Jordi Baylina: Hermez – ZK Technology for Scaling Ethereum #410

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto founders builders and thought leaders i'm friedrich and i'm speaking with jordi vadina today um who is the founder of hermes among many other things we will get into that in a bit before we talk to yadi um i'd like to tell you about our sponsor this week so taxes are great but they're vulnerable to problems like mev failed transactions and high gas costs cow swap tackles these issues head on and offers a new kind of trading experience built by gnosis cowswap is a metadax aggregator that that's right it's a dex aggregator aggregator it fights mev by matching overlapping orders directly if

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estimations and warnings about trade actions has also gone live so start trading on cow swap dot exchange or learn more in the cowswap discord so yodi it's super lovely to have you on i mean you've been in the ecosystem really long time i think the first time i became aware of your existence was in the context of the dow hack so if if memory serves correctly you were part of the collective um that drained the dao right um so so tell us how how this came about well this is a little this was a little bit my baptism in in blockchain at least doing real things and it happened that

you know i i went absolutely deep in ethereum for me it was like a drug just you know studying all day long and and just understanding the the goodness of the centralization and the decentralization protocols and all that i i just arrived randomly to the dao project though you know at that time was like the trending project at that time and was very cool and people was very excited about that one for me was i learned solidity uh uh from the dao i i didn't i just created some liquid democracy smart contracts for the

dao and it was really exciting for me it was just like i already discovered that this was like a new world a new way of understanding the the the world the more decent lights uh uh manner and i became like part of uh of the dao you know just like another another community member there and just uh very excited like everybody in there and learning a lot from many people technical and i would say from from the community people it was for me was a very incredible uh project uh but then the the hack happens and at that time i knew a lot about the about the smart contract of the dao because you know i

i used that smart contract to learn well i just was i just realized how to how to what happened a little bit with that i was able to reproduce that in the testnet so i contacted the locket people at that time and from there i they just just became what we call their robbing hood group just trying to save the dao at that point it was like the last guy to arrive there but for me was but i changed my life absolutely you know since there i was just first cutting there and then i just quit my last job in not crypto world and since there i've been uh 100 percent in this space and

yeah but just change them up changed up surely my life my life is it has to those two sides one before the now and the a [Music] and yeah i've been i'm there since that's the last five years and very excited and i'm very excited and you know so proud to be here yeah super interesting what uh uh what a moment to enter the ecosystem right i mean um it made the mainstream media and everything and basically back then it just they were so i mean there weren't a lot of people around right well there were probably different

people maybe not that many for me there for me it was a lot of people at that point even but you know of course now we change it uh i changed it a lot and many many new people entering the space but [Music] you know just uh i remember at the beginning you know in this thou hacks uh now just i start because i i didn't knew anybody i was just in my home in my laptop just uh talking with chats and i remember the first time that i uh meet physically with other uh with other hackers just with that and it was very very very exciting it was very exciting exciting moment uh you cannot forget and and and yes and

and it's interesting yeah because it's what something that's very technical and you start getting in because the technical curiosity but then you discover the community you discover that these real people real very smart people and very committed people and people that really believe in what's doing and when you discover this world is you just get engaged you just get to get here and it's super exciting you then went on to found um giveth right with griff yeah exactly yeah so with grief grief was also was helping to recover all that

i actually was the guy that was just talking with everybody i was just behind the scenes just trying to uh help there and with him we get we got very friends there and then we started the project they give it project actually we started together with grief but i would say that's more the grief project that that that minds it's mine too because we started together but it's gibbeth is the dream of uh the grief dreams and um well i don't know i'm sure you know grief but you know grief is very idealistic and he loves uh he he believes he has a vision of

a kind of a world and gibbeth is like a a piece a very important piece to build this decentralized uh this decentralized world and and it was and i would say this because griffith stills trying to building that he didn't give up and he's also well he's uh working there and i'm sure he he will he will get it what he's uh achieving it's very interesting just to give some background so uh giveth is is a donations platform right so uh yeah it's a donation platform but it's more uh community i would say it's a very uh a way of a way of uh

