The zkEVM is Here | zkSync's Steve Newcomb

Transcript

hey bankless Nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation where Dave and I get into something topical super topical item today zkevms they are here well David they are almost here and we have brought on someone from the ZK evm team matter labs to talk about it what are we covering today David the ZK evm is something that has really been exciting a lot of people in the layer 2 space the scaling space because it is generally considered the gold standard of scalability uh ZK Roll-Ups plus the evm we already know that the evm itself it was a huge uh player in the 2021 bull market so many people forced the evm spent out their

own chains but that was as an alternative layer one uh you add some cryptography magic with zero knowledge onto the zkm a ZK evm and it unlocks New Frontiers Ryan if you will for us to explore as we explore out the crypto Frontier so that's why we are super excited today to talk to Steve Newcomb of the ZK sync the matter Labs team and all about the incoming zkevm that is imminent upon arrival this is a technology that vitalik in our episode earlier this week that released on Monday he said he was even surprised at how quickly ZK EVMS are coming to Market and I think this episode will fill you in on some of those details a quick disclosure before we get in David and I are Angel Investors in the matter Labs

which is the entity behind ZK sync we're also advisors to the ZK sync project we think that highly of it and DK sync is currently a bankless sponsor we wanted to get those disclosures up on the front of the show we take disclosure seriously so we are mentioning them at the top of every show from now on there's also a link in the show notes where you can see all of the disclosure details for David and I get a peek into what we own what projects we're excited about um also want to tell the bankless Nation about Swell this is the next Frontier I think when it comes to decentralized staking technology this is a thing that we have to get better at in crypto it would be a massive failure if all of our

stake ended up in centralized exchanges and with swell we are pushing back against that narrative David what is swell and how can folks get involved at this stage in the project yeah swell is joining the ranks of rocketpool and Lido as a decentralized staking as a service provider and so we all know these things uh we want the we want our stake to be liquid but we also don't want to stake with centralized exchanges and so it is a new staking assay service system with a liquid staking token that is trying to do the best of both worlds for both rocket pool and Lido rocketpool of course anyone can add their node to the rocketpool network that's why we love it but also with Lido Lido has such amount of scalability because our permission

validator set as well is trying to do the best of both worlds so you can actually do both with swell there's a Dao that governs the permission validator set but regardless you can also permission permissionlessly join the network so interesting strategy we'll see how it plays out for them if you want to join the Discord there is a link in the show notes check out swell and also disclaimer Ryan and I are also Angel advisors into swell as well and they also sponsored this message so thank you as well David why are we talking about ZK EVMS today what uh why is this the topic of the week that we decided to delve into yeah crypto right now is looking for a new narrative uh what's next is a really big conversation in crypto right now

it's in fact it's the name of the podcast that we just did with vitalik buterin post merge we're not really sure what to be hopeful for and so instead of being hopeful we just look at the macro markets and like cry a little bit so crypto is crypto's in search for what is next what is on the horizon what is something to be excited for and Ryan I remember the 2018 to 2020 bear Market as it as it went on you could just see the kindling being laid that eventually manifested into the 2021 bull market and that kindling was using the ethereum layer one to build out these new things called defy apps and later nfts and now that's kind of the status that we've had that bull market but what we haven't had

is a bull market in like the layer two space the scalability based on ethereum so first comes the protocols then comes the apps and the zkevm like I said at the intro the zkevm is this new surface area for New Frontiers it is the thing that so many devs have been looking forward to and waiting to deploy on so while it's not the ZK evm isn't as something as like massive as the merge it's going to be hard to compete with the merge but it is something to answer the question what's next what to look forward to and while we're all going through this bear Market together where to look for Alpha because eventually the retail Market is going to come back and they're very likely going to come back on top of a zkevm if you are here now listening to this the ZK evm is a

frontier for you to go like glom on to some Alpha 4. so at least that's what's going on in my mind while we listen to this yeah I think the we are pretty close to the ZK evm as well so it's not something that is far into the future this is something that is weeks away potentially we get into the timeline as well last thing David really quick for us what should listeners just be paying attention to in this episode yeah there's many different components of a zkev and there isn't one standard ZK evm so ZK sync and matter labs are coming into the world of the zkevm with their flavor there's also conversations as to how these organizations and entities interoperate and interact with each other there's going to be conversations around bridging how is bridging in a ZK evm World different than an ALT layer 1

World so that's something to pay attention to onboarding is going to be a huge huge conversation we've seen some chains on board in the bull market very very well and other other chains not on board so well so how is ZK sync approaching this how are they going to capture some of the market share once their evm goes to goes to mainnet and also they're not the only zkevm coming so what is that competition landscape look like uh what else what are you looking forward to Ryan in this episode I'm going to be looking for the differences between ZK EVMS and optimistic rollups I want to hear more about that uh of course I want to hear about uh zk6 plan for a token is that a component of the strategy where does that fit in

and I also want to hear about this concept that I've heard a lot bandied about which is layer threes what are layer threes this idea of self-sovereign chains that are also somehow secured by ethereum how does that mesh with cosmos's app chain model so these are some of the things I'll be looking for with Steve guys hang with us for just another minute we're going to be right back with Steve but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible lens protocol is an open source Tech stack for building decentralized social media applications it is the new era for social media we all have toxic relationships with our web 2 apps we want to break up with them but we can't these applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made we need to break through to a new

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entering the world of web3 social rocketpool is your decentralized ethereum staking protocol you can stake your East in rocket pool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your eth and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eat by staking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating ethereum nodes setting up your rocket pool node is easier than running a node solo and you only need 16 e to get started you're getting an extra 15 staking Commission on the pooled Eid that uses your node to stake you'll also get RPL token rewards on top so if your bullish e-staking you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized rocketpool network which

currently has over 1 000 independent node operators it's yield farming but with ethereum out you can get started at rocketpool.net and you can also join the rocketpool community in their Discord you can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat so I'll see you there arbitrim is an ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use D5 and nfts some of the coolest new nft collections have chosen Arboretum as their home while D5 protocols continue to see increased liquidity in usage you can now Bridge straight into arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges including Finance FTX huobi and crypto.com once on Arboretum you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees allowing you to explore New Frontiers of the crypto Universe new to Arbitron for a limited time you can get arbitrum nfts designed by the famous artist ratwell and sugoi for joining the

arbitrub Odyssey The Odyssey is an eight week long event where you complete on-chain activities and receive a free nft as a reward find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.gg arbitrum you can also Bridge your assets to arbitrarm at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of arbitrim's apps at portal.arbatrum.1 in order to experience defy and nfts the way it was always meant to be fast cheap secure and fiction free all right guys we are back the ZK evm this mysterious bit of technology that came actually earlier than scheduled this is the promise technology uh to scale ethereum uh we've got Steve Newcombe here who is the chief product officer at matter Labs he's the team behind ZK sync that's what we're going

to be talking about today and he is no stranger to startups he's founded four companies already he brings a ton of experience to the frontier Technologies in the world including of course ethereum scalability Technologies and he's also recently joined matter labs to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto he aligns very much with some of our personal sovereignty goals at bankless and uh Steve it's great to have you on how you doing I'm doing great really excited to be here with you guys all right you guys are getting close to mainnet and by mainnet I'm talking about a ZK evm on mainnet can you give us the countdown like how many days because I I I've been following you guys on Twitter and there have been some commitments made when man I'm wondering I remember

