just like the internet where you can like you're not inherently limited by a single amount of uh servers right you can always add more servers more data links more and more connectivity and and you can grow like a complete anyone number of users of transactions of data volume we want the same thing in the world of blockchains and specifically with ethereum and so the way to achieve that would be to have many different roll-ups many different systems

deployed in a way where users can select where they want to host the data for their specific accounts and so coming back to the difference between ZK and uh and optimistic prolapse in the world of ZK we can build those systems like on in the in this case sync ecosystem we call them hyper chains and we can make them seamlessly connected to each other regardless of where the data availability is stored like for both roll up and and the keyboard accounts on any of these hybrid chains can seamlessly interact fully trustlessly with minimal costs without without liquid with the same cost as the transaction on your hyper chain with any

other account on any other hyper chain so you can think of it as the email system where you have I have my email like Alex at meta Labs you have Robbie at rollup.com you know like you have ND at gmail I can send email from any address on any of those domains to any others on any other domain in exactly one click doesn't cost me more you know I don't have to do more work if it costed some money like I I would just pay the same amount ascending it within matalabs within Gmail and so on this is what we can build with with the ZK Roll-Ups so this is the biggest transformation of zker labs compared to the optimistic problems with optimistic Roll-Ups you can have a multi roll-up ecosystem

it's actually beneficial because in optimistic Roll-Ups all the users of a roll up are expected to revalidate the transactions if you're not doing that you still rely on someone else for security it's not it's not how it's intended to scale like if if you use Roll-Ups for scaling someone has to do the work and like a lot of users have to do the work and at least one of them has to be honest for optimistic problems right so so it has some Merit but the inter interoperability between those independent Sovereign Roll-Ups will take like six day or seven days for trustless messages to to arrive there and you cannot extend the space for um the the error space the account space

with this off chain uh extension which would then seamlessly be interoperable with all the other Roll-Ups it's just like fundamental limitation of the architecture and this is why it's obvious to me that long term will only have zero Labs like optimistic Roll-Ups are really important now because they launched earlier they provided the relief to ethereum the safety ethereum from like users migrating to other like ethereum Killers other chains for being like because it would be way too expensive to transaction ethereum so it's it's great that they're there but they will eventually have to migrate and like Embrace DC technology or just disappear do you think they will eventually have

to migrate to this same sort of architecture where you split up like larger accounts and smaller accounts into into validium accounts I think so you think I think okay I I just I don't know if that's feasible because that that's a lot of work if you don't put this architecture in from the beginning it's going to be really hard to migrate so like but you can always migrate the users from one row off to another right so but we will see like what how this will work but like we have this architecture from the beginning and it was not revealed to build to to make it there from the beginning yeah I think on this point of um uh interoperability between uh these hyper chains within the kind of the ZK sync or

the ZK stack uh you you get to a question about uh interoperability with shared liquidity um and kind of how they interoperate with each other and there's two concepts there that I think um our audience would like to hear about which is understanding what shared sequencers are and understanding shared provers and the pros and cons of kind of the centralization of approver um you know or or of a sequencer in the current ecosystem so if you could start at the Bare Bones level of what sequencers improvers are and then kind of walk us through the vision that you have for this interoperability inside of the ZK set with shared sequencers and shared provers so you kind of have these These Chains that are different and

could have you know could be l3s l4s to the nth power but can all kind of share liquidity and share the same experience within the ZK stack absolutely so let's start with the basics AC concern is simply any entity or any like mechanism that see that bundles transactions together for a roll up and then submits these big batches on layer one it can be a centralized entity like just a one single server it can also be decentralized thing with the consensus running off chain which collects transactions with across multiple validators and then they they use vft kind of style consensus to decide what what's the uh state of this uh block is going to be

um so all the rollouts today basically use this Central IC concerns because they were easier to implement and we most Roll-Ups have plans to transition to decentralized ones at ziki sync we're working on the decentralization of the sequencer for a long time and we we will soon publish the first results on like we will have a contestant for everyone to try like it's it's court or Mission it's core to ZK credit like we will not stay centralized um uh sequencer for for a long time uh so that's the sequencer now ZK roll-ups after you publish or like after you produce the bundle the transactions together in this block someone needs to

generate easier knowledge proof for this block which is a quiet computationally intense operation again like this is the drop of the prover the prover proves that the block is valid it can be a centralized prover running in the cloud on AWS or Google or Baidu or wherever could run on your personal Hardware on your gpus or it can be decentralized one where the work is distributed to multiple entities and then you you collect the result and you recursively combine the proofs until you get one final proof of the entire block uh again we we start with this more centralized version of the of the prover and we will transition towards more decentralized