solving the community fundings for the communities you know how the community is organized and how the community can be funded and how the a community can start doing things good things with less friction that the current system has and this is about giving organizing communities funding communities and he's also for example just working in this his dao stack project and it's all about this it's just about ways of funding uh ways of funding uh people that just want to do good things and this is what's give it about

cool yeah no it's it's it's definitely a super interesting project to check it out um so let's talk about what you've been up to since well uh i can i can say that since there the from from that time what i was doing at the beginning i was doing a lot of updates and you know all the ico boom at that point and it was still learning and continue learning i didn't stop learning since there it's just a new world and you know you have to study a lot here just to understand what's going on uh but there was at that point there was a technology that i already realized that was very exciting it's all this zero knowledge uh

technology so since there i was at the beginning just studying studying a lot of these technology then i was building some tools for this technology we created the project the project id3 either three is a project for uh self-sovereign identity we're still working on that project it's a protocol for salesforce identity that's where zero knowledge is the key piece for you know for privacy and for recovery and for everything and the with this technology we just started the roll-ups because it's cool because this zero knowledge technology it's the same technology that can be used for privacy but can also be

used for scalability for scaling it's exchange but technology that allows these two things so then we started the hermes project hermes project is a a roll up uh layer 2 zk roll up for doing payments mainly was launched last march is like actually working right now in mainnet and now i'm working in the zig avm that's mainly layer 2 ck roll up where you can deploy smart contracts on top of that and this is what i'm fully committed right now and what i'm working hard right now and

what i'm very excited uh to work on and and yes we are doing a lot of progress and yeah i hope that we can see it very soon well yeah so let's talk about hermes so as you said um hermes is a zk roll up built on ethereum so obviously ethereum has a pre-existing evm which is not optimized for zk technology um so basically starting from that there are at least two options and how to get the zero knowledge part and the evm part together so either you make the zero knowledge part solidity compatible or you build a full set of evm up codes and you have you guys have decided to go

the second path right so from where i stand this comes with very obvious advantages so basically you inherit the full compatibility with the tooling and the ecosystem and you keep the ethereum security model but i assume it also comes with a lot of challenges right yes absolutely it's uh uh you said before it's uh the current evm ethereum is not it was not designed i don't think nobody realizes that this could be run in a zk friendly environment so yes it's not designed for that

we are doing a kind of interpreter so what we are doing is okay we are just this is not compatible we are but we are trying to make it compatible so that's a little bit what uh we are working this uh theoretically this should make so should should be a little bit not optimal but when you check at it it's more optimal that what you may think at the beginning so if you think deeper if you think deeper in all the problems you have and if you're doing in the in the right way you see that you can create a very you know this specific micro code so you

know specific uh you can you have the freedom to design this the kbm that yeah the the the that's the base evm that you want so you can design this evm in a way that's very optimal for uh interpreting the ethereum evm so it's like let me just put an example is i want to uh [Music] imagine that you want to do an interpreter of python and okay and you want to do it in c but it's not it doesn't fit it's it's not uh the right way but imagine but imagine that you don't even

that the c is not even invented so you can invent your own language there that's uh it's a language that needs to run a single program that it only needs to that the only thing that needs to the only thing that the problem is to do is uh to interpret python so you can write of any optimal uh language and compiler for c to be very optimal to just compile a python interpreter that's a little bit that example but it's uh it's not that so it's not that unoptimal as it may looks like of course it is but it's not as much and it's doable and of course this brings a lot of advantages uh

from compatibility just go just upgrade to a code you you just compile the program in solidity and you get the same output and you just run it there here instead of there it's like a little bit for example currently the the optimistic roll-ups uh like garbage room or or optimistic literally the way they are doing you know they are not uh maybe they change something in the solidity but it's more because not because they are changing the ibm is because they are it's not a layer it's not a layer one it's a layer two so there are maybe some of codes that makes no sense in layer two uh but it's more