like 100 days out and I just my time schedules got lost somewhere so like how many days out are we and are you going to hit that date we are so yeah we set a hundred days a while ago and as soon as we said it was 100 days to mainnet I think everybody in the company threw up because we were like so worried about hitting it but um we're 31 days away right now and I I think we're gonna hit it one month things are looking you know I would say more than a non-zero chance that we'll hit it more than a non-zero chance but there's also a chance that you won't then I assume but like I think I think we're looking pretty good I think we're looking pretty good all right the TTD numbers coming in healthy I guess so we're gonna yeah we're gonna hit ZK so

what is actually shipping can you give us the high level this is a thing that I've heard some people call um ZK sync 2.0 so maybe that's a term that people are familiar with um the the other the high level I think is this is um the first Zeke evm compatible uh ZK roll up on mainnet I believe so maybe that's a milestone but what is the thing that you are actually shipping yeah I think this is going to be a big moment for not only uh us but for ethereum the whole community of us that have been after scaling not just the technology of ethereum but the mission of ethereum and we are shipping the long-awaited promise of the end game for

scaling ethereum and this is a ZK evm uh that is evm compatible which I'm sure we're going to get into a lot today um it supports solidity it is really easy to Port from wherever you are to zksync because it's compatible uh it it will be open source when we get to mainnet we'll be talking about that um and it will be supported by I think a token model that expresses the mission of ethereum and and expands it and so Steve in the beginning we were talking about what should listeners listen for what should they look out for while they listen to this episode and you just gave a list of characteristics or parameters about ZK sync specific ZK

evm can you talk a little bit about those design choices uh the the flavor of zkn is the evm why you chose them and how they differ from other possible ZK EVMS that might appear on the market in the future yeah I think that one of the things that we strive every day to do is to really be a mission more than a company and our mission is to scale ethereum and so we listened to the ethereum community and we said what what do you guys want um what is it that makes it so special for us um and it really was those five ingredients that is a a general purpose uh evm compatible open source uh supported by a token model that we that

we all have consensus around being the right way to do things and it allows developers to use solidity so when you have those five magic components it's really going to make it easy for people to adopt us to port to us and our goal is to be the absolute number one choice amongst Developers for Layer Two we differ from a couple of the other different attempts um and you know there's starkware who has a project going on there is polygon there is a company called scroll that has a project that's going on and there's a couple of important differences between all of us and I do want to say I think the competition is healthy uh it's good and that when when

these projects have successes we celebrate those successes too because again we're really here just for ethereum and to scale the ethereum uh Mission and values but I think that um so first out was stockware they were the first one to come out with a general purpose ZK roll up um and they were about eight months ahead of where when we're going to come out might be nine months um but they only had two of the five components uh with their release so they weren't really evm they didn't support solidity you had to use Cairo a custom language um and they and they weren't open source completely it's sort of they have a

complex but very overt and then very transparent license uh that they shared and then a little bit of the fourth one is that their uh token model wasn't exactly well received because they had 50 of the token going to insiders um and they they elected to charge gas fees in their own token um anytime you don't hit these five magic criteria I think you have a lot of adoption friction and a lot of friction within your community we saw dydx leave largely because they didn't meet these five magic criteria we may see other projects decide it's not for them it's not a fit for them as well um and then in terms of scroll and polygons

approaches um I think that both of the approaches that they have are completely valid and healthy that we are exploring and trying these things but it's just a matter of timing uh when are they coming out when will they actually be available and there's trade-offs we believe that since we've already launched a ZK roll up before we have a lot of experience on mainnet so through very principled thinking we've made specific choices on purpose we of course knew that these other two methods existed but we passed on those methods in favor of the way that we're doing largely because of hard thought embattled experience and we think that our solution has that magic mixture of evm compatible that's

almost perfected there's only three op codes we don't support one of them is deprecated the other one has been suggested to be deprecated and the other one no one uses so we try to be accurate when we Market the product and tell people about the products so we always call ourselves compatible we don't try to claim equivalents but it's really it's a non-event it's very easy to port to us um but what really gives us Advantage is is uh we think we've optimized ourselves for most compatible but highest performance and that allows us to scale better than every other solution out there because that's our primary job our job is to scale ethereum so once all the porting is done I think the evm

compatible versus equivalence argument it'll just it'll just go poof just like everybody was saying hey they're never going to get the proof of stake nobody's saying that all the haters are you know they can't say that anymore really other than hating on proof of stake itself um the and then the other big difference is we have learned that you have to have patience as a strategy you have to make sure security is a primary factor in your deployment plans it took us nine months to go through testnet because we wanted to make sure we took the safest route through testnet we're going through two full multi-million dollar uh security audits that are that are testing Us in every single way we can

possibly think of and we think about nine months is about as fast as you can go through testnet and then even after we go through testnet when we launch mainnet and we'll talk about this in more detail we are having a very careful approach to getting to full production so one of the bigger differences is scroll and polygon while they have a valid white papers and valid approaches to how to do this neither are even started on their test Nets yet um so for about the next year in reality Unless somehow polygon and scroll have a magic way of getting through testnet in three months which we would say good luck that's not really safe please don't

do that for the whole community um that for about a year we are going to be the ZK solution and we can imagine a world in which we're very easy to port to very easy to eat use and a lot of projects will be interested in porting to it because not only is DK layer 2 part of the end game but you get layer three for free and I'm sure we'll Jam a lot about layer three but it's future proof because the the very way that ZK technology works so everybody's saying they want to try ZK sync and 31 days to starting and I'm still throwing up I'm still a nervous wreck but I'd rather I'd rather be throwing up on stage than be caught

in the audience watching history being made and I'm I'm loving being on stage but I'm a nervous wreck you know all right well I mean it's a big event certainly it's I can imagine how the ethereum devs felt before the merge right it's just like there are a lot of jitters here and you guys are 31 days out so that's big I I want to go to because this is still fresh in my mind so David and I just had vitalik on the the podcast we recorded last week and um first part of that was uh released on Monday and actually when we asked them a question about layer twos his answer somewhat surprised me and I want to get kind of your reaction to this so he said he was surprised at how fast ZK EVMS have progressed that was the first part

of it surprised at how fast they have come to Market and are coming to Market and I want to ask you the question Steve of like how has it been so fast like what how are we here now like you've even surprised vitalik which is like no easy thing to do um what about the technology has progressed because this never happens in software it always takes like five times longer than you think and this is happening faster than we think well if it took what was it eight years to get from uh proof of work to proof of stake I think um yes so consider then it was four years since we began to get to a true evm compatible ZK Roll-Up

consider to get to layer three consider maybe one year from now we'll be really actually saying oh my God that only took one year to actually get into a workable state um technology when you're working on really hard technology it comes and fits and spurts it's not smooth um one of the things that was just a huge unlock for us is when our crypto team figured out a lot of people still think we're running on Specialized Hardware in the prover and to get approver working like on a GPU for example so that you can run it on normal machines and actually decentralize down the line well we cracked it uh we haven't told anybody until me telling you right now but we cracked it and once something

like that is unlocked you you suddenly just go really faster in a bunch of different areas because you're like wow that's easy or when you when you complete your first ZK circuit inside of a prover and then you're like okay now we want to try doing recursive ZK proofs and then you're like oh wow that happened easier because the fundamental underlying work was done so if you build a really good foundation it's very easy to build the floors on top of that that building and what we're seeing is the foundation of ethereum is now being well laid and now we're seeing the foundation of ZK is now well laid so things like the things that are happening in layer three um

