Polygon's Next Chapter: Aggregated Blockchains w/ Brendan Farmer (Polygon)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for today's conversation at the end of 2022 vitalic was on an episode of the bankless podcast in which Ryan Shan Adams asked what is your assessment of crypto after this crazy year now remember 2022 was the year where the moon crashed into the Earth and where the Aderall induced Mania finally fell apart under the Bahamian

Sun so suffice to say that there was a lot to say but vitalic gave one answer that really helped me understand the moment that we were living through um 2022 was also the year of ZK EVMS right so five years ago the Zeitgeist basically was that oh there is this fancy thing called ZK sarch technology and like maybe theoretically it could make abstract proofs and you can turn things into pols and like put stuff on top of stuff and maybe eventually verify an ethereum block but like come on it's so high overhead it's going to take like literally four weeks to make a proof and

four years to actually audit the code to do any of that right um but fast forward to 2022 and we have multiple ZK evm implementations that are all promising some kind of mainnet launch next year like this is amazing right like ZK EVMS have just gone from being a non-existent pip stream to being the I think queer manifest longterm and and possibly even medium-term a future of scaling ethereum so here we are about a year later multiple ZK evm implementations did come to mainnet so much so that the ZK evm itself isn't a particularly sexy problem anymore in fact the technology and the

narrative have moved so far in such a short amount of time that much of today's conversation would be mostly unint ible back then what's your data availability strategy have you considered an alternate execution environment than the evm what pieces of your stack are going to leverage reaking and on and on and on and on and even a year ago we could all see the big hairy problem that was beginning to emerge yes the rooll abcentric road map seems great in theory but in practice if it requires a massive fragmentation of liquidity and composability does the

rollup Centric road map destroy everything that makes crypto amazing well today I am so excited to announce that we have the perfect guest to answer all of these questions and to show us the future of blockchain scaling Brendan farmer a co-founder of polygon and a co-leader of polygon zero over the next about 70 minutes you will learn so much about the future of polygon blockchain scaling and of ethereum with a particularly Deep dive into the new and very exciting agir a first ofit kind solution to an increasingly fragmented rollup focused

world of all the conversation we've had on strange water this might be one of my favorites and I hope you take away just as much from Brendan as I did one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then okay let's bring out Brandon Brandon thank you so much for joining us on the strange water podcast yeah thanks for having me Rex of course so before we get into all the incredible

stuff that's happening with polygon and with Ager and just like the revolution that you're bringing to us um I'm a big believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that as a frame can you tell us a little bit about yourself how you found crypto and eventually how you made your way over to probably the most important infrastructure entity in this industry uh yeah I mean Rex you're hyping this up a ton I hope I hope going to be able to live up to this but um yeah so I think for me um I studied math in college uh math and philosophy and toward the end of my time in undergrad I uh started to get into cryptography just uh encryption as a result of um kind of

the Snowden leaks and just sort of worrying about about privacy concerns um and then so I I was kind of like tiptoeing around that for a couple years and then uh ethereum launched and I was living in San Francisco and and started to go to to ethereum meetups I'm sure like a lot of people um and just kind of became really interested in in cryptocurrency and and ethereum and just what you could do and so I I think for me the journey into crypto really like started accelerating when uh vitalic launched the plasma paper and this was I think 2017 and um and there was this line in plasma where it was like okay we we

provide security and safety with this cool game theoretic mechanism um using fraud proofs or or whatever sort of uh design and they referenced um you know but you could also use uh Zer knowledge proofs or snarks to kind of make all this better and I IID sort of like vaguely heard about what Zer knowledge proofs were but I I I you know didn't know if if the math would be accessible or or you know how to get into it um but that really sort of stayed with me for a while and I started getting more into zero knowledge proofs and at that time there there weren't a ton of like easily accessible entry level tutorials um and so it was uh it was pretty rough um but

I found myself at zon zero so zcash was nice enough to give me a grant so I could attend uh zcon zero and I met uh Daniel lubero um and the two of us started talking uh I just left um kind of a job at this you know pretty boring startup that wasn't going anywhere Daniel had just left Google and we sort of wanted to do similar things and you know we kept talking and you know after a few months um we're like you know maybe we should work on a project together and uh that project became Mir um which was a like a ZK L1 that was trying to use Zer knowledge proofs for privacy and scalability and so we got that off the ground in

2019 um and we raised some money at the end of 2019 and then immediately uh there was a global pandemic and that was a really fun time to be trying to get a startup off the ground um but we managed to hire some people we built a really good team uh sort of by accident honestly like we we randomly came into contact with with really really talented people um and this journey sort of uh brought us to um to being acquired by polygon so polygon in kind of mid 2021 was uh looking to to Pivot into building ZK technology so they had the polygon POS side chain and they knew that like in the future that wouldn't be good

enough to to be competitive in in the L2 landscape and uh to their credit they decided to make a huge bet on ZK technology and so they acquired three ZK teams and and we were one and um and yeah so that that kind of brings us to to where we are now I I I work within polygon on ZK R&D so um proving systems like planky 2 and funky 3 which are state-of-the-art Zer knowledge proving systems and um a type 1 zkm so a prover that allows you to um take any evm chain and immediately upgrade it into a zk2 and so that's what I'm focused on and it's yeah really interesting awesome so before we get to kind of like modern day

and what we working on now I I would be remiss if I did not ask one of like honestly like one of the uh Godfathers of like the Z K Revolution that we're going through so let me put it this way last year the meta in ZK world was like let's build tools that make ZK accessible so that like application developers have access to these tools and then can like focus on building like things that users do and not worry about PhD level math and that became like very obvious after we had like a couple big wins in ZK world and then people want to go replicate it and realize like oh my God exactly what you ran into in 201 19 and so I would just love to take a