uh technicality is that what it is so a developer ideally should not care if he's doing a smart contract for layer 1 and for layer 2. so you're basically you're taking up code by opcode and you're kind of transposing them into the corresponding zk op code so basically if i wanted to have like a five op code string a b c d e i would go z k a z k b z k c z k d z k e and i would get the same result is that kind of roughly correct yeah it's actually is your run you have a program uh solidity program when you compile it you get a set of uh bike you said a set of bytes that are

upgrades mainly so you just take those bytes and instead of running here you just run there it's like at the end is from the user perspective is like having a sidechain it's not a sidechain but the same way that you are using uh polygon or xi or any other chain that you are just signing transactions and deploying smart contracts in the side chain it should work the same way with a zk vm the only thing is not going to be a side chain it's going to be a layer 2 it's going to be a roll up but from the user perspective should not be uh many differences okay and in principle can you transpose any opcode into a zk opcode yes theoretically yes

there are some upgrades that are harder than uh others but uh we have been analyzing and i would say yes there are some you know as i told you before there are some exceptions uh that are more uh for example uh you know if there is an op code that's uh uh difficulty how much is difficulty is okay in layer two you don't have difficulty or anything related so this op code probably will exist but maybe we'll return some hard-coded information okay or uh base code who's the who's the miner okay you don't have miners but maybe you have a coordinator so maybe

this up code returns the coordinator instead of the miner okay so there are some some tricky up codes that are very related to the later one but most of the opcodes will be will be the same and they should not be many problems to implement it here is another thing is the cause you know uh maybe there are some old goods so the the the the gas cost in in the layer one is uh one and then this that the cost in the zk roll up that the specific cost for running that in the roll up may be a little bit different so uh here maybe some adjustments that uh

would need to be done but they used to keep exactly the same gas model that layer one so and the worst thing maybe it's gonna be some transaction that would not be able to to run in the in the sequel for example if you are a boosting uh one of these of course that's very expensive in the sdk roll up well in the university envelope maybe it's gonna be a limit of imagine for example exponentiation exponentiation maybe it's a hard uh uh upgrade so maybe you can only do like three exponentiations or four exponentiations and if you are doing more these transactions would not would just be impossible to mine so it wouldn't it would be an

invalid transaction that's the thing that may happen but if it's executed it will be a trigger in the same way that uh layer one okay so so basically um you you have like this uh this library of say 140 or 140 minus you know the couple that make no sense zk up codes and then i mean what we use on layer one um a lot is these precompiles right i mean there aren't as many i think there's like 10 or something but do you have equivalents for those as well yeah theoretically yes uh but these are hard and these are i would say these would be expensive you know no code there are upgrades that are expensive

but pre-compile pre-compiles it's like another op code it's not really not good but can be understand local but they could be very very very very expensive for example uh you have paintings uh so theoretically you should be able to run a uh so to check the painting uh inside the overlap it's doable so technically it's swollen but the cost uh it would be quite expensive in zk ibm terms so maybe you can only do one paying or two pairings in a single transaction uh compared to that but but theoretically it's it's it's it's possible

okay and as of this summer we have this uh zk pre-compile right can you kind of nest these with um the ms network and kind of get something like a recursive um uh zero knowledge um system yeah if you have paintings if you have paintings actually you can have a roll up as they give all up inside another yeah you have some sort of recursions if you have paintings yeah uh as i told you here we need to see what's the final cost of these paintings you know this is i tell you this is going to be the last uh the last top code or the last yeah the last pre-compiled smart

contract that we will implement it but uh it's repetitive you know at the end at the end painting is to do a painting you need the miller loop you need the final exponentiation both things are very uh cycling so it's very loops so it's it's very it's much doable uh in the in the way that so who we are building all these polynomial systems so all the way that we are building this proof is absolutely doable but what may happen is that is maybe a transaction can handle only maybe one pairing or two paintings okay um so but but let's talk about what's on layer one in this right so basically so when when i as a user when i send a