will be able to Blossom much much faster than it took to build those foundational layers so look for like I call them 10x moments they just happen and then all of a sudden you have 100x use cases falling out of it and your speed to get to Market has these has these moments where you just zoom uh forward and we had some moments where we we just solved some things that were really big unlocks that people didn't think we would solve for years I still I think everybody watched that Dan Bonnet video when he said it's 10 years you know so we solved this sort of stuff and all sudden some advances were made and everybody's like wait a minute it might be two years um so that that's kind of how it happens it's never a smooth ride it's always

it's always fits and spurts that was the first part of what vitalik said in the second part which was equally kind of interesting to me is that um he said he has been somewhat surprised at how difficult it's been to figure out um optimistic roll up fraud proof technology and that the top optimistic rollups today haven't fully implemented fraud proofs and um how he thought that um ZK EVMS might almost like be a short circuit to getting to not quite fraud proofs but like the idea of like maybe converting some optimistic Roll-Ups to ZK type technology and I'm wondering your reaction here because one

thing we've seen it was it was just over a year ago when David and I hosted a state of the nation episode with the very first layer two that was actually deploying on mainnet and that layer 2 was arbitrum remember it well they were getting ready to launch there's someone like you and that they were like you know very nervous about launching I can't believe that was just one year ago by the way that was just one year ago I did not expect to have ZK EVMS just like one year later um but what do what do you make of maybe this contrast with optimistic Roll-Ups which we have seen a lot of traction I mean they've been deployed for the last year getting traction I don't know how many billions of dollars in value are

now locked on layer twos but the bulk of it is on optimistic Roll-Ups so what do you make of the trade-off between like optimistic Roll-Ups and zke VMS and how do you think that plays out so yeah I mean um before I joined uh matter Labs you know I usually take a year between my projects that I work on and I took I took a year and a half actually to really study uh crypto to understand these types of things and I remember when I first started looking at the optimistic you know Roll-Ups versus the ZK Roll-Ups and I never had any problem understanding how an optimistic roll-up might get a signal a single single order of

magnitude Improvement uh to ethereum where I had trouble was how do you get many orders of magnitude like how do we get to a hundred thousand transactions per second or a million transactions per second without degrading decentralization and without degrading security and it's that last little bit um so um there's the seven day settlement problem uh there's the the risk of centralizing as you scale up in optimistic roll-ups um and I don't want to uh bash on optimistic Roll-Ups um rather I I'd say that um

we we in the ethereum community seem to eventually find consensus around things like we're like okay we argue about things for many years and then we finally get to a point where like I think there's consensus that this is the answer and we we certainly went through it with like we know side chains aren't the end game we all agree on that that's an easy one I think we're at the edge of all finally agreeing that optimistic Roll-Ups is Valiant of an effort as it was as much as it did Advance the field for us it's not the end game because when you go up into what we are about to call layer three it is functionally inelegant and it just isn't as clean and especially when we get to talking about bridging up in

layer three and the magic that happens with CK that does not happen with optimistic I think it's layer three when we begin to understand what happens in Layer Three is when I think we will begin to understand why vitalik said it's the end game because that's the true true magic um that's as best I can say that because I don't wanna I don't want to like beat down on uh optimistic Roll-Ups but uh I think we're all getting to the point where we're like I think Jessica is more elegant it's more scalable it's more secure and the last one security is a big one is a big one uh Steve I actually had the uh the privilege of kind of getting a preview of the conversation that we're talking

about today because we did a mainnet uh panel with uh you Ben from optimism uh and also a coinbase representative about this and so since we're since we've got to the topic of layer threes I think what you just said is a pretty spicy take uh I think a lot of listeners right now are like oh wow like we're already we're already ready to put optimistic Roll-Ups back on the shelf and and take off take down the the ZK roll-up book like that's that happened so quickly again like we just had it's been one year of optimistic Roll-Ups so I think we have to go into like why you think that that is true and what the technology is that's supporting that that statement uh and in this uh in this presentation we did uh you've given me some of your slides you produce a chart

that said uh something about the scaling of the internet so we're going to use what banklist does very very well which is metaphors so we're looking at a chart here where there's like 23 000 websites in about 19.95 and then it goes to where we are uh uh closer to today where there are 60 billion websites closer to today which is like you know a significant amount of growth uh and so you know this is the model that we in the crypto world have views quite frequently is like every in the same way like anyone can have a website anyone can have a token I think the metaphor that you're providing here is that like well yes that that model that idea you know anybody can have a website anybody can have a token works but also anyone can have a layer too uh and and so this is going into

this layer three conversation which I also thought you put a pretty cool image together which is like this fractal tree structure and bankless listeners that know uh what I like to pay attention to they know I I like the world world fractal and the way that nature and blockchains intersect and so for the podcast listeners here we're seeing a graph where we have the ethereum at the base layer as it is the global sediment layer and then we have the ZK sync layer two and then we have this like branching tree structure that looks like arteries or like lungs or like lightning and it's it's spawning off into many many many different layer threes uh and what you just said is that uh the ZK technology the ZK Tech stack

is more apt to produce what we are looking at than the optimistic roll up Tech stack but can you also can you can you explain that and how this all works it has to do with bridging but also can you just explain like what this layer 3 ecosystem is like what like maybe people if they think Layer Three is layer twos layer one they think okay the layer three settles down to the layer two which settles down to the layer one which is true but it doesn't actually illustrate why there are so many layer threes uh so can you kind of walk us through this layer three narrative and this layer three Tech stack and what it what it really means I'll I'll do my best uh and and the whole layer one layer two layer three is just uh we had to name it something uh

so I think these this is as good as we can get I think the the um at the highest level what are these 10x moments that like even bring us from like back in the day in 1995 23 000 websites to 2005 was 60 billion and and I know that number of 60 billion because that's that's when I built uh a search engine called uh Power set which ultimately became Microsoft Bing and I'll just never remember like like oh my God we have to index 60 billion um and thank God like most of them were WordPress sites that were were easy to to index but um the the fits and spurts these 10x moments usually come in either you got

way faster way cheaper way easier to use you had more feature sets or you were much more secure and like think of 1995 as like the back of the days like nobody trusted the internet with our credit card um Everybody remember we thought the internet was a fad uh nobody thought there was any real use cases for the internet that's kind of where we are today mentally when you talk to like a norm normal person um and uh it's exciting that that's where we are today because we're about to have a bunch of these 10x moments where you're where you're making it easier faster cheaper uh more secure and if we go into the the famous tree of life slide um and by the way one of my other most

proudest moments is I created this entire thing in Google Slides I want everyone to know that it took me like five hours wow but uh this is pure Google Slides um uh think of think of um where are the 10x moments occurring and when are they coming what's next right so we had our proof of work to proof of stake sort of 10 000 x moment in reduction of energy what's the next 10x moment that we're gonna see well uh it's gonna be it already did occur it's Layer Two so it's arbitrary when we had Layer Two they they were about a 10x bump on top of uh ethereum a layer 2 ZK roll-up will be about the same 10 10 to maybe 100x depending on

the the situation on top of the Arbitron scale in addition no no no no no no no no no no no no no equivalent roughly okay at at first at first and that's that's an important statement at first um but we have eip4844 coming you know my best guess Q2 you know uh you can you can see how good I am at predicting things who knows um that is going to be about a 10 to 20x I know that if you go on blogs and the inner tubes it says 100x I would really Bank on more of uh 10 to 20x range and that's this is Proto dank sharding