version and the it's very obvious to us that eventually everything has to be decentralized this is why the new proof system we we are coming the new implementation of the proof system we recently announced called bujam uh is optimized for decentralized proving we have a GPU implementation that can work with consumer grade GPU Hardware which requires only 16 gigabytes of RAM in the worst case we can even tune it down to six gigabytes so I could it can run on basically any AGP on any gaming machine or or MacBook or um anywhere in the GPU mining rigs that were previously used for mining ethereum

itself so this is the the proverb now um the the uh the question was about shared Secrets the shared Liquidator yeah the shared sequencer and shared prover to facilitate the interoperability that you speak of yes so let's start with shared liquidity in order to have shared liquidity between Roll-Ups you need to have uh you need to design them in a certain way so that you have this trustless messaging passing from from each of them to each other and you need to manage the token storage the token treasury of the of the roll up in a certain way like if you split the treasures between two Roll-Ups

let's say if you you have a completely two separate Roll-Ups like GK sync and I don't know like some something else some some other Ezekiel roll up our optimistic problem ethereum we will store the assets the native assets of uh coming from ethereum in two separate contracts on layer one one will have all the assets locked for ZK sync the other have all the assets locked for this other roller and so we cannot talk like there is no way to have shared liquidity in order to bridge something from one row up to the other we'll have to pass a message and even if the other roll-up trusts the message and says like oh I trust decreasing simple implementation and I

trust its governance uh the upgradability protocol to to to to be perfect to be not compromised they still cannot do much because the the money is still locked in this kissing base confirm so we'll somehow need to get this eth or other tokens over to the other role for some tokens it's easier to do like for usdc for example because it's managed centrally they can easily centrally mint and burn protocol you know assets on different chains this will work but for Native assets a native assets are hugely important like ether itself is the most critical asset in ethereum ecosystem and you cannot it has to remain native it's the the whole point of defies that ether is used as native collateral which does not depend

on any centralization and to move ether we would have to make a transaction on layer one and and this will create a bottleneck of scalability and there is no short liquidity so the shared liquidity can only be within ecosystems like there will be a network of hyper chains driven by SDK stack um within which the um shared liquidity is present maybe other Roll-Ups will develop it so but we'll have this this kind of closed ecosystems unless at some point we all agree on the standard for shared bridge and we kind of coordinate and maybe enshrine it in ethereum itself and then we share it all across all the

ecosystems which maybe uh potentially future which you could reach but like I'm not sure that like this is certainly not the near future this this is like years away from until like we could get to something like this because we need all the components of the system to ossify by that time and we're doing a lot of Developmental like really active like really uh high frequency of innovation of cycles of upgrades and so on so like not not for some and I I mentioned the ZK stack a couple of times so I I want to take a second to explain what it is the ZK stack is simply the open source framework based on the code of ZK sync era the the first roll up we deployed with like the

first dkvm on ethereum essentially uh that anyone can use to build their own hyper chain so if you want to be play on your own roll up you can just take ZK stack and deploy it it's we currently are preparing it for for like um um we're bringing it in the Forum where anyone can do it uh on on their own for now the it might be a bit complicated like this some uh things in like some parts of the code are not as easy to to work with independently but we're running a pilot project with a number of um uh with like and we're running Pilots with a number of projects to experiment with ZK stack and bring it

into full production form within a couple of weeks from now so if if the audience is interested just reach out to us uh we have contact on the kissing.io and Dr RBD team and we can make it work but in in the short term it will be easy for anyone to just deploy it in one click uh and the code is open source uh from day one fully permissionless under mat Apache license so anyone can use the code and uh everything we will ever do is going to be full open source under this premise classes now shared sequencers you ask about shared sequencers um the like in the ecosystem of hyper chains the liquidity can be shared seamlessly

and uh the messages are trustless and relatively fast but they're still asynchronous which means like you want to roll up can send a message or some value or some message with really attached to it to another hyper chain and it will relatively quickly like within seconds or minutes depending on on configuration it will reach the other chain destination will be uh the transaction will happen there you can even program it to send some value back so you as the user of like error chain could for example trade on a uni swap specific chain and then just do one click Send value and then it comes back with a different token you can imagine

