Macauley Peterson

Data recorded on the blockchain is often perceived as everlasting, and in many ways, it is. Ethereum, for instance, is expected to operate for as long as the internet exists. Every piece of data in every block is publicly accessible, forming a continuous chain from its genesis in 2015 to the present — 18+ million blocks later.



But when it comes to smart contracts, only the previous 256 blocks — less than an hour of data — are accessible.



Accessing all of Ethereum’s historical data relies heavily on platforms like <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/etherscan">Etherscan</a>, which indexes the data off-chain, and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/oracles">oracles</a> like Chainlink. While these are essential tools, they require users to trust the data providers.



Relic Protocol, developed by blockchain security firm ChainLight, instead offers a trust-minimized way for smart contracts to call upon Ethereum’s vast history, replacing platforms with pure mathematical precision.



V2, which launched today, will now bring that data to other blockchains as well, starting with zkSync Era.



“We&#8217;re trying to build the building blocks for the app developers to build on top of,” Brian Pak, ChainLight’s CEO, told Blockworks.



Bayo Akins, who handles business development at zkSync developer Matter Labs, noted that Relic is the first oracle provider on zkSync to use <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#a-zero-knowledge-succinct-non-interactive-argument-of-knowledge-zk-snark">zk-SNARKs</a> as part of their oracle design.



“This deployment not only improves data accessibility and cost-efficiency in the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a> scaling ecosystem but also provides developers with the tools they need to innovate and operate trustlessly,” said Akins.



Relic Protocol enables access to the data on-chain thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, removing the need to trust traditional oracles. It stores historical data in a compressed format, allowing developers to prove certain past facts. For example, a user can verify Uniswap pricing for a specific token from a year ago — all within a smart contract — without needing to push that data on-chain from an oracle.



This could be a boon for applications like borrowing and lending markets. Historical price volatility data could be used to tweak lending parameters trustlessly, minimizing the need for governance involvement.



That’s not possible today. Ethereum&#8217;s smart contracts, by design, depend on third-party data sources to access older data, due to the so-called &#8220;BLOCKHASH&#8221; operation in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/evm">EVM</a>).



The reason for the 256 block lookback period is largely pragmatic: Maintaining the hash of every block ever produced would require substantial and ever-growing storage requirements on every Ethereum node and would be detrimental to the system&#8217;s scalability and performance.&nbsp;



If a smart contract needs access to data from blocks older than that, the workarounds available require trust assumptions and can be costly.



Ethereum’s history has shown the status quo is not ideal. For instance, DeFi protocols have suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/mango-markets-mangled-by-oracle-manipulation-for-112m">oracle manipulation attacks</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Similar approaches</h2>



Other teams have set out to tackle the same problem.



At the StarkWare Summit in San Francisco, Herodotus, a startup working on storage proof technology, today debuted an “on-chain accumulator” which uses STARK proving and will also make historical Ethereum data accessible on Starknet.



By early October, the whole history should become verifiable, according to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/starkware">StarkWare</a>.



“It’s an innovation that is sorely needed to bring Ethereum in line with the principles of transparency and accessibility that are so central in blockchain communities,” said Kacper Koziol, co-founder of Herodotus.



Starkware president Eli Ben-Sasson noted that the work by Herodotus will boost layer-2 usability and transparency.



“When we started scaling on layer 2, we said to ourselves that this is going to lead to all sorts of out-of-the-box ideas that we can’t yet envisage, and it’s so exciting to see this happening,” he said in the statement.&nbsp;



A ChainLight spokesperson noted Herodotus is also working on zkSync support.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Fairer airdrops</h2>



On the identity front, the Relic Protocol can facilitate the creation of an account’s reputation based on its past interactions with the blockchain.&nbsp;



That can come in handy for prospective DAOs looking to distribute a governance token using an airdrop scheme. Currently, developers have to use an Ethereum archive node to take a snapshot in time and determine which accounts interacted with a given protocol or had a certain token balance.



From that, they typically build a <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#merkle-root">Merkel tree</a> to determine how many tokens a given account qualifies for, and finally deploy an airdrop contract with that Merkel tree root. Users then connect and provide a Merkel proof to receive their tokens.



Trust is required each step of the way; the archive node or the person deploying the airdrop contract could maliciously corrupt the data in a way that’s hard to detect, ChainLight’s chief technology officer Andrew Wesie <a href="https://youtu.be/xIhsC2hSOGE">said</a> in a presentation last month.