um and uh yeah there it is 100x you know that's the famous 100x number right there on the right uh it I think we should more realistically look at 10 to 20. but that's huge um because every time we increase scalability of ethereum by 10x the use cases grow by 100x or a thousand X think of all the things you can do at so if we're sitting at 150 transactions per second right now on a layer two and eip4844 comes we're Suddenly at 1 500 transactions per second what can you do with that and then imagine if we went to 10 500 a hundred thousand uh transactions per

second now you can power visas protocol at that standpoint so it's like an important math equation every time these 10x moments occur you have 100x or a thousand X response in the ecosystem and that's why we went from 23 000 websites and to in in 1995 and suddenly we had JavaScript come along jQuery came along that made it way easier uh bandwidth speeds went from 10 kilobits to one megabit and we didn't have a 10x reaction in the number of websites it's it's 12 000x that's what happens in the ecosystem so now going back down into the Tree of Life slide we have one 10x moment left that's a big one in ethereum eip4844 we

have the 10x moment of layer twos themselves now ZK sync and ZK Roll-Ups as they mature will Trend towards 100x over time in layer 2. that's why I say at first um but where the real interesting thing is is that in layer three it's not one 10x moment it's like a star cluster of 10x moments it's a bunch a bunch a bunch of 10x moments that occur in layer 3 that revolve around either increased speed reduction in cost easier to use more featureful to use or and it's my favorite one security we can finally trust uh ethereum ethereums and and

Layer Two ethereum and Layer Two and we won't have these things where we're getting hacks in non-native bridges in in layer three so when you get up into layer three think of it as Layer Three is infinite scalability with infinite customization and instead of having a one block size fits all which is kind of what layer two is each use case so defy gaming you know go on forever of use cases can now customize a blockchain to its own purpose and we call that a fractal blockchain and if we want to get really super brandy brandy we call it a fractal hyper chain

uh but it's basically a blockchain and Hyper chain because is that a reference to like hyperlinking in that these blockchains are relating to each other yes yeah that is that it so Alex Alex their co-founder named it that for that exact reason okay um and uh what makes these things magical is a you can choose between one of three structures you can say I want a pure ZK roll-up recursing inside of a ZK roll-up base chain and that that's a that's a layer three on top of the ZK sync Layer Two yeah so imagine you're creating your layer 3 fractal hyper chain and the first question says what type do you want and you're like I want type ZK roll up and that's because you want the most

security because in that one you get to inherit the the security of ethereum but you're going to pay the most for that too right the second option you could have for structure is you could have a ZK Porter uh stockware calls that volition I believe um and you get to choose I want some of my data to go to ethereum some of it to go off chain and for example a use case for that would be like a gaming company where I want all my financial transactions to be on ethereum but the fact that my sword of elrond is green for my character that can be done off chain because I want to do that super cheap super high transaction speed and then the last structural option you could say is no I want it to be

ovulation because I want millions of transactions per second I want to pay super super deep cheap fees and security uh I want it but it's not as important as if I was doing banking or something like that and then once you create the structure then there's there's two other magical things you can do up in layer three one is you can choose to say I want to secure my blockchain with my own token uh and that is gigantic uh for the field out there this is dydx this is what they wanted to do what they couldn't do on stockware so they moved to Cosmos and it'll be a beautiful moment for the ethereum community I think if we could bring dydx back into the pure ethereum

Community by letting them to live in layer three and they can have their own token and decentralize with their own token in layer three uh the second thing that you can choose is whether or not your blockchain is private or not and that's a super hot topic I'm sure but we we see ourselves as just the technology providers and then the DAP companies can choose whether they want to be private or public and the beauty of this is that and this is the big one and this took me like forever to try to be able to describe in a simple way that was um accurate um regardless of the the structure or options you choose to customize your fractal hyper chain

all of the fractal hyper chains in layer 3 are bound by one magical thing they are all on the same circuit technology so there are proven by the same prover and what that allows you to do is normally when you're you're interacting from one blockchain to another blockchain that interaction is through a non-native Bridge um but in a hyper chain World um that interaction is uh a native Bridge um uh or as when we were on stage Ben corrected and he's like no it's not a bridge at all uh and that's actually kind of an interesting way to think

about it is like if if this possible future of fractal hyper chains can exist the internet of fractal hyper chains then there are no more bridges and and now we're getting into the reason why potentially this one potential future is the end game for ethereum because then some other magical things can happen if we can standardize on one prover that does one circuit in one way then we can invite some very very interesting Futures to exist that maybe didn't exist in people's heads before I've heard so many times people were like I think it's a winner take all and all the alt L ones

are gonna die and there will be one L2 that rises to the top and all the other alt l2s will um will go away as well so as ZK Sync has the potential in one possible future to be the standard uh L2 prover um imagine a world in which two things that happen that are kind of mind-bending um imagine all of the l2s adopt our prover technology and we are all on one circuit and imagine optimism polygon scroll everyone gets to exist but what they exist as is as a layer 3 fractal hyper chain

and imagine all the alt L ones come over and they exist as a layer 3 fractal hyper chain and the beauty is um that communities that believe in these blockchains because when you buy into a blockchain you're buying into more than just a blockchain you're buying into its belief system and like optimism has amazing things going for it with its Community with its efforts and governance um with its its public goods projects and you know to to belong to the network state of optimism is something that perhaps should be fought for to preserve in some way um and how can we how can we work with

all of the blockchains to preserve what their missions are and to say let's bring technology to the table and that we promote that standardization is very very important when we when we finally all standardize on evm how much happened when we finally agree DVM was the standard imagine if there's approver that we say this prover is the standard let's all adopt it then we really grow Steve one quick question for you do they lose anything if they select a ZK sync as the prover can optimism and ALT layer one what are they are they losing anything here are they losing any sovereignty I hope not um I think it's a complex topic uh I I

think we're at the very very very beginning edges of that topic so in terms of like is there consensus that ZK syncs prove her is the end game absolutely not we haven't even launched yet we haven't proven anything um we need to launch and show the goods and live up to the hype um and uh part of that is by sharing information sharing how we do what we do and what we can talk about that in a minute and and proving that we deserve to be the standard and even once we are the standard you know Roll-Ups that aren't ZK Roll-Ups that have their own token they have their own economies that is very complex and we have not

figured that out in any way shape or form but that's our job our job is to go out there and to as you guys say it's the frontier and like figure that out like that's what makes this so exciting uh so we we don't know how this all works out it's one of many possible Futures but when I sit and think about the possible future where we can bring the alt l2s into the layer three place and we can bring the alt l1s into layer three and we can survive and thrive in these communities to me that is so much better than Winner Takes all and we destroy blockchains um because we we at matter Labs want to be creators and we want to be positive and we want to be expressing the values of ethereum and I don't think it's like

to destroy your competitors is like what you know being in in the ethereum community is all about um so I'm constantly reaching out uh to the other founders of of all the projects and saying how can we think through this because if we if we if we if we get to the other side of this future and vitalik said it I think on your show the other day once we solve scaling we enable all of the many possible futures of ethereum and this is just one of them that I described there may there there are many many other possible Futures but I'm really excited about this possible future yeah sure there they take that other layer twos will actually become proven by the ZK sync prover as layer