this this kind of TX um but it's a synchronous so you can do things like flash loans flash loans must complete within one single transaction atomically either all of the steps of the transaction is complete successfully or all of them fail but you don't have the first part executed and the second part failing and the only thing to do things like this would be shared sequencers so um they would enable like seamless inter seamless composability across all the chains like without any any asynchronicity uh but I don't think that this is for everyone because with shared sequencers you are giving up a lot of sovereignty

so like you essentially you give up your right to decide on your own how you're going to be handling Mev how are you going to be handling transaction ordering what you're going to be uh optimizing your protocol for how you you like what's your fee model how you're going to structure it maybe what token you use to pay the fees maybe what token you used to to like manage the sequencer you don't have control of all of that you you just go on to the the sequencing layer and you just ask them to do it for you so I think that this might be valuable for some protocols especially for like for smaller startups that want to borrow this credible neutrality and decentralization from something more established and bottle tested and I know

of a couple of really smart teams working on shared sequencing like really really uh strong people like I'm sure they will come up with uh good results fast uh but I think for some Roll-Ups sovereignty is Paramount like the ability to launch their own token for whatever reasons the ability to the ability to control Mev flow or like to do just innovate on the Meb and say you know what everyone is doing X but I'm gonna try the approach why because like I believe that there should be no extractive and maybe so I'm just gonna time locked and create all the transactions or i on the contrary I want to extract maximum and maybe it and send

it to my sequencer for the for the Treasure of the protocol or maybe like the Mev problem does not apply to me at all I just want a really really fast sequencer with instant confirmations uh from a centralized Source because I'm doing high frequency trading all of that freedom should be left with the users or with the Builders of those protocols and so I think some of them will use it some maybe most want got it so those Builders are are the users of ZK sync and like ZK Sync has its own network in its own chain and there are there are apps that are deployed on zksync and there's

also the the builders who are building these hyper chains on top of the ZK stack so ZK sync era implies the existence of another era right is there is there like a second era or like is there a road map as far as like how ZK sync is is on the path toward this hyper chain uh universe or world oh yeah absolutely so ZK sync era is just the name of the of this first base chain the the first hyper chain that we put in existence and it's a generic purpose chain so like for for most use cases you probably don't

need to launch your own roll up you don't need to launch your hyper chain you just want to deploy on on the project centralized credibly neutral uh trustless platform uh which will enables you to to reach high scale that is error like if you if you just want to deploy a D5 protocol or NFC protocol or um in some interesting identity application you can just do it on era you don't have to wait for the hyper chance to arrive or you don't have to build your own era is experiencing explosive growth like the in the numbers we see like it's the most popular L2 on ethereum for the past couple of months with uh uh like when on many days we exceed ethereum's transaction volume we have uh I think the largest number of

active users we have we are third largest uh L2 by tvl and tvl is growing We have basically daily by a number of Protocols are deploying some interesting things on era and we have not even yet unlocked all the features that that make uh you know that give you the full potentially full superpowers of ERA this is coming in the in the next wave of uh of releases that will happen over the next couple of months uh so there are some things though that that make array distinct and unique like for example native account obstruction that is not currently present in any other protocols uh you can use eap4337 on ethereum and other Roll-Ups

but that does not work natively with metamask for example you cannot do gasless transactions for metamask users you can let metamask users to pay if he's in different tokens and so on you can do this on error so it enables uh some really magic ux for uh um for a bunch of application use cases nfts or E like wallet abstraction um the smart wallets and so on so but but yeah like era will will be just growing on its own hyper genes are there for use cases that really require a separate chain like maybe you have a special community that that wants to have its

own chain for whatever reason because this community is falling around or maybe you have a special application that will benefit from an application specific uh roll-up or an application specific validium maybe you are an Enterprise or you're a bank and you're building uh you need privacy out of the box from the beginning and so you like you would opt in for validium but you still want credible neutrality from ethereum and processes from ethereum you can do all of that with Hyper chains and and I think you you started to to drive home the point of of the question that was not fully formed in my mind when I asked it like we we saw some some l1s especially in 2020

there was a lot of like layer ones that were created and ultimately a lot of those those protocols that were deployed on layer ones I you know they could have they were almost carbon copies of other of other protocols that were deployed on other chains and we had this this essentially like this even even evm like side chains there was almost like this this competition between side chains whereas a lot of them could have maybe just been on the same chain and just been different apps on that chain so Andy and I have talked about about this at length where it almost seems like we're repeating this part of the cycle except this time it's l2s instead of side chains and I'm curious whether or