moment to reflect on this like kind of 5-year evolution of ZK and um you know I think I just said like kind of the the basic part but as someone who was there and really like helped Shepherd us forward what was it like during this like this period where ZK went from this math that has been around for decades that literally no one outside of the whitest tallest Ivory tow has ever heard of to something that um has like just joined the like the background lexicon of our like vocabulary and knowledge yeah I think that's a really good question I I will say um for for for honesty uh I probably am not the one shepherding ZK technology into the

future but I I get to work alongside the people that are doing that directly um so so that's a nice thing um but I yeah I mean the way that I look at it is like I was really fortunate to join the ZK space at a time when I think it was just entering like a parabolic exponential growth curve and so if you think about like when I joined the space um like the state-of-the-art was like uh sort of the Groth 16 proving system so you needed a trusted setup the the performance was good but not great and and like it was inconceivable that you could build um like a a ZK VM where where you're proving uh like the validity of ethereum transactions like that that was

something that was seen as like a decade away like so so far in the future that it was you know not really conceivable um and I think that we saw and to be honest like a lot of this was catalyzed by crypto because it it I think it was obvious to enough people early on that this technology was basically like the perfect fit for crypto privacy and scalability like you know from the scalability perspective um Z knowledge proofs allow us to compress the computational load of validating a bunch of transactions into validating a single tiny proof and so like it's a complete GameChanger in that respect and from from privacy the Privacy perspective it allows us to have anonymity on public ledgers and so like

it like to me it was like very obvious early on that um like this was an extremely compelling technology for crypto but it was like a really really uncomfortable position to be in at the time to be starting a company and raising money like given the enormous amount of technical uncertainty that that existed around uh um around the technology and so I guess in in 2019 we had uh proving systems that were transparent um so like Starks and uh or it didn't require trusted setup um like Marlin and plon and or didn't require a per circuit trusted setup um and so like you could see how uh like the the

restrictions and the limitations on the technology were beginning to be lifted and I I think that honestly like our team did a lot to create this feedback loop between like techn the sort of like academic R&D and the like engineering of these proving systems and like I think that we really focused on uh changing the the discourse from like a primarily academic one where people would look at papers and they would say like okay um we're going to measure the efficiency of this proving system in terms of like the like ASM totic complexity of the number of field elements that it's doing but like for us we looked at questions like

okay we have a 256-bit field and we have a 64-bit field we know that the 64-bit field each field element is going to fit in the single word of a CPU and so it's going to be like way way faster in practice on CPUs and on Hardware than a 256bit field and so like let's look at these areas where we can squeeze out as much efficiency and performance out of every component of the approver so that we can really like push this technology forward and I think that if you look at like the progression from 2019 to the current day like we've seen a huge um a huge like Leap Forward in in what's possible both from from our work from

work of others um working on like binary fields and and other really interesting uh areas yeah so um last summer I had the great pleasure uh to have like sit down one-on-one for 30 minutes with Professor Dan Bon at um Stanford SBC the thing like we both of us were just like so a struck by him much more than like I never want to put myself on the same level as Professor Bonet but but what is special about crypto is this interface between Academia and entrepreneurialism and like we've seen this in tech for now like especially internet Tech and for like the last 30 years but there was just something so special about sitting

in that conference room at Stanford watching grad students and researchers from Microsoft and just like people that like live and breathe in Academia come out give a like presentation on their paper and then watch like 4,000 kids writing down this is exactly how I'm going to turn it into a startup and again just to add a little more onto that I asked so I actually I went to Stanford I took intro to number Theory from Professor Bon 11 years ago left the space entirely and and actually during that time the like example he gave at the end was about uh Quantum cryptography nothing to do with crypto at all even though this is 2012 and so um I asked him I was like talk to me a

little bit about the transition for you personally how it was like going from Quantum to crypto and he's like somewhere around ethereum time I wrote a research paper I publish it and then two months later somebody had raised millions of dollars on that paper and I thought eh it happens it's a fluke that was pretty cool but it is what it is and then like 2 months later the exact same thing happened and that's when he realized like oh my God that there's something different happening here and everything that you just said kind of speaks to that so loudly and and I guess why I'm again going to call you a Godfather of like the ZK Revolution is not because like the important part is the research in the mathematics like

that's been going on for 50 years the important part is what's happening now now which is US figuring out that this like really really weird idea of like hiding numbers behind an elliptical curve has like real applications for things that um are transforming the world right now and you know we're still early in that process we still get to watch it but I just I can't even imagine what it was like in 2019 yeah I mean to be honest like like I said I think it was really nerve-wracking because we raised a lot of money and and we didn't know that the proving system was actually going to be efficient enough for what we wanted to build and so um yeah I mean it was this uncomfortable position where I think ordinarily when you think about launching a company like you don't think

about uh like using your seed round to invest in like core R&D for the technology that you hope to build on and that's like exactly what we had to do and and fortunately it worked out but yeah I think uh I I'm glad that we sort of entered on the right position of that parabolic curve of development because yeah it's it there definitely a lot of elements of of a crypto startup that are that are a little bit different than traditional te well I want to meet and like thank your VCS because like we need some people that are willing to just like throw money at technology that might work yeah yeah yeah shout out to to oloff from poly chin for being willing to make those bets cool so again last question before we get into like

what's happening now I would love to hear a little bit about your Reflections on This Time postacquisition by polygon you mentioned that um that polygon acquired three teams in this ZK space and so I would love to hear a little bit from your perspective what that was like did it feel like a competition did it feel like oh my God we just like the two people that we're competing with are now our best friends like talk to me a little bit of the dynamic of being an inquiring founder in um in sorry an acquired founder in a space um where conceivably you could have like Rivals yeah yeah I think that there were was definitely a world in which uh acquiring three separate ZK teams that were all