transaction i don't send it on layer one i send it to um a coordinator right corner set up for coordinators and and the coordinator kind of the coordinator takes um all um basically the mempool of all of all these transactions and kind of executes them um all together and then sends a proof to the chain right and basically a new merkle root is that correct yeah mainly is that yeah so why is the gas limit so crucial the gas limit of uh of the coordinator um the gas limit of of the um of the up

codes are precompiled no this is this is more for building the proof so okay it's just for them yeah it's for your need to build a proof but not everything you know the proof is like at the end it's a circuit and and the circuit can have a limit that number of operations so if you exceed uh these operations then you just will not be able to build the proof that's the same to say that you you will not be able to execute that transaction okay so how how many transactions fit in one proof we need to we need to do the final numbers what i will give you is just like a first

first graph but um the way so we have like a a double system so we have a girl 16 or blanc that's uh validating a set of starks okay in each stark uh in each stark we don't have this is just uh it's not the final numbers but we expect to at least in each start to be able to process half a million gas okay and we can have i would say easily about 1 000 starks in a single proof so this is maybe two orders of magnitude of uh improved improved terms to orders of magnitude of the current ethereum

but again this is you know very pre preliminar uh theoretical calculus there okay um so in uh in your white paper and also on your on your homepage you say that hamas is very much focused on token transfers so what why do you say that because in principle if you have all up codes you can run any and any smart contract no yeah yeah but it's like okay we have it until now so what we have is a payment a payment cable up and this is what's running and this is in the main net okay uh what i'm when i'm talking now about the zk uh zkbm this is not it's not created yet this is

what we are working technically right now and it's going to be the next version of hermes uh some way so if you are talking about payments we are talking about uh what we have right now and i can give you full detail of what we have right now if we are talking about executing smart contracts if you are talking about the kvm this is what we are building now and and this is why i'm telling you about the quantity of gas in the current hermes the quantity of payments we allow 2 000 transfers [Music] per proof okay and and you can feed about 15 between 15 and 20 proof per block if so this is a more or less a total of two

thousand transactions per second if you were using full ethereum just to run uh you you could not do anything else in ethereum with that with those numbers but this gives you a scalability these uh two orders of magnitude scalability on the on the roll up and the main limitation is more in the well it's in the proof but it's also in the data availability so here are the limits that are it's just it can be it you can you can you can do it better there is margin to to to improve uh these things so this is just like the first version of uh ck all up is with these numbers okay and so basically

um as a ck mechanism you use either graph 16 or planck and as far as i know gross 16 actually requires a trusted setup right yes um so you'll do a ceremony at some point we did the ceremony for the hermes and it's a specific ceremony for the circuit if we upgrade the circuits then we have to run like another trusted setup i hope and this is this is i would say that girl 16 is uh perfect in uh uh it's like has all the advantages and it's the best proving system and it's everything is perfect except for these trusses so if

you need that if you if you can not handle a trusses setup then you need to go to uh other to other uh to other proof systems plonk also requires a transfer setup but it's a universal process setup it's not a specific setup for for foreign and personally i think that should be enough now growth 16 i can i can accept that you know it's not perfect because at the end you need you need to end up trusting a set of people that run the that run the specific trusses setup but

[Music] in plonk this trusses setup this is a universal setup it's much bigger with much more people it was created beforehand was created for with different companies uh with different people around so i think it's it's [Music] you know who knows in the future maybe there will be other proof systems that will not require processor up here for example the z-cash people is working hollow that does not require trusted set up and there are other starks that's not required but the proof city the proof sites is quite big uh but there are other and there is a lot of research in this field and

maybe it's going to be some proof system that it requires but for for the from pragmatic way i think that google 16 or blanc is is good enough cool um so let's talk about how this looks for me as a user right so basically um i sent my transaction to the coordinator so what what's the job of the coordinator well the coordinator is just uh it's a little bit like a minor preview one so it has some similarities with there they just collect uh as many transactions as it can and build a patch which means building a proof