threes uh and like Ryan of course asked do they lose anything by doing that do they lose their sovereignty uh and and I love I love the philosophy of that answer is no how can we grow the pie the most by having producing an inclusive environment where everyone can settle on the same proving standard because that optimizes for bridge risks but isn't don't like doesn't a competitor ZK evm like scroll or polygon don't they also want that like don't they also want uh other optimism ZK sync to settle on their approver and so like what do you think they they think when they are listening to uh to ZK saying say hey like they'll come and settle with our approver I I I hope that what they think is that

we are all after the same thing and that if I see data that their approach is better than our approach then I will listen to that data I am not a uh religious zealot on the way that we do it I I am very familiar with the way that we do it and I think we have very principled reasons why we chose the way that we did it but our job uh for all of the companies that are trying to find approaches to do a ZK roll-up is to say let's listen to the data so we are going to be the first ones out there for like a year and everybody's going to be able to see our data you know we we are going to be able we're going to be you know uh at at some point submitting our approver

to uh zprize so that everybody can see how it performs and that's the sort of stuff we all need to do is is share how we're doing this uh so that we can pick the right solution moving forward and if we for whatever reason decide the method that scroll has or the method polygon has is actually better than what we have again I just go right back to to what we said at the very very beginning our job is to scale ethereum uh our job is to have a mission not to have like a token that just solely benefits ourselves so we can line our pockets we're here to you know somehow find a way to accelerate self-sovereignty and it has to be a big ego you know swallow your ego and just

like get get over to the other side of this thing and it's it's tough It's a struggle because we do want to win I'm very competitive as a human being I want to win but I don't want to win and like stick it to somebody I want to win because we were actually just right right right I think this is the big takeaway that I'm getting so far is that it is the prover Vector that I think is the focus of competition it's like it's this is really just a meta game of who's got the best prover uh and that's going to be I think a big conversation between the ZK evm teams moving forward but on that same conversation with the reason why the approver is such a big deal and we talked about this but I really want to drill this home is it because uh

Steve you use that term everything's on the same circuit right if optimism comes and settles on ZK sync they're on the same circuit and I want to unpack what that means a little bit more and I think what that means is that if everything is using the same prover that creates this native Bridge ecosystem which is meaningfully different from the cross layer one bridges that seemingly always get hacked uh at side chains that also kind of the same deal get hacked so the bridging problem was clouded and just like tainted this whole entire bull market because we couldn't find cross cane bridges that could stand up and so now we're getting into this world where we have these new forms of bridges and these new forms of bridges are specifically enabled because they all

settle on the same prover the same canonical prover that we as an industry hopefully we can coordinate around and that enables these things called hyper Bridges which like you mentioned Ben Jones from optimism saying well really there's actually not a bridge there uh it's actually straight cryptography all the way through and through can you talk about this vision for the future and why this means that we can support an infinite infinite number of bridges which again technically aren't any Bridges anymore and like what that does why like going the 10 to 100x on security can do the thing that we saw with websites where we went from a thousand websites to 60 billion websites what does that mean for the blockchain ecosystem and uh and yeah can you like polish off this part of this

conversation yeah so like there are two well so in terms of like it's not which layer two blockchain is winner take all or winner take most it's witch prover takes all um the words we should be using is is what do we choose to standardize and ultimately commoditize um if if we if we all agree to it it's uh it's like a browser agreeing to use JavaScript and CSS and that there is a JavaScript standards body and there's a CSS standards body and all browsers use it the same therefore all browsers benefit because of it um

there are many areas where there are projects and and and technologies that are put forward where one of the l2s is saying hey I think this should be a standard and it's more than just Proverbs so like optimism has bedrock and they want Bedrock Bedrock to be adopted as a standard and imagine there's an imaginary possible future in which we slot our approver inside of bedrock now I currently don't understand technically how that would work uh to be it it's something that I would have to listen to and understand a lot more about but I do know that if optimism becomes an L3 fractal hyper chain I know

that the circuits work and I know how that works I don't know much about Bedrock but that's another example of a potential technology that could become a standard and just like when the browsers agreed on standards everything got better so too will the same exist um for crypto imagine if we all agreed to Common set standards for sdks and CLI tools and other types of things that made things easier so you're after one of those 10x moments so think of 10x speed 10x reduction cost 10x easier 10x more feature full 10x more secure and those are your areas where you're looking for things to agree on with other projects and when you can it

benefits the whole ecosystem and I always liken it to when the browser nobody trusted their credit cards on the browser and we finally agreed on SSL everywhere and we've got that lock icon up and up in your browser window and suddenly people started trusting using their credit cards online and it changed e-commerce it created e-commerce didn't change it it created the use case of e-commerce and you think that this is going to be the same thing with this hyperlinking native bridging again which is like actually the elimination of bridges where you have much stronger cryptographic assurances about where your assets are in the blockchain ecosystem if it is all like again what you say on the same circuit

we can instead of like a little lock icon that'll be a little new icon that says you know secured or secured by ethereum or is it secured by ZK sync that's kind of like the the metaphor here yeah I mean tcpip is a protocol we all agree on https is protocol we all agree on um when we get to a point where we are hundreds of thousands of transactions per second gas fees are minimal um it's as easy to create a blockchain as it as it is to create a Squarespace site it is featureful as we want it to be and we have the features of like Shopify right at our fingertips to create anything or Unreal Engine is on the blockchain and that we trust it and it's secure that's when we see that lock icon change into the ethereum icon and

everything we do in the world is ethereum oh man Steve what's uh really interesting to me about this is um it kind of reminds me of uh Cosmos and the interchain model a little bit right and like particularly at the top and so I just want to make sure I'm understanding this like kind of correctly right so um what we see at the top in this layer three this fractal area hang on sorry Ryan My Stream is being weird uh I can't see your screen can you actually stop screw out of sharing screen share about that how about that maybe just try it again okay uh share the screen now that work

uh you guys are all missing I don't know why okay I'm gonna just keep talking just keep going for it yeah uh so uh in in kind of the the cosmos like model of the world there are all of these um self-sovereign chains essentially and anyone can spin one up it's very easy with kind of like you know tender mint and all the components that they've built and there's a certain Beauty in that because you get to run all of these experiments in in parallel and everyone gets sovereignty of their chain and yet the ethereum criticism of that is it's also a very messy world and it's also a world that seems highly risky because when you port assets from one chain to another from another chain

to another you have no idea as to the security of that particular asset because it's backed by validators and you know three or four different chains and you also have to go through kind of the the bridge piece of it and then more broadly if you assume there are worlds outside of Cosmos which of course there are ethereum is much larger than Cosmos at this moment if you try to Port an ethereum asset onto Cosmos you lose more security guarantees or Cosmos asset on on ethereum and so it's kind of this messy world where I don't know if my eth wrapped on Cosmos I have no idea how secure it is it could get hacked any moment with all of these kind of like flaws in in the chain and so what I see

in your vision here Steve the vision you just laid out with Layer Three is we get to um still keep that multi self-sovereign chain anyone can spin up something an experiment experience and yet we don't have the downside because we have the shared security of ethereum we also have the bridging security through through hyper Bridges where there aren't even Bridges it's almost like you're operating in kind of like one single virtual chain that you know exists as independent organisms can you talk a little bit about the the cosmos vision of the world and how that's different or similar to what you've just laid out yeah