like continuing to operate autonomously was not like a good idea or a good thing um I think fortunately in this world it ended up being uh a very good thing because all three teams um were sort of focused on different things um so so we were all working in ZK we're working on ZK Tech um but it's sort of different stages of the development process so my team polygon zero has always been laser focused on core proving system R&D so planky 2 planky 3 just like pushing the underlying Tech forward and uh Hermes by contrast has is really really focused on shipping and getting something to Market and so it actually ended up being really

really complimentary because we could take the proving system advancements that we' made in planky 2 and transfer them to Hermes um and that was what allowed Hermes to launch a type two or type three ZK VM um and be really fast to Market and so the the third team might in is is focused on um sort of alternate uh ZK VM design so so different execution environments beyond the evm and how we can add privacy and scalability and client side proving and so I think that there's a really really nice interplay and and like a really sort of fertile collaboration and and uh an exchange of ideas and I I think it's been a really good thing for for us and and for polygon sounds like the lesson

there is that it it's easy to set up this situation and for it to actually be a disaster but I think maybe it's just a testament to you know the the m&a team at polygon to like realize that that it's possible to acquire three ZK companies in a way that's like complimentary and um about like fitting a puzzle together and not like let's just go suck up the market and like hope we get some of the winners and then hope that plays out internally yeah yeah I I think that's completely right and I do think the perception at the time was polygon is just like turning on a fire hose of money at this space trying to buy technology and like that really wasn't the case and and I think to their credit the polygon team

did a really good job of recognizing that we were all like very internally motivated and uh and and we were Founders and we were sort of like able to operate autonomously in a way that was a lot more productive than sort of aquiring a bunch of people and squishing them all together in a single team and like hoping that that would work um and so I I think it was a really good thing yeah I mean like the proof is in the pudding here in February 2024 like seems to be working out yeah yeah yeah so far so good cool so I'm I'm having a little uh trouble coming up with a transition here so I I I'll I'll lean on you a little bit about this like what we need to start talking about is polygon ZK evm

and that kind of gets us into Ager and I think it makes sense to kind of just skip over polygon uh POS but and then maybe at the end we can kind of wrap around and talk about how we get from polygon POS which is a lot of tvl today to like a future that does Polygon posos exist does is it migrated over but let's just uh fast forward for now straight to um polygon ZK evm so I think anyone listening to this podcast understands the the most of the modular blockchain uh thesis they understand the idea of like layer twos and rollups and even like ZK layer 2s but um without just like doing an explain like I5 can you talk a little

bit about what is like the polygon ZK evm and for crypto natives who kind of understand in general what we're doing like what are the important things to know about polygon ZK evm yeah sure that that's a good question so um the polygon zkm is a new chin and it's a chain that allows uh the sort of um I'll say evm compatible or or EV evm equivalent I'm not sure what the the the accepted terminology is but um it allows any developer to take any existing evm smart contract code um and deploy it seamlessly on this new chain and it just works same with all existing wallets with existing developer tools

and so for developers and users it presents an environment that's identical to ethereum and this is a really really important thing because uh say what you will about the evm and it sort of drawbacks it's pros and cons um but the vast majority of crypto activity currently exists on the evm and you know the vast majority of of smart contract developers and written smart contracts and so it's really important at least in the short term to preserve compatibility with the evm and to allow for the transfer of all of this accumulated knowledge and tooling and application development to be migrated to a new chain where transaction fees are much lower than on ethereum where we can sort of optimize for these different things

uh like latency and um and cross chain composability and so so that's sort of the vision for zkm and so the zkm chain that polygon released launched last March and we actually have an update that's coming soon that we Rel that we announced I guess uh last week or I don't know when this will air but sometime within the last few weeks um and uh so it's a new it's an upgrade it's a much more performant zkv impr and it uh exposes a new mode which we call the type one mode and so what the type one allows you to do is previously with a zkm you needed to start up a new chain to have this environment where uh that

was sort of evm compatible or evm equivalent and uh with the type one you can actually take any existing evm chain uh whether it's an optimistic rollup uh a side chain like the polygon POS an ALT L1 and you can just start generating proofs for it you don't have to migrate anything you don't need to change the client um and so it's this really powerful tool that allows us to take all of this uh liquidity and usage and state that's fragmented across all of these different evm chains and upgrade those chains with ZK so that they can ideally connect to the a layer and enter this environment of unified scalability uh or sort composability liquidity and state

and so I guess just for a quick clarification when you talk about type one you're referring to like vitalic framework of ethereum l2s yeah sorry I should have clarified no no that I I know what you're saying but I can't even like come up with what type two through five even are so so so type two is um it's basically the uh the way that ethereum uh represents State like the state tribe um is really uh inefficient for ZK proof proofs like it uses a hash function cck that's expensive to compute um the Merkle partition TR structure is expensive it us RP en coding and so um so for a type two the idea is uh let's take that uh State data structure and

let's replace it with something that's more ZK friendly and so we can expose the same environment to users and developers but on the back end it's just easier to generate Zer knowledge proofs with the type one the idea is we need to be able to generate proofs for existing chains that are running without any migrations and so we just have to accept um and sort of optimize around the cost of using the uh the existing state TR in the evm and then the like as you go further out like type three type four is the idea that things get more and more distant from what ethereum base chain looks but at the end of the day you're still putting settlement on main layer and you're still giving the ability to I like to say rage quit but to withdraw on