and sending that to the layer one that's what a coordinator coordinator does in hermes and um how do i become a coordinator let me just okay i i explain you in the hermes maybe in ckevm we we changed this a little bit but the idea of hermes is that you just buy or you just beat for a slot uh the the winning of the the who wins the bidding just gets 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes you just can build as many batches as you want so if you have a lot of transactions and if you are fast and if you have a good

requirement equipment you will be able to extract all the value of those transactions and get all the fees of those transactions and so by extracting the value you mean the fees that people pay and not i mean in principle you could also extract um mev or maybe coordinator extractable value right yes in the case of oh in the case of uh it's not very much the case yeah the the thing that i mean the mining extract extraction value this is all this is more for when you have a smart contract you have taxes and you have uh uh uh other other kinds of things but in the cabin this will become and so in the ckvm we probably will will work we'll do it a little bit

different what are your ideas um as to how to do it well the idea is more about using more sequencer so how would that work so basically there would be um there would be a deterministic way of um of seeing um which transactions go in which order yeah exactly a little bit a little bit a little bit will be that but let's stay there okay um so the coordinator currently has to um to pay for the privilege of kind of mining the block or coordinating the block what happens to tokens that the coordinator has to pay for um for this privilege

yeah well this is uh part of it is burn and needs to be born for the protocol and part of it is donated and part of it is recycled to the to the to the users of the to see to the network itself currently is 30 is born 40 is donated and 30 is recycled okay and um if the coordinator um behaves maliciously um can they be slashed uh they can not so what first is what means uh uh behaves maliciously because uh coordinator

cannot do very much so it just can just forge or not forge and if it forge can forge the transactions that they have so first thing is what means maliciously okay so this is a little bit like saying what happened if a miner behaves maliciously well sure they cannot insert their transaction an invalid transaction or steal funds okay things that may happen here is for example that he's censoring me for example some sort of transactions okay and in the casing of the roll-up we have uh we call it a forced transaction and mainly it's a layer one transaction that's forced to be uh

mined by the well forged by uh by the coordinator so coordinator has the obligation to execute those transactions so uh your phones cannot be locked there you know if even so if if if you are doing if you have the funds there and the coordinator don't want to execute your transaction you you you can always do a layer one transaction travel to exit and you and the coordinator will either forge the transactions or or will not forge anything okay so but what happens if the coordinator submits a

um faulty proof no it's it's just uh it's like doing nothing you know it's it's it's that's the that's the difference between optimistic and ck in ck you just uh send the proof and this proof is validated by the smart contract and if this proof is invalid then uh the smart contracts you know just the transaction fails transaction through so it's like the state doesn't change okay so it's impossible to forge a new valid transaction in music it roll up and even better when it's forged so once the transaction is forged it cannot be rolled back you know it's it's final it's it's it's there and and this is the big difference between ck

roll up and optimistic roll up in optimistic relapse you need to you know a coordinator can can forge so you can send an invalid uh transaction there and then there is this uh mechanism and this doesn't exist in sig roll up in ck roll up you just send a transaction you send this proof this cryptographic proof which is hard and expensive to compute but the cool thing is that once you submit there you the the smart contract verifies and you're you're okay you are you are that that's it okay so basically the worst thing that the coordinator can do is they can um they can censor someone so basically the way that you currently combat that is by um having users submit

things via call data right um or how does it currently work well coordinator can sen sensor because at the end he can choose which restraint at currently in the hermes it can choose which restrictions they include and which transactions they do not include but you know the user has always the option to uh to create a layer one transaction forcing the coordinator to execute that transaction so it seem so it cannot be censored okay maybe you will have to pay the gas of the later one yeah uh to run the to run your transaction