um very good question um I I I think that um in trying to understand things like this I always try to find some sort of comparable that makes my brain like click into place and like go oh yeah that's what that is and think think of it this way imagine that there is a spectrum of um Form and Function and control and at one end of the spectrum you can say like do whatever you want and the other end of the spectrum is like this hyper-controlled you must do it this one way it can only be done in this one size fits-all sort of world and now go back and imagine that spectrum and apply it to the web 2 space

and so I'm going to say a statement I'm going to it's a little spicy and and I want to send a lot of love to Cosmos because they had a lot of the right ideas but they're functionally the Myspace of blockchains um it's it's a great idea they get social media they got it like they got so many nuggets of it but it's but it's kind of a mess and so structure is what's needed and the idea is is so so imagine you you have this spectrum of structure and like if you have too little you get you get Myspace if you have too much you just you just get this single way of doing things and it's just not featureful it's not customizable it's not what you want and you've got to have that dialed in and so we are an example of an

experiment in providing a a a level of of structure so we have our three different structures of your hyper chain and everybody must be under the same circuit to have safety and to have security so we we brought that dial we took inspiration from Cosmos we pretty much have their exact color scheme in our brand it's hilarious um but I I love reading the cosmos papers I love reading the cosmos Visions because there's so much goodness in the vision but the way the tech is implemented the way the early shot you know take an early shot at this it's it it it is sort of a little bit myspacey in that it's just it's disorganized there's no there's no security and structure at the

end of the day that I believe that could scale um but that being said like I cannot tell you how inspiring Cosmos is to me I I I have read the white papers and this is true for for many of the other projects in the ecosystem but their method of connecting blockchains is an older technology for connecting blockchains and is therefore less secure their structure of how you can create your own blockchains is much more wide open and and can lead to a lot of things that would worry me um so think of us as just uh we're not one size fits all but what we do get to do is is what will be perceived as

infinite customization but there's actually underlying structure that is essential for principled good engineering that uh provides the security necessary to trust the the the the the the blockchains and and all of the blockchains interacting with one another what would it look like for an alternative layer one to become a layer three in this scheme that that you just mentioned and in fact do you think that's actually like a possibility I know plenya has predicted this many times and he's somewhat people have labeled them a layer two roll up maximalist maybe but could you actually imagine an alternative layer one like a

fairly large market cap layer one migrating to a structure like this or how about um a defy app I know we already mentioned dydx but there are other their defy apps of course could they become their own chains and be be part of this fractal on layer three yeah I think that we're at the very beginning of contemplating this and um when we first had the concept of layer three and sort of first threw it out there um and had our first tests of this and it realized that it worked um I was shocked at how many um

our ones have come to us um I was shocked at how many D5 projects have come to us I would say that um it's it's kind of weird we're launching the L2 which we've been working on for four years it's the most exciting thing in the planet and uh I I we are we are having just so many meetings about L3 because that's the star cluster of 10x moments and everybody's kind of getting it and the way I would say it is that we need help um uh we we need to have a project where we have a tier one or many tier one uh ecosystem projects work with us and

perhaps work with some people that are other people that are the smartest people on the planet um and imagine we're all working in unison towards this this one possible future but we're beginning to see the beginnings of a cohesive uh approach um where we have a consensus that oh my God I think this could be the standard so be on the lookout for a 10x moment where a a group of tier ones band together to to study this and to figure this out because we have a long way to go before it becomes a reality but I would say that we have definitively uh come to the conclusion that it is worth a great deal of study

uh could it because it could provide uh again this this star cluster of 10x moments and be something that is is a benefit to to to every people uh or every project in the ecosystem so I I can't I can't yet make a comment on like announcing stuff but I would say very much you know we talk about what's next what are the next big moments coming view on the lookout for that type of a moment uh because I'm feeling a Groundswell that has come our way to begin talking seriously about layer three well Steve I have thoroughly been enjoying this uh conversation thus far there's a few other things that I want to get to of course when token and what

does that token to do uh I mean we gotta ask about that but also like all of everything that you've been saying it's like it's a great it's great on a podcast it's great with words what's this actual onboarding strategy look like like how are you going to do it uh so I want to ask about that but also just overall what's next in the ZK sync roadmap uh with only 31 days left what are y'all doing inside of those 31 days and then what's going to be after those 31 days so all these questions and more are coming right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible Juno is bringing crypto friendly banking straight into your checking account with Juno you can send money from your Juno checking account straight onto a layer 2. like polygon optimism arbitrum and they have

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greatest web3 projects possible ones we haven't even seen yet crypto needs its killer applications to onboard the world but crypto killer apps need ZK sync as a platform to build on first it's generally accepted that zero knowledge Roll-Ups are the conclusion of crypto blockchain scaling technology and zksync is leading the charge into the final frontier of crypto economics so if you're a developer who wants to build your app on a future-proof foundation which gives your users the best ux possible check out zksync's website at zksync.io and yes there's also going to be a token so give them a follow on Twitter too at zksync the brave browser is the user first browser for the web 3 internet with over 60 million monthly active users and inside the brave browser you'll find the brave wallet the secure multi-train crypto wallet built

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icon to get started and we are back with our conversation with Steve Newcombe from ZK sync and Steve uh I mean I've been loving this conversation again like any time we talk about like fractals in nature and hyperscalability uh hyper chains and like you know the tree of of Life metaphor for a group of chains what that sounds like to me is a bunch of surface area uh and like I was alluding to earlier in the show during 2018 to 2019 it was that like kindling that brush that was growing that a lot of us that stuck around during the bear market during that time saw it's like yo like this uniswap thing is is really cool uh this defy thing is great uh once people figure this out that's going to be awesome and then when I see like chains

upon chains upon chains all I'm seeing is like surface area for use cases and platforms and projects and companies to like latch onto and finally we can push ethereum into every single corner of the Internet it's a great idea it's a great vision but what about the actual onboarding because some layer twos definitely like get their adoption and get their uh Business Development better than others so what's this strategy like how ZK sync going to go from the bankless podcast where we're talking about fraxels and stuff to like onboarding actual like web2 Commerce future web 3 ideas like what's it what's the business development and onboarding strategy here we will we will be um much to many Chagrin I think much

more like ethereum than just yoloing onto mainnet and hoping for the best uh you know I I I think that it's important for people to understand that the onboarding that we're going to be conducting so on October 28th we're going to go on to mainnet for about about a month we're going to be kicking the tires and we are going to be the ones that are the only people using the system for the first month because we want to absolutely make sure even though we've had two security audits we're going to be doing all sorts of exercises to try to punch holes in it for about a month and kick the tires and make sure it's safe for everybody after that we're going to start letting everybody in to begin developing and and

uh creating their adapts on ZK sync however they'll be gated so while the dapps work only the developers will be able to use them the users won't be allowed to be onboarded and then again we're going through more testing more security more testing and more security and when we're happy with that uh all the projects at once will be the gate will be lifted and everybody will launch uh at once so it's it's not so dissimilar from kind of what we just went through with uh proof of work to proof of stake there's going to be a moment where there's a day where it happens and people will probably yell at us the entire time we're waiting for that day and we're going to be like nope we are

taking the absolute most safest uh most secure route to that moment if it takes us three months it takes us three months if it takes us six months it takes six months it takes nine months that's okay too we will never shortcut our test net activities you know when we go through test net we took zero shortcuts when we go through mainnet from all the way from alpha to hey we're wide open and everything's good to go and everybody can just rock and roll on ZK sync we're going to be very careful the entire way through so you're going to see projects like probably just like come on like come on hit that button and let us in and just like ethereum we're gonna be like no like it is our j-o-b to be secure we cannot have a foul up here