Main net yeah exactly so so like type three uh you know maybe you don't have access to all of the pre-compiled that are available ethereum or maybe you're missing some op cones and then type four uh I I'm not sure if there is a type five but type four five it's like okay the uh you're no longer in the evm you're in some different zvm but you're able to compile solid solidity contracts um to run on this kbm and there might be some compatibility issues there might be some issues with Dev tooling um but maybe you're getting a a you know an improvement in performance for for generat proofs and you know I I can guess um but rather than that I would love to hear just from you like why when

you sat down with a polygon you know greater ZK team for the first time why was it so critical to chase after the type one style ZK evm with the caveat the the typing system didn't even exist when you were doing this yeah yeah good point that's that's a good way to put it um uh so the really critical thing was and you alluded to this earlier uh we have the polygon POS chain that has a couple billion bridge to that chain has a lot of usage uh and so there's all of this value that's currently on that chain um and so the thought is like if we can upgrade that chain to be ZK proven we can connect it to the ZK M to

other chains in the polygon ecosystem to chains run by Third parties like okx or Manta or AAR um and we can actually share liquidity and usage uh between those chains and so like for us it was really about unlocking all of this latent value in the POS chain and like bringing that to the rest of the polygon ZK ecosystem let me ask you this um leading question but I I imagine that at at some point like I very much believe that the polygon team are like incredibly ethereum aligned and just like all um really open- Source projects you look at the things you're building also is giving back to like the

greater knowledge set and I guess the question is how much when you guys were originally architecting this even now to when you're actually building it and deploying it how much do you think this technology might end up being the ZK that um enters like main net and enters the base chain um once we're ready to make that upgrade yeah so I I I didn't want to be presumptuous and say that earlier but but I I I think that that's a huge part of it right like like we uh you know I entered crypto through the ethereum ecosystem we really enjoy being within and contributing to the the ethereum ecosystem and so the idea that we could um develop technology and be

the first to generate proofs for real mainnet ethereum blocks at a very very low cost was like an incredibly exciting thing for us because like we sort of Envision this future in which um the main net ethereum chain is ZK proven so you know you you might be using some application on the web that depends on State uh that's on ethereum or depends on the ability to send transactions via blockchain and you know in order for you to be able to do that trustless you can either run an ethereum full node which you cannot do in the browser unfortunately or you can ZK prove someone can ZK prove ethereum and can provide a proof that allows you to have

full node security guarantees um in a very very lightweight way and so this is like a I think a really important property for the future of ethereum and it's something that we're excited to contribute to awesome well yeah again I I really see like ethereum at the baset has to go ZK for so many reasons but at the end of the day day it's just like if we don't then we we have infra and Alchemy and fine we'll give next cycle let's say we have one more and then we're basically stuck with like AWS like I mean it's just it it once you recentralize in that way it's like what are we even doing and so ZK is the solution to that and I think it makes so much sense from a from a business standpoint from a branding standpoint

but also just from like a true open-source ethereum standpoint to be like this is a problem that needs to be solved and we think we can contribute to it and if we're going to build our projects with that same technology beforehand like that should only be viewed as like us putting our money where our mouth is that the technology actually works and so um I think this is the vision to the sorry this is the path to the world computer and I hear you that you don't want to sound presumptuous but like when we look back this is how it this is how the story happened yeah I mean for us like like we want to be viewed as as being ethereum aligned and being positive contributors to the ecosystem and and we think that you should like look at what people do and not what they say and like we think

this is like a really meaningful action to like support the continued growth and development of ethereum all right so we're altruist we're fixing ethereum good let's go back to um polygon so we we have uh ZK evm which um pre this new launch was just like the first um evm I think you guys are evm equivalent yeah I think so so you're the first uh CM equivalent uh L2 and that's awesome and um so first why don't you talk through outside of this new ability to deploy type one uh ZK EVMS like what are the upgrades under the hood that have happened just to like the the I hate the this the monolithic part of the ZK evm

yeah so so there have been a lot of upgrades um that have affected uh performance they they've been mostly incremental up to this point so um performance upgrades adding pre compiles like pairings and different hash functions um and so there's been a lot of incremental progress so far I think with this new type 1 upgrade you're going to see like really really significant improvements because on the client side we're able to use existing uh evm clients like we use Aragon and like one thing that's held back the sort of growth and and and Adoption of the zkm so far is like we made the decision to to rely on a custom evm client and uh I think other optimistic rollups

have also discovered that you should actually never try to build a custom evm client um and so we're really excited to switch that out and to be able to support a much much higher uh level of throughput and and scalability on the zkm okay got it so heard you like nothing worth like pointing out individually but the culmination of all these upgrades are just straight up like huge performance boost as of uh this new release so let's talk talk about the the type one deploying um so first of all like let's just walk through from a user Journey like let's say I work at um anheiser Bush and I realized that I want to do this new like nft giveaway that involves tickets and this this and I

realized like there's an opportunity to use blockchain and deploy my own okay this is way too advanced for a beer company that would never happen but like let's just say I am at this stage where I realize like my choice is to build a new L1 to build a L2 from scratch or to use like ZK evm like talk to me through a little bit about like if I am interested in using ZK evm um what choice am I making and like to like what is the lift to get from like hey Brandon I want to do this to we've got something running yeah sure so I I think the nice thing about using zkm is that it it presents the same uh developer environment as on ethereum and again

like say what you will about the evm there's been I think billions of dollars invested in improving the developer experience and developer tooling on ethereum and on the evm and so I think that the nice thing for developers is like you you don't need to chew glass you you have like there's there are a lot of resources there's a lot of handholding that can help you um do things like minting nfts uh uh in an evm environment and so you can very very easily transfer that and deploy that on zkm um I I guess we can we can get to this maybe a little bit later with the Ager but the the BET from polygon is um like right now the L2 landscape is fragmented like it's really difficult to uh move