but uh the you can not so the coordinator cannot uh sense for you well it can the only thing that can do is don't don't forget anything just to stop the network in some way but in this case the a time mode that anybody at this stage anybody can forge and create a block so can forge so if everyone if everything is a stop you can always build maybe it will take one day to compute the proof in the normal laptop but that in one day uh the transaction so the next you you have you have for sure that in the next batch that's forged either by you or there by somebody else your transaction is going to be executed so

if at the end it's impossible to be censored in the in the worst uh in you know in the worst scenario okay you get you cannot be censored cool um so a couple of months ago we had alex from mata labs on so at a very high level um how would you characterize the difference between um the the zk roll up um that mater labs is working on and the zika roll-up that you guys are working on well first of all let me just say that the motor lapse is an incredible project and they are doing a very good job in the in this space i'm not so in the in the case of the zk uh in the ck ibm

part i'm not 100 sure of what they are doing because they have not polished too much yet okay so i cannot talk very much how they are doing they are following more an approach of uh [Music] you know just compiling solidity to a more ck specific set of op codes okay which is uh it's a good path you know it's an interesting path and it's just uh here we just choose a different path we just choose a path uh to try to uh probably it's a little bit harder in things but it's simple in another okay so it's just uh it's different path and

and uh we'll see you know just uh uh we think we believe that or or path is is the right one but but we may be wrong you know just uh we see and but the interesting thing is that even if uh at some point we just see that this is the wrong path you know just we may happen we can always go to the other path you know just uh if so it's like because we're implementing uh at the end we're implementing the same we are executing uh programs in there so if if at the end it's very easy to say okay just let's forget forget about compatibility just let's just use let's

simplify the avm just just run this this this and this and let's run them we can always do that and and this is always an option but we we really believe that we can be very very compatible to the current evm so so far we've talked about scalability a lot so basically the other thing that that zero knowledge in principle can do is it can afford you privacy right so um i mean even even despite the fact that currently everything is kind of centered around um advancing scaling could this also to trans could this also translate to better privacy down the road yes and no as i told you before the zero

knowledge can be used for privacy and for and for scalability okay but they can not be used at the same time for both okay so if you want to have a privacy and scaling you need to some sort of recursion so you need for example so you do like you have like a kind of a tornado cache or a kind of sd a z-cache some some layer of uh uh privacy uh that's running inside uh maybe a zika ziggy roll up okay but both things at the same time you know i know that for example people is working in that direction you may ask them how they are doing and so on they

are you know great people and they are doing very interesting people but we our focus is at this point is more for on the scalability just having an ethereum but running in a zk so scale scale ethereum and once there of course if you scale ethereum and the stereo handles privacy maybe you can run it inside the scalability but we are trying to uh split the split the the problems and trying to solve one specific problem sure and i mean it's a hard enough problem to solve um so a couple of weeks ago the news broke that um hermes merged with polygon the

scaling solution um so basically um if if you look at um hermes in polygon they are um architecturally they're built in different ways right so basically um hermet hermes very much inherits the security guarantees from ethereum whereas this currently is not true for polygon in a way it's it's a standalone layer one chain with a periodic uh ethereum commit um so i haven't really found a lot about how the joint model will look um can you talk about this between hermes and polygon there of course there are things that are very complementary that's why i think it's a good merge but there are

we both share um the same vision here and the vision is mainly that we are not doing here these projects uh we are not here just to do some some some gadgets just to play we want to bring this uh technology to real people we want to scale we want to go mainstream we want to grow and this is the this is the the vision of polygon and this is the vision to hermes okay and said that uh we are we have been working a lot in this zika relapse you know in this technology

polygon polygon people of course accept that this is the right way to go uh this is the so they they believe and and in the while they are doing things just to to try to get customers just to get people using that and they are of course maybe it's not the perfect solution sidechain but uh i would say an enough solution for many projects and and probably the best solution that you can have it right now if you want to build the smart contracts and you don't want to pay maybe a a huge amount of fees and and so on so at the end the important is understand