not and and that's part of the reason why I asked the question about like why should someone Deploy on ZK sync era or or deploy their own hyper chain from the ZK stack is it and you started to answer that question as well so is it are we on the same path that we were on in 2020 when there was so many side chains and there was they're starting to become competition is that necessarily A Bad Thing to recreate that competition with l2s and do you do you think or maybe like I guess what why is someone why why is it beneficial for someone to launch their own chain from a ZK stack or you know a even an OP stack why should someone take that leap and

ultimately deploy their own chain instead of Simply take the app and and the protocol and deploy that on top of existing infrastructure on an existing chain um so yeah I started to answer this question on the business Dynamics it's individual like it's it's it it has happened in the beginning of the internet with like social networks where everyone would launches social network for its own community for with with other kind of platforms um I think this is an important Discovery phase where there will be this Innovation and it will crystallize what works what doesn't work and for some cases it really makes sense for some other cases it doesn't

I think the key where it makes more sense um is the actual Innovation when you when you do something different like if you just launch the exact same chain it will probably not be successful because like if you just launch the exact same general purpose chain as as the existing ecosystems you know it will you will be competing against the the the already trending uh networks with momentum and the EVMS right that that's kind of what happens yeah it would evm I like um I I don't think anything else but evm currently like makes sense for for smart contracts because we have this really

powerful ecosystem of tooling of uh of the code of libraries around TVM so like you like if it will be hard right if you if you're building something completely different this is what our alternative at once have discovered and this is what alternative roll ups are currently discovering that are not based media but that that that's put aside uh if you're in the VM you can still innovate in interesting ways you can say maybe you are uh building something that uh uh takes privacy to the new level and specifically on this chain or maybe you're you're doing something interesting with the sequencer or any view layer but you have to differentiate somehow you have to do something differently if you're doing something differently I think it makes sense so uh

and the best way for you to do something differently is like not to reinvent the wheel but take something like take a good base sometimes ZK stack that is bottle tested that is we invested millions of dollars in security and security audits in security contests we have like big dedicated teams working on efficiency on decentralization on uh uh on like on all aspects of security like we're very paranoid we're very deeply uh having the security mindset embedded and all um like in all stages of the design and implementation and testing and Revival process so like why replicate all of that if you can take that as a modular stack as a framework and then you can just tweak on specific things like you you just replace the sequencer

or you just like the sequencer better in some ways or you just like change the data availability mode and you say like I'm going to keep it to myself and then I'm going to do privacy application around like whatever I need that right uh this is how I would see it thanks for that yeah as you kind of um wrap up here in the final minutes I wish we had another hour but uh when when you're done scaling the uh the the world and uh implementing ZK technology from everything from Finance to uh social media to hyper chains gaming derivatives all types of app applications what's what's a passion project or a cool use case that you

would like to see built out um or that you'd be interested in building out your yourself uh that is available because of this technology uh it's really like we I cannot talk about specific applications because we have a very uh sacred culture of credible neutrality I don't want to to we're never going to make Kings and like prefer ones over the others we want to education to be completely even playing field where everyone can do things better and it doesn't matter if you're a big existing project or a newcomer you always have a chance to play it even uh I will talk about generic Concepts that that I really like are that I don't see being embraced to lead to its full and I

think this is a huge potential if someone is going to be doing that and they obviously if someone is first and just build something new from scratch uh we will be endorsing them we will help this project we will like spread the word we'll push the idea that this here's a new use case here's a new approach uh take a look at that um what I really want to see build more is the applications leveraging the all the superpowers of native account obstruction so like you can you can think of um building wallets or or just like protocols that allow you to like for example replace

the bank which offer you all the functions that you have in the bank where you can create sub accounts you can create a you know like a family account and then you give it to your kids or spouse or whoever with some spending limits or daily spending limits you can create um uh session keys where like you you you you you like you kind of like on just on this browser you can do certain things in your game in in your like nft project but like you don't have to log in every time you only sign the message once and then this the session key is stored in the browser and you do everything like web two-way like really easily with just one click but you cannot do a lot of harm things like this well thanks for that I appreciate your

time I feel like this is extremely educational um learned quite a bit about um just ZK and what you're building at CK sync so thank you for this um and yeah man it was it was it was a pleasure we look forward to fulfilling our our role in the space and just kind of educating as much as we can um so yeah it was a pleasure uh it was uh really cool thank you guys for great questions I really enjoyed it thank you Alex this is fun