State and liquidity and assets uh between L2 chains at least in a trustless way and so the problem that we are trying to fix is like how do you give anheiser Bush the ability to set up their own environment where maybe they are running in a super centralized way because they just care about performance and they want to give a really really good user experience um but they also want to be able to plug into uh existing sources of liquidity and pools for uh to allow their users to actually like you know access liquidity for these assets that they're getting um how do we like take these two things that are sort of intention which is the ability to uh have a lot of control over your

environment the ability to maybe operate in a centralized way and at the same time like access the reason that we care about crypto which is the ability to operate on shared State access uh sort of public sources of capital that exist permission permissionless um and so that like for us that's sort of the bet on the polygon ecosystem is like how do we build foundational technology that allows you to do that yeah so okay I I am still going to push off Ager for one more segment but but like when we're um talking about like let's say anheiser or any corporation like done Brendan you've sold me I want to do ZK evm I want my own chain you keep talking about like sovereignty and like my ability to make

choices and like can you help me understand how at the same time like the point of this is that it's within the evm like you don't have to make any changes it's like beautiful and perfect but also you have control you can make whatever changes you want like talk to me a little bit about like where the space for customization is within the ZK evm framework yeah sure so so I might give a rambling answer here so stop me if I am just going in million different directions but I I think one way to look at it is like you have a lot of choice at different layers so so you can use the evm as your execution environment and and actually you can also use like miden or things that are like an execution environment that's more tuned

for your specific use case like if you only want to nfts there's probably like better ways to do that than using the evbm but but let's say that you want to just use the evm um so even though you're using the evm you still have sovereignty and choice over like how you sequence transactions so so if you're running uh your chain on a single server obviously this is a terrible model for running ethereum or for running like a public chain that has a lot of defi activity where there are huge trust assumptions um but for something like an nft mint that's run by a centralized party anyway it might actually be a very good thing for providing a a a good user experience and so the point is like you as the developer should be able to make

these choices because presumably you're the person that's best positioned to determine what's best for your application and for your users yeah so I was working my way into just getting to this question but I think you got us there perfectly because what I find so so cool about the era that we're entering right now is um that we're realizing through the power of ZK that I I think it's a mistake for for anyone to on the evm like yes I understand that it like basically came out of like a couple guys in like over a weekend just like jamming something out and like it wasn't really thought through and that's fine but literally have you tried using JavaScript it's exactly the same

thing and the point is more about just the amount of like people involved and the amount of people trying to make it better that being said like the evm does suck and what we're finding is through the power of ZK is that we can have alternate Computing environments and then projected back into the evm through ZK and the one like we somewhat interesting to me is like the salon VM and like what something like eclipse is doing much more interesting to me is something like what risk zero or what succinct labs are doing which are like completely unrelated to blockchain environments at all but they just have the ZK proof and so with this is about background my question to you is like

when we're talking about the whole structure including the AG layer including all the things you're building together if I want to build a within the ZK ecosystem sorry the ZK evm ecosystem am I tied to the ZK evm as my execution environment or is what you're building really about the scaffolding to just say whatever you're building will help it settle regularly and with composability back down to main net yeah so definitely the latter um and I I I I really like the way that you put it uh where ZK allows you to take all of these different execution environments and project them back onto the evm and I I I think that like is a really evocative um uh metaphor and I think that that's

exactly how we think about it like you can imagine someone who um wants to basically replace centralized crypto exchanges and but wants to do it in a non-custodial way and probably like accepting the overhead of the evm or even the salon of VM is not like is not really a trade-off that they want to make because they're so performance sensitive and so in that case like being able to take through risk zero or through I I think the cinc Babs project is looks amazing um like being able to develop custom execution environments but still be being able to plug into all of the liquidity and state and users that exist on the EV M that's like a a

huge transformative thing and I think that like enabling composability between different execution environments is something that's essential for crypto to to really grow past its current stage so I think this is now the perfect opportunity to transition over to Ager but I think um with in order to transition I think it would be helpful um we've talked about two terms we've talked about um ZK evm and we're about to talk about Ager and then there's another one which we haven't touch which is cdk or chain development kit can you talk a little bit about like are these three different concepts is this one concept like how how should we think about these three things yeah sure so the way that I would put it is that the

cdk is a software development stack that allows you to launch new chains in the polygon ecosystem so it has a client it has a choice of execution environments like you could use um a zkm you could use miden in the future there will be a lot more choices um and so so the cdk is like the building block and like you can use you can opt for ZK VM in a cdk chain and in fact a lot of the chains that are launching cdk chains are opting for uh for zkm um but I I I would look at cdks as like the the unit or the like the building block of the polygon ecosystem and then the aggregation layer as the

thing that stitches together all of these cdk chains into a single environment that feels like using a single chain so where you have unified composability and liquidity and state um and users don't have to think about uh like bridging or trust assumptions or uh like moving between chains to access liquidity as they're using the polygon ecosystem got it so like everything is a CD cdk chain but not everything is necessarily A ZK evm chain exactly got it so that brings us to Ag and I think we've like touched on enough of it that if you're paying attention and if you're listening to this podcast you probably

already know what it is but just for the sake of completeness like would you just uh give us definition and like overall vision of like what is agir yes sure so agir stands for aggregation layer it's a shorten form of aggregation layer and uh fundamentally it does a really really simple thing where it provides safety for super low latency cross-chain asynchronous and synchronous uh interaction and composability so it allows you to it allows chains to uh interact um very very quickly while maintaining safety and so this is really important because if you think about the

way that cross chain composability works on the L2 ecosystem today like what does it take to move uh trustless between like the polygon zkm and Stark net so you have to take uh your funds on polygon ZK VM you have to withdraw them so we have to generate a proof for your withdrawal and that might take you know two to five minutes and then that proof is submitted to ethereum every 30 minutes and then that block on ethereum must be finalized so that takes like 12 to 19 minutes and then you have to transfer to Stark net so that takes another 12 to 19 minutes and then uh finally you have your funds like an hour later on Stark nut and so if we think about like what's required for unified

composability and liquidity um I think it's two things so first is super low latency composability between chains and the second is fungibility of assets so right now we have this problem with Bridges where if you want to like Bridge directly between polygon zvm and Stark net you're accepting this trust assumption so you're having to trust some property of a third party Bridge but you're also like running into these liquidity issues because if I'm using Wormhole to to bridge between polygon and starnet um I'm not getting like I'm taking eth on polygon Z kbm I'm trying to bridge it I'm not getting eth on Stark net I'm getting a wrapped synthetic version of eth and there might be liquidity for that token there might