what we are doing what where we are what are the current technologies that are available working together i think we can go very far just to bring this technology to mainstream and this is that that this is why i think is a good merge there is a very good fit in the even in the management teams there is very good fitting there and yeah it's uh for for me it's very exciting to be uh at this moment just part of this polygon mission there so which is the same that the one we had so it's it's

it's very exciting we'll see you know this is at the end is we'll see in the next uh months and years and see how the things evolve but i think it's very good i think it's a very good thing that we can work together cool so i mean the the polygon network obviously is is used quite heavily currently i see that there are different parts here that kind of where maybe it's not clear how they will get how they will work together in in the end but do you have an idea of architecturally how it will work so basically will you will polygon resort to the hermes ck roll up model um or is this not clear yet

uh i would say it's not clear yet um but you know at the end is it's what i told you before it's just bring this uh technology mainstream and being this technology what i'm saying bring this technology mean please bring this technology with all the values that need this technology adds and if you have to do some concession at some point it's important that we understand with which concession we are doing in in in each site and and and this is yeah this is uh so uh polygon will use the technology that's

available at each point to to to to have the most adoption uh they can and to try to keep the values of the centralization as much as they can and this is uh so if it's this if this is the hermes technology that's great but if it's another somebody else's technology because it's better it's going to be great too so it's it's the idea is to to bring this to to what it's it's important that there are that we have a lot of uh companies that are developing on top and on top of ethereum that are thinking about blockchain that is thinking about the centralization and

um i remember that uh maybe in the in the during the acos in the in the 2017 2018 2017 there was a lot if you if you if you check uh uh ethereum you saw a lot of different applications a lot of different people just building uh things on top of ethereum and i remember that a lot of those [Music] initiatives a lot of those projects they just stopped their business some way because they couldn't afford just

the ethereum didn't scale and so they couldn't afford the the they couldn't afford the paying the gases and make no sense just to use some uh insurance applications just paying for reduce every time you just hired insurance just paying 50 dollars just or whatever so it makes no sense but they are very interesting applications and at the end it's just a matter of scaling okay so it's important that these companies continue working continue evolving continue doing things on top of ethereum because when ethereum scales whichever way they are ready they are already running there so it's in some

ways just earning time in the earning time in the in the future so that's why it's so important uh those uh side chains even if the properties are not as good as not the ideal as not the ones that we want to uh we want to have but they are doing their job they are doing their their their mission okay even it's like it's not a test but you know a test that is not enough sometimes you know this is some middle thing you know just and this is i think it's this side chains you know it's important for that but you need to understand and this is probably the key most important thing you need to understand what are the limitations of

these side chains yeah i i completely understand um so so let's talk about the road map and how this um fits in with ethereum two so basically um the current vision for the for um sharding is data availability charts which sounds wonderful if if if you're in charge of a ck roll up so um tell us about um when you plan to i mean i know that these these estimates are always fraught and we've all been there but um so when do you plan to uh go live with um the zika evm and how will that change um once data availability shots um become available

let's say though for in our site uh the zk the kbm for us is more or less it should be more or less a one year project okay so maybe it's maybe we can for example we are right now we are accelerating and we are running a lot but you know there are some maybe there are some stages that we delay so that's it's difficult to it's difficult to know exactly when but it's not it should be around like a year okay so that this should be production ready in some way okay um again things may happen is something that's new a lot of challenges have happened and and so it's like not fully committed just give you what's in my mind uh what

should be okay how this fits with ethereum 2.0 uh i don't know you know we need to see for us the the the sharding is uh the important thing right now i think they are working a lot with the merch yeah with uh uh so and probably charlie is one to come it's gonna come next it's a path you know we will see and it's a stage to stage uh right now the cool thing of ethereum 2.0 is um you know i remember in the 19th in 2019 2018 that was not clear and there was uh