in the same way that I mean several sort of magnitude more important proof of work to proof of stake it needed to go right I mean I told everybody like if that goes down like I'm I'm probably looking for everybody's looking for a new job like there's nothing left but that goes down and we treat our launch onto mainnet uh the same way um so everybody thinks October 28th oh my God the World's Gonna Change we'll have 14 000 TPS blah blah blah that's not gonna it's not gonna be how it happens it's gonna be slow quiet careful principled roll out in the most careful possible way that expresses the carefulness that ethereum already expresses all right so so just so we're understanding the analogy we used before

like a year ago at this time was for Arbitron was like the the analogy of a theme park okay and you guys have the theme park ready it's on mainnet you have all the infrastructure for the theme park Step One is the internal employees are gonna make sure everything in the theme park is kind of working and that's going to last a month maybe a little bit longer then step two is you're going to allow a bunch of builders in who can start building the rides you know this is like roller coaster tycoon or something yeah build all the rides all the while everyone's going to make sure that these rides are safe that kids aren't getting flung off the the roller coaster right that no one's going to die and those tires are

going to be kicked and then eventually the gates will open for General use and anybody can come streaming into the theme park and start to use the rides but the first step is October 28th where you're just going to open the park internally then the builders then opening it for all of the theme park attendees and you don't really have a timeline on when the theme park will be open for the users and the attendees other than to say we're going to make sure it's secure and ready before we open the gates is this right that I couldn't have said it better uh you said it perfectly yeah we we will not let our uh some sort of hype marketing campaign

pick a date for us to say like we need to launch on this date we are going to let security tell us when we're able to launch because that is Paramount for us but that that was a very good analogy uh and that is that is almost just dead on exactly how we're thinking about it so Steve of course we've got ZK sync we've got the ZK evm win ZK token when it comes to the token and what does it do and what like how would be what kind of flavor token would it do would it be um so again uh this was an area where like patience is is one of our greatest strategies in ZK uh sync is like we we look at what everybody else has done in the market space and again a nod to

optimism for really moving the ball down the field for how governance can work how decentralization can can happen how tokonomics can work I I'm very thankful that I think that the ethereum community now pretty much I believe has consensus when a few of the items of how to economics should work and while I really can't comment on our token on when it will occur or anything of that sort um I can say that when we've studied the system and we really do think that when we saw layer twos coming out with token token splits whereas 50 to the Insiders we just never felt like that was who we

were um and so we we stay uh committed and are committed and and will when we do have this we are committed to one-third insiders two-thirds public and I think that's it essentially just as important of standardizing our approver for everybody in the system we should standardize things like these things that say these are belief systems that should also be shared and standardized and as well there's another big one which is gas fees um I remember when I I think you guys probably remember too when when I read that Stark where I was charging their own token for gas fees I was just like huh I was like uh what like what nobody's gonna

like that like what um and when you I often say that when you see a company's tokenomics model that kind of expresses who they are and we um are here to scale ethereum so we will be charging our gas fees in eth um and that's all I can really say about our tokenomics is that we will be committed to doing things the right way um and and and when people choose a layer two solution uh we always remind them that you're not just choosing to prover and the tech and which one is the end game for scaling you should choose the one that's the end game for ethos and tokenomics is a very very strong area to understand where some of these

ethos uh uh ethos sits uh so I'm I'm looking forward to people uh not like financially benefiting from something like this but from coming up to us and saying thank you uh thank you for doing it the right way and and and when when we you know when you raise money and stuff like that you have to negotiate to stick on this sort of stuff and it's such a such a devil on your shoulder like I can have a huge valuation if I just agree to these horrifying like terms and I couldn't have been prouder about how we have always stuck to our principles in the company so that's I think that's all I'm allowed to say about our uh tokenomics sure yeah and of course whenever a token gets released it's

always that pie chart of distribution that is basically the first thing that gets analyzed it's did I get the airdrop and what's the distribution uh and so the the two-thirds to the public one-third to the private is uh going to be interesting to see how that lands with the community and what they say um but how have you guys thought about how that two-thirds distribution actually works because Distributing is hard these days there is uh an arms race between airdrop farmers and airdroppers and there's many different ways to distribute a token uh and some are better than others have you guys thought about this strategy or how you guys are actually going to uh push out the token to the people that you want that token

to land with versus the people that you don't mm-hmm uh they're unfortunately uh I wish there was broad consensus on how to do that so we could just copy somebody but I think this is a field where we need to innovate because I think it's a little bit broken and it needs some love uh and it needs some some thought uh somebody I think needs to come in and be a thought leader in this area and really nail it um I I guarantee you I will be uh maybe trying to get some advice from optimism and saying what are their thoughts because I think they are thought leaders in the space um I don't think anybody's got this one

yet I don't think this is figured out um I think we need to work on this one I think the all the things you mentioned are problems we got to fix them and uh we expect us to be us and come up with something that nobody expected us to do that everybody as soon as they hear it just like they hear like one circuit to rule them all and ALT l1's becoming L3 validiums and they're like whoa Whoever thought of that expect us to do that sort of thinking and trying your best to be leaders and push the ball down the field and be responsible about it in such a way that we can create a standard around doing this so that we help everybody

well I Steve I certainly appreciate the intentionality and the foresight and forethought that that you all seem to be putting putting into this I just want to ask about um open source uh because this is also a topic of conversation between many of the layer two teams both on the ZK roll-up and optimistic roll-up side uh can you talk about why is the open source conversation such a big deal and what what elements of ZK sync are open source and and what's left to open source and where do you guys stand on this whole front yeah I mean we since we've uh uh had ZK sync 1.0 out there for so long we've gone through this open source stuff and um it's interesting because open source not

in crypto so like normal open source uh is a bit more straightforward um I I was blessed with the opportunity to be able to fund node.js and help create it at one of the largest uh open source projects in the world and I got to fund and be on the board of directors of jQuery which which which is the largest open source project in the world and in those areas like those types of open sources straightforward it's like you protect three freedoms the freedom to view the code the freedom to change the code and the freedom to Fork the code boom you're done in crypto we learned some weirdo lessons uh with ZK sync one do you guys remember what happened back then so we we open sourced it all three

freedoms right off the bat while we are developing it and I would say that some people with not great intentions forked us and launched with bugs uh in the system and did not affix the bugs and that hurts the ethereum ecosystem when you do things like that it makes people not trusted you can have hacks you can have all sorts of bad things happen when you have code that really isn't really battle tested and you have these Bad actors that will will Fork your code and do nasty things with them and you know at some day I think someone will count up all of the nasty Forks of ZK sync 1.0 and you know they they all

die away it's not like it's a competitive worry what our worry is is that when that happens the news will catch hold of it and expand upon it and then it makes everybody in the ethereum community look bad so we're we're sitting here trying to think this out and it's another area where like there's no consensus on this everybody does it their own way stockware does it their own way they end up actually not open sourcing after they went into production polygon what they do is they give you sorts of visible but they copyright it so then forking and changing the codes not possible and then they they say that they're going to make all three freedoms open when they go live yeah that that might work um but what's weird if somebody does