not be but like that's imposing a cost on the user in terms of complexity and then in terms of you know accessing liquidity to convert from a wrap synthe itic to the native version of that token and so like both from a usability perspective but also from a cost perspective that's just like a very bad thing and so the AG layer fundamentally solves uh these two issues so it provides like like a foundation for safety and cross chain low latency composability and then it provides uh a unified shared Bridge so that we can achieve fungibility of assets so so if you within the polygon ecosystem if you have zkm or if you have eth on zkm uh you can transfer that to POS or to

okx or to AAR and you you'll just get eth you won't get a WRA synthetic version of that token and I think cuz cuz the first uh Negative Nancy reaction to what you just said would be like yeah well okay like you don't have to like withdraw down to main net and move back over and like we are we have some we're creating more ZK bridges that like are able to see what's going on in ZK evm and able to like like know that eventually the eth that you send into that bridge is going to be able to be moved over to Stark net so they can immediately give you the eth on the Stark net and like through the but at the end of the day like what what the big Insight is is that if you ever want to transfer uh eth from one chain to

another eventually someone is going to have to do the reconciliation on Main net like every different project has a different person that's actually paying for it but I think like the big insight for AG just to put it like almost crassly it's like how do we create a system where we just don't do anything on Main net yeah yeah and so I guess with that as like the preface why don't we walk through like literally what is agair and I just because that's a open-ended question I'll give you some structure like talk to us a little bit through about the architecture like what exists on mainnet if I'm deploying a new chain using cdk whether or not it's evm equivalent or not like how does that interact with whatever is on Main net

like just talk us through what is actually being built here uh so so the Ager is a decentralized service and it all it does something very very simple it accepts chain States from new chains or from chains in the polygon ecosystem it accepts proofs showing that those chain states are valid and then it accepts uh it allows those chains to declare dependencies on other chains or other Atomic bundles and so this enables asynchronous and synchronous composability and so the the idea is um if I have chain a and I and I want to send eth from chain a to chain B uh chain a doesn't need to generate a proof it doesn't need to post anything to ethereum it can just send a message to chain B and chain B can say okay I've received this message from chain a I

haven't received a proof from chain a I I don't know that this state is valid you know chain a The Operators of chain a could be trying to rug me they could try to double spend but I'm going to submit a new state to the AG and I'm going to include this uh dependency from chain a and so I know that the only way that my updated chain State can be posted to ethereum is if chain a is the the state of chain a that I am depending on is valid and also posted to ethereum so uh we we can generalize this to Atomic bundles so if I have a a bundle of transactions that I want to execute on chain a b and c I can guarantee via the AG layer that uh that bundle will only be executed on each of those chains

if if all transactions execute successfully across all of those chains so I so I can't have like a mint on uh on chain C if I don't burn uh the equivalent amount of tokens on CH a and so the way that like the the really nice thing about the agare is that um it's agnostic to the mechanism by which chains uh coordinate and direct so those chains could use a shared sequencer they could use uh like what Justin Drake calls super Builders so like heavily centralized ized professionalized um block builders that execute across many many chains they could use relays they like chain B could just decide to trust chain a and so so there's like a varying

degree of risk that chains accept by uh by participating in cross-chain composability because it's it is possible that chain a could uh generate an an invalid block and that chain B could depend on an invalid block and the finalization of chain B to ethereum would be delayed and so that's a liveness failure but fundamentally like we uh we know that we need to be able to uh have super low latency cross chain composability and fundamentally like we believe that the best way to enable that is by allowing chains to navigate and to sort of like negotiate the trade-offs between um liveness and uh and low latency uh for themselves so going back to the last

thing I said which like the Insight here is that we just want to avoid touching main net as close as much as possible do do you think this is a fair characterization to say the way AG layer works is we put all of the assets for all AG layer chains in one smart contract and then using the magic of ZK we create this sort of virtual accounting that says like we're going to do all the transfers and we're going to be ensured through ZK that they're valid but we're not actually going to any of the assets on L1 so first of all is that fair yeah and and if you want to be the new polygon head of marketing uh like that then yeah that well no I we have a very good head of marketing now

so I'll retract that but but uh but yeah that that's like the perfect way to put it it's um like like there's no sort of like onchain footprint or or rather there's like a constant size on chain footprint because periodically we submit a proof to ethereum um that find analizes uh the states of all of the chains that are in the polygon ecosystem but this is like fundamentally a constant size proof regardless of uh like the number of you know transfers between chains or the number of chains in the ecosystem and so it's like a really scalable from the perspective of ethereum system um where we're not doing a ton of uh of L1 interaction yeah and I think just to hammer the point home the

the point is that these proofs that are going down to ethereum to be verified they're happening anyway like that is the concept of the ZK uh l2s and so we're not creating any like I I'm sure someone's sitting there being like okay so you're saying you're doing less proofs but you're still doing proofs it's that's not the point the point is is that the regular proofs that are just part of how l2s work through the magic of ZK get this like virtual accounting system that is the magic of agir yeah and and so the the nice thing too is that we can do proof aggregation so rather than all of these chains paying to ver for ethereum to verify their proofs they can aggregate those proofs

off chain and then ethereum pays to ver or they pay ethereum to verify one proof there could be a million chains in the ecosystem and we're still paying you know 200k gas every five minutes uh and so that's a really nice thing from a cross perspective so something I want to queue in in what you said was um this the the interactions between multiple Ager chains so with the caveat that everything is opt in and like you know if it's opt in and you're interacting with a bad chain like that is on you so it is what it is but like in this world we have chain a chain B chain b gets a message from chain a accepts the message integrates it into