[Music] every time that we talked about ethereum 2.0 was not it was like the research was not done and and there were a lot of things and even changing one from one side to the other which is normal because when you are researching you know thing changes and you go deeper in one topic and then you you you see that you can do it much better so you just go back and and it's it's normal but from outside it's like it was uh we never had when you see it from one side we will never have a theory to the zero this is never will never happen this is the the feeling that a lot of times we had at this point i think that nobody doubts

that ethereum 2.0 is going to happen maybe we are talking is this we will take one year two years or three years but but uh 32.0 is is is happening and it's uh it's the way to go uh we replaced the concept of this because we call it before execution environments now we call it zika ups or servolapse at least if you want uh it's not exactly the same but it's almost the same and this evolution you know just this evolution of ethereum with all this zero knowledge technology that has been evolving all the all the work of the sharding

the vikonet on the consensus mechanism all this you know all this is coming together and the uh i think i think that at this point nobody knows that blockchain blockchains and concluding ethereum is gonna be a global scaling blockchain very soon if you and if you talk to if you if you talk to me maybe in 2018 when the scaling solutions were you know state channels or even these uh

side chains uh and things uh it was very skeptical and [Music] and for me it was not clear but at this point uh i think the path is quite clear no this is going to scale for sure and and it's just a matter of at this point it's a matter of engineering it's a matter of just putting the pieces together uh building and of course maybe improving some protocols and things but it's it's there is it's more fine-tuning and and building but this is gonna happen cool so maybe um to conclude let me let me zoom right out so you've always been

a person um to think a lot about what's right and what the right thing to do is right i mean basically with the robin hood group and the the white hat hackers and giveth and so on um so i mean currently you're working on technology that makes the blockchain more performant but on a societal scale what do you hope will come out of this so basically if you if you look at blockchain say in five to ten years um in what metric will humanity be better off because of blockchain look at the end

i hope that the people get proud of the communities they belong to the they so here is uh empowering people that means that you are part of a society you know you were born you you will die and and you don't exactly you don't really know what you are doing here in this world but you know that you are surrounded of the other humans that are more or less the same that you and you are trying to do the best thing for all of us so at the end you are just building communities and you are just trying to in some way work together to have more to be more happy and this is what's life about and the the cool thing of a blockchain is that

this should allows you to be part of the community of the community that you want to be in the community should be half obtained or not options to the community you should have uh uh you should be part that means that you should work for the community you should uh this is why governance for example is something that's so important but you know just governance but also organizing or distributing if you want distributing the the scarcity resources some way this is why the money is about and why the tokens are about and so on this is what can uh blockchains uh uh and this technology can help

if you see if you see the the world right now just thinking how many states uh how many conflicts are right now in the world because a lack of a lack of trust in the central authority and all these places you know places where there are wars or in wars right now uh or countries that you know let me put an example here is just venezuela venezuela is uh it's a democratic country and the people just wants to be how they want to build or is just a dictatorship and uh and and and who knows you know there is a there is a

central party that's organizing some uh elections nobody know if this is uh corrupt or not and it's it's it's a lack of trust imagine that you can just organize a voting system where it's it can be just real and you understand how it works this will solve a lot a lot of things uh right now in that conflict and this is just an example you know there are many conflicts and many things in the humanity that can be solved just by don't having to trust uh central uh central authority and and this is this is what's the blockchain so this is what what the blockchain

will add to the society of course uh blockchain is a technology it's not enough uh for this transformation of the society to happen you know that it requires some social uh transformation too okay but definitely uh uh the blockchain can be the the technology that triggers this change in the society for sure cool thank you jordy so where can people go to find out more about hermes that's hermes dot io i think you can find all the information there right now is polygon slash hermes dot io but yeah

any both both domains work so just go there we have our reddit group we have telegram group of course twitter also there i think it's just a mess with zit you know just and that with it just it's easy to find us cool um it's been a real pleasure to have you on i've wanted to do this ever since you gave that really astonishing talk at ecc which we'll also link to in the show notes so um if you're interested in the math behind this go check out that talk as well it was fantastic thank you so much for coming on okay thank you very much steve