fork you in that model and you're using copyright to protect yourself from a bad actor forking you then you're using the very nation state to Sue that company that you're trying to undo in the first place so it's a little bit of a like whoa I'm I don't want to use the nation state to protect me to to undo the Nations for my own security yeah yeah it's like thinking about an unpitted olive for too long it's like really complex uh and yeah that takes a while um um and and so we're thinking about our open source strategy meanwhile and rightfully so it happens every time I you know we we're on a panel with arbitrum and Stephen he's always hitting

us up like why aren't you open source why are you coding in the dark why don't you code in the light and we're like I know but it's not a perfect world we just don't want to be forked again and then people do nasty things and with ZK sync 2 being you know this this long-awaited evm ZK roll up we're like wow this could be really bad because everybody's after this stuff and really bad stuff could happen so uh this will definitely be spicy uh so we're gonna announce what we're gonna do it's definitely not perfect um but I hope what people can see is the intent so here's what we're gonna do when we hit mainnet

everything will be uh protect open source and protecting all three freedoms Freedom to view the code change the code Fork the code with the exception of one thing we're gonna we're gonna hold back um and I actually have my language here to get it exactly right we're going to hold back the node implementation of our approver and the method by which we were able to get the prover to work efficient efficiently on regular old gpus um and that is the secret sauce basically of what that is the 10x breakthrough I would maybe even say that's 100x breakthrough that we did um and the reason we are holding that

back is because we've we've we think we've been able to create a principled pattern that we can now announce and say this is what we will always follow so that no longer does anybody need to ask what's our open source strategy so here's his best I'm going to try to say it as best I can when anything that we build touches the hands of the users that it was intended to we will fully open source it and protect all three freedoms but if we are releasing software and it still is sitting in a centralized state where we are not releasing it to the intended users meaning we are still kicking its tires we're still testing it out we are still making sure it's secure and unhackable and we are taking on the

risk to make sure that it stays secure in those situations we will we will uh protect that code so that a bad actor can't Fork it and then release it to people with mistakes in it but then once we do decentralize our approver and that is when we have the technology in the hands of validators which are the users of that when we secure it and at that moment we we will be releasing that into open source and um this is a conversation that Alex and I have been going through uh with their VP of engineering and other folks on the

team and Alex made the call today uh we this has been a very long uh discussion in the company and what's important for Alex and me and the whole company is that we do things based on principled thinking and so again it's that thought process of if the technology has been delivered securely and we believe it's now secured to the intended end user that is the moment in which we will make it fully open source so for the for the vast majority of the code that means mainnet when we are on mainnet um and we think it's really really important not to let uh people with bad intentions to be able to try to Fork

something when it's not fully secured yet when it's not fully battle tested because our our mission and we always go back to our mission is we can never damage ethereum and and the community within the theorem and the reputation of a theorem so we cannot have a security situation happen ever and we have a goal and a mission to be seen as a leader in security and that may mean that we are slower that we take longer that that people have to wait it may mean May mean that we have an open source policy that I can I can hear Stephen over at Arboretum right now handing it to me I I know he's gonna he's gonna and I'm just gonna smile and I'll be like we did the best we could

man but the other thing we're doing is like Stephen rightfully so said I want to see your approver I want to see what its stats are I want to see it in action so what we are going to do is we're going to submit it to uh zprize so that everybody can see the measurements of its performance because it is a very big deal that we got this working on a GPU everybody thought we were working on Specialized hardware and was going to cost a mint every every time Steven like hands it to us on an L2 panel he's always like your proof is going to be too expensive because you have to have specialized Hardware um well that's just not true um and we'll be able to put that out in the open public so everybody can see that in 31 days right and and I think

it's going to happen exactly on the day but there's some Logistics that we only have so many human beings but the intention is like that's when it would happen and I know this is going to get spicy I know that uh uh you know that that that I'm gonna definitely get some comments on this um and I just want everybody to know like we know that that the world isn't perfect on this and that nobody has it yet uh polygons method is I don't think that solves it quite um but we are trying to move the ball down the field and open up this as a as a open and transparent conversation of hey here's the issues we're thinking about and so yeah I'm going to take the punch to the face probably

so that I can protect ethereum and so that we can take the safest and securest route and and we're always happy to do that because we got to live by our principles at the end of the day well that's okay nerd fights are my favorite types competition is good for ethereum the next L2 panel is going to be like wild look it's good you guys should be holding each other accountable so and the back and forth is appreciated I think by the ethereum community um Steve this has been great thank you so much for walking us through it last question for you I think this thing that you're shipping on October 28th um and I guess you're not waiting till Halloween huh not October 31st October 28th this I don't want the launch of my

Layer Two renters [Music] just in before Halloween all right uh fair enough so um this is called ZK sync 2.0 I think and there is a ZK sync 3.0 one one might imagine or maybe some sort of a you know smaller Point upgrade what's on the future road map so after you ship this thing what are you going to be looking at you don't have to go into all the details because I think we've stuffed people's brains a lot on this podcast with some mind-blowing Concepts but just the high level what would the next step be for ZK sync Beyond ZK sync3 Beyond two tell us about three

oh well ZK sync 3 is synonymous with layer three and all the things that I spoke about in layer three um so that is the ability to choose the structure of your fractal hyper chain uh whether it be a ZK roll up a ZK Porter or ZK validium it's the ability to have your own token to secure your own hyper chain the ability to choose whether it's public or private and then all this will be uh mastered with one circuit and that is not coming on the 28th right CK sync two is coming on the 28th will not have all of those things ZK sync three comes later and will have all of those things it's synonymous with the layer 3 concept we were talking

about yeah so and and think that it took us four years to get to ZK sync two on October 28th um ZK snake three on testnet is going to happen a whole lot sooner than anyone thinks it the Innovations go boom boom boom boom boom boom boom and uh it's gonna be exciting to have when vitalik says he sometimes gets surprised how fast things move I I think I'll have a little bit of Joy when we say like hey look at this and he says I'm shocked again um uh it's really really exciting how fast the Innovation is going to happen and one of the things that's going to happen as an arc

over that is we are working very hard and it's going to become a theme and a narrative that's part of who we are is we're going to make it a lot easier to build stuff so think of my background and what I've worked on if anybody wants to look at my background you can you can very much see where I'm going to take this and that is we're going to make this thing easy so look for sdks CLI tools all the way down eventually to the WordPress of crypto we went at this I imagine a world that's low code no code click some buttons and you have your own blockchain that is doing extremely sophisticated things um I think 10x Factor Improvement in

Easy is going to be a very big story but for the rest of this year and for all of next year the biggest story I think for us is going to be just porting everybody over so they can try ZK snake out for themselves and being welcoming to those people and making it easy for those people we're seeing it anywhere from seven minutes to seven days to Port so it's been really really easy to do and it's been really joyous to watch People's Light eyes light up and be like oh my God I was so afraid but that was actually like super duper easy and you know at the end of the day that's that's kind of my job on the product side is to make it a a joy to be using this technology instead of something that people fear and and they think it's

going to make them feel dumb I want to make people feel brilliant um okay so that's what's in store for us coming down the next year or two that's awesome uh David did you hear that zero code no code chain so maybe bankless gets its own chain on layers exactly thank you so much for joining us this has been awesome thanks for having me risks and disclaimers everyone of course I gotta tell you like I always do none of this has been Financial advice even though we talked a little bit about tokens crypto is risky so is eth so is D5 all of it is you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier maybe the New Frontier is layer three it's not for everyone but

we're glad you're with us on the bank list Journey thanks a lot foreign