their just com their commitment of their transaction sends it down to Bas layer and it doesn't verify that creates this situation where in my head like chain a could just start griefing chain B with a bunch of things that aren't going to verify and the person paying that cost is chain B who just like has to keep resubmitting proofs until one like finally verifies and so I guess my question to you is like how is that avoided yeah so so so again like the the cool thing about this design is that um like the trust assumptions are navigated between chains uh themselves like like the the AG doesn't make chains opt into anything

like like if you want to accept super high latency and and only interact with chains that have finalized to ethereum you you can do that it it will be an extremely poor user experience for everyone using your chain but um you know that that's like there's nothing that prevents you from from doing that but the um the there are like a bunch of different ways to avoid um like chain B having to constantly ly um you know revert or or have finalization delayed uh of their chain they could run a full node for for chain a is an easy way and so they they could see even without a proof at super low latency um they could see that you know the block that they're depending on from chain a is valid um

they could run within a shared sequencer so the shared sequencer would be running full nodes for a and b um this is really easy to do it can be done in parallel across multiple machines like there there's no sort of scalability a um in that model or it could run um on a relay um it those two chains could interoperate in a manner where they only accept cross chain interactions when there has already been a proof generated so so they could rely on sort of like superb Builders who are constantly executing uh transactions synchronously across many chains and those Builders are just providing proofs um that their uh their transactions are valid and and the accepts uh those blocks when when

they're approves um and so there I I think that the really important thing to emphasize and sort of how we look at it is the agay is sort of foundational infrastructure that will enable emergent coordination mechanisms to arise on top and so we don't know what the best way to enable asynchronous or synchronous composability is but we do know that it's a core and required ingredient uh to have safety in in like any of these mechanisms so so you can't have a situation where chains are trusting a shared sequencer and the shared sequencer can uh can rug chains or can steal funds from different chains like

that that just doesn't work and so like fundamentally we we believe that if we provide this Foundation of safety then like different companies and projects and and individuals can can find and optimize the best coordination mechanis Ms that navigate the tradeoffs between liveness and low latency yeah yeah so I want to shift uh gears a little bit and talk ask this question more from a business development standpoint than a technology standpoint but when you're looking forward let's say it's 5 years from now like the last bull cycle brought brought enough awareness to the space that like companies just understand that this is where you go to

when you want to do specific things let's say there's 5,000 CD cdk chains and I'm anheiser Bush and I come to you and I'm like we want to do this specific thing like from again a business development standpoint not a technology standpoint like how do you see the N plus1 person entering this ecosystem and being able to make decisions on the other n uh chains on like which ones do I want to connect to which ones like are trustworthy like how do you see that all playing out in this world of um permissionless and like inspiration and creativity and all that stuff yeah sure so I I I think that the the really

important thing to emphasize is that um like from a cryptoeconomic perspective it it's actually very very bad for you to create liveness uh faults in other chains because um like there's no payoff for you like you might delay the finalization of a chain by 30 seconds or a minute um but you don't get like you you can't really steal from that chain um and uh you're jeopardizing your ability to interoperate with other chains because chains can main black lists or white lists of of different chains um and so I my assumption is that the vast majority of chains will uh will never create liveness failures for or or sort of misbehave or like engage in

activity that that might uh delay finalization of other chains um and so the way that I look at it is um if we have this ecosystem with thousands of cdk chains and um like all of them are engaging in what's fundamentally like a positive sum win-win relationship like we as polygon we we don't impose any restrictions or requirements besides you know the requirement to generate a proof uh to Jo the agare like like you can use your own sequencer you can use your own token for gas fees for staking uh we don't do Revenue share like like there are no restrictions or requirements on

chains um and so fundamentally like the bet is if we have this ecosystem or this economy that has value um where there's liquidity and there are users um and there's State that's valuable uh like every marginal chain like every additional chain um that's able to bring positive economic value to this ecosystem whether whether through an nft Mint or through some new defi primitive or or a game or whatever like that is fundamentally a win-win both from the ecosystem perspective because everyone in the polygon ecosystem will be able to access that nft or that D5 primitive or that game and vice versa like anyone minting an nft can access a huge amount

of liquidity within the polygon ecosystem like we think that this will be like a self-reinforcing mechanism where uh like it it just makes sense to join the AG like you're not giving up anything like the the only change is you're paying less to settle to ethereum um but you're able to access like this tremendous amount of value and and users and liquidity yeah you know what's funny is as we kind of just progress down the ethereum road map I find the answer to a lot of questions kind of is like we're going to build a reputation system um and like I'm especially seeing this with

like the the reaking and like the active validation Services um and there's something like totally normal about that and crypto's perfect for it because all of our reputation can be put can be built off of the immutable Ledger and so like that's awesome but there's something just like slightly uncomfortable for me that reputation means trust and we're saying we're going to solve our trustless system by just like having a trust system yeah although I I I do think in this case the um like there are ways that you can like get around like you know if if you don't trust a chain you can trust a relay or shared sequencer or a builder and so so you don't have to like maintain or like

track the reputations of of other chains um and so I I I I will say like it I I think it's hard to like explain in great detail on on a podcast but but but there are like a lot of mechanisms that I think that we can use to to kind of like scale and uh enable like a lot of uh sort of chain-to-chain interaction in a way that's like fundamentally trustless and um I think that they like there there's a lot more to sort of write about and to explain and and to to get into but but I I I think that this um this approach where like we provide safety as the foundational thing like like like you know like you're only sort

of accepting these these compromis is for for liveness and and you know that this is like inescapable because um fundamentally your users are not going to be willing to accept super high latency they like if you want to enable unified liquidity you need to do so at at uh very low latency and I I think that once you have safety there there's like a huge design space that opens up for finding like mechanisms and ways to coordinate that um they kind of offer like Optimal trade-offs for for different cases yeah I like that that you know what like maybe you're right about your reputation system comment but at the end of the day like what we're not sacrificing is safety and like that's what's kind of important here and

so um yeah here you like you'll never sacrifice on that so uh Brandon before I I know we're running a little bit low on time but I I can't let you go without talking a little bit about uh polygon POS and this transition of polygon POS into the technology that is like so exciting and being deployed right now so don't don't want to ask any like sensitive alpha or any secrets or anything but can you just talk through a little bit about long-term like five plus 10 plus years what what is the role of polygon POS and like how do you see it interacting with this like and I don't mean to like throw punches here but this like much more exciting technology that that you're putting out

there yeah so I I think the simplest way to put it is the polygon p us will become a cdk chain and it will become like sort of the flagship validium and and I I think that there's a ton of room in the market for a chain that has super super low cost and uh is still ZK proven and already has a ton of uh usage and um you know exchanges are on boarded to it and uh users and wallets and tools and and so I think that like you know at least in the short and medium term um it's it's like really exciting that that PO on POS can join this ecosystem well that's super interesting so can you just talk through a little bit more about um what that transition

will look like and I'm interested for polygon POS but really why I'm interested is because if it's possible to migrate a chain into cdk and into Ager like a lot of the questions I have around like specifically optimistic Roll-Ups and like how they are going to compete when they're just objectively a worse technology like start to um get answered so so can you just talk through a little bit about like what would that transition look like I mean I'm assuming main net the tvl moves over to the different contract maybe the proving system like just talk through what what does a transition look like yeah that that's a really good question so so the first thing is right now we are we're not using ZK at all for the POS and so

we're verifying consensus votes on ethereum and this is pretty expensive and it's annoying and so first thing is to uh to move that to Z K so to verify consensus uh with ZK and then the second thing is to verify uh everything so State validity with our type 1 prover and so like every transaction that happens in the POS gets verified and we submit a single proof with every checkpoint that shows that everything that happened in the POS was valid um and so the third point which you correctly identified and which is um I think like an area of kind of like undersold complexity is is um migrating the bridge over to the unified lxl Bridge uh that's running with the agare

and so we we we have some road maps for for how we'll do that that that we'll share in the future um but that's something that we just want to ensure is done very safely and you know so that no funds are at risk and uh and so that's something that's really important um you alluded to uh optimistic rollups upgrading to uh to to ZK rollups with with the type one pro and that's something that I'm personally very excited about and and there's this question that comes up which is um you know you're working on ZK Tech uh you have this fundamental technical advantage over optimistic Roll-Ups and you're just going to give that to them uh in the form of the type one prover because you've open sourced the prover and so now every optimistic gr up is

going to be able to take it and I think that that misses kind of the beauty of the agir which is like fundamentally we believe that all of this execution environment Tech will become commoditized it's all open source like anyone will be able to use it any sort of Advantage will be uh competed out over time um but fundamentally like what what we believe you should be building is the agare because we believe that no single chain is going to be able to accommodate all of the demand for scalability uh that will come when when crypto reaches mainstream adoption and so like from my perspective I would love if optimistic rollups upgraded to become ZK rollups

and joined the agare and that's something that again is like a win-win for them they they can use their own sequencer they can use their own tokens they can use their own shared sequencers and and like make their super chains within the AG but fundamentally like the AG is this required and necessary uh component for interoperability and it's something that we believe that every chain will will need to use yeah and it sounds like if you're thinking you know if you're starting from scratch like just you use Ager you cdk it's fine but if you're thinking of migrating over it the the questions are always trade-offs right so if I move into Ager I understand I get composability I get um liquidity I get like all the stuff that

we've been talking about for the last hour and then the question is like okay what am I giving up and I'll I'll put you on the hot seat here literally the only thing I can think of that you're giving up is that you don't own the private keys to your L1 smart contract with all the assets anymore which you probably shouldn't own in the first place but can you think of any other reason that that any other thing you're giving up by moving over to AG no I mean I I I think that maybe there's like a narrative cost where uh but I think that will that's like purely a short-term thing and I think that will be become like completely insignificant as like the polygon ecosystem evolves to like being more than just polygon and so I think there are like five or 10

chains that are currently like queued up to deploy on agair and so like I I think in the near future like it's not even going to be like a sort of polygon ecosystem it will be this shared ecosystem uh for ethereum but I mean to me like I I really struggle to think about another downside besides the one that you identified and and I think that very correctly you uh you said that like we shouldn't be relying on multi- security anyway and so um yeah I mean and and truly you know if a chain wants to exit the egg layer there's nothing preventing them from doing that they could migrate like just like they

migrated their assets on it's possible to migrate your assets off and so um like for us it's like purely a positive sum win-win uh uh engagement for for any train that wants to join the agler yeah ma'am incredible well Brandon this is the the hardest part of my day like I literally would love to keep you here and go for another two hours and just like go through the details of what we're talking about but for your schedule and the sake of everyone's attention span I will cut us off here so um first of all just thank you thank you for this podcast and thank you for just the transformation that you're you're bringing to ethereum and like we're we're at the stage right now where you look to your left and you can see ethereum the mediocre blockchain and

you look to the right and you see the world computer and like when I look right in front of me I just there's like eight entities that are like the part of that transformation and it it is so wrong to not recognize polygon as like one of those eight if not the head of the table so just first of all thank you thank you on behalf of ethereum and thank you on behalf of the world computer yeah thanks Rex it was really fun of course before I let you go can you just let the audience know um where they can find you where they can find polygon and I guess if they after this conversation are interested in either deploying a cdk chain or uh migrating over like what how do I start learning about that process yeah sure so I I

think our website has a ton of resources um uh you can follow us on Twitter at zerox polygon I'm uh I think unor barmer on Twitter uh and uh yeah I I think reach out to anyone on the team and we would be really happy to to talk about um either starting a cdk chain or up upgrading an existing evm CH incredible man well so excited I I can't wait to see what's coming up and next year and Beyond and um again just man thank you so much yeah thanks so much Rex