Relic saves those steps. “Instead they just call into Relic to verify that the account should be eligible for the airdrop,” Wesie said, who pointed to the use of a storage or transaction proof, for instance.



“So it&#8217;s really about taking something that used to require off-chain centralized trusted service and instead of bringing it on-chain and doing it in a way that is trustless,” he said.



ChainLight envisions a world where the benefits of both Ethereum and zkSync can be seamlessly integrated, offering developers the best of both worlds, and without sacrificing decentralization. Through an open-source SDK, developers can access circuits and smart contracts.



Like Herodotus, ChainLight has plans to extend support to more chains.



“Ultimately, this is not just enhancing options on zkSync Era to meet the differing needs of application developers, but it will open the path for new use cases to be created,” Matter Labs’ Akins said.



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Relic Protocol ports all of Ethereum’s data to layer-2

Sebastian Sinclair

A dispute has erupted in the open-source community, with the Polygon Zero team, a branch of the Polygon project, accusing rival Matter Labs of appropriating significant amounts of source code without adequate attribution.



The crux of the disagreement centers around the <a href="https://mirror.xyz/0x70DF15b0208eFCeFaA541Da9A0ED6C4A884554Fc/gNi8coqXjd1ybFsQBAG7QARUkPHZECu7ihIRkpiVx2Y" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">new proving system</a> developed by Matter Labs called Boojum.&nbsp;



Polygon alleges that the system incorporates a considerable amount of code from Plonky2, their open-source library designed for optimizing zero-knowledge-proof systems, according to a <a href="https://mirror.xyz/0x70DF15b0208eFCeFaA541Da9A0ED6C4A884554Fc/gNi8coqXjd1ybFsQBAG7QARUkPHZECu7ihIRkpiVx2Y">blog post</a> published by Polygon Zero on Thursday.



They further claim that Matter Labs has misrepresented the origin and performance of Boojum, both in attributing the original developers and in claiming superior speed to Plonky2.&nbsp;



Matter Labs is known for the development of zkSync, a trustless scaling solution for Ethereum based on zero-knowledge proof technology. The pair first announced their <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-and-matter-labs-compete-on-zkevm-rollups">public testnets</a> based on zero-knowledge tech back in October with Polygon first out of the gate.



Alex Gluchowski, co-founder of Matter Labs, dismissed Polygon’s allegations as &#8220;unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing,&#8221; in a detailed rebuttal on <a href="https://twitter.com/gluk64/status/1687263207860166656?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">social media</a>.



Gluchowski also outlined several key points to refute the allegations, underlining that only about 5% of Boojum’s code is based on Plonky2&#8217;s.



&#8220;The reader of the Polygon Zero post is left with the impression that Boojum is largely using Plonky2 code with little innovation, and that we allegedly re-used this code without providing any attribution to the original work.&#8221; These claims &#8220;could not be further from the truth,&#8221; Gluchowski stated.



The co-founder further clarified that Matter Labs&#8217; team introduced <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1400.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">RedShift</a>, the cryptographic proof system on which both Plonky2 and Boojum are based, three years prior to the former’s release paper, something which he has publicly <a href="https://twitter.com/gluk64/status/1680878564072103936?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">noted</a> before.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Both Plonky2 and Boojum are implementations of RedShift (Plonk + FRI). We borrowed some dope ideas from Plonky2, but did many things differently (see README). At the end, Boojum is more than an order of magnitude faster (see <a href="https://twitter.com/CelerNetwork?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CelerNetwork</a>&#39;s benchmarks).<a href="https://t.co/k93qYyZW8B">https://t.co/k93qYyZW8B</a>&mdash; Alex G. ∎ (@gluk64) <a href="https://twitter.com/gluk64/status/1680878564072103936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 17, 2023</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



A clear attribution for the reused code is provided in the main file of the module, Gluchowski added, with additional acknowledgments to Plonky2 made in the README file and the introductory post.



Polygon had earlier stressed the importance of maintaining integrity in the open-source ecosystem, per the post.



Disregarding open-source norms can damage innovation and collaboration among developers, especially for smaller teams heavily reliant on the benefits of open-source contributions, Polygon Zero argues.



Starkware co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson, whose company is a competitor to both Polygon and Matter Labs, appeared to <a href="https://twitter.com/elibensasson/status/1687162808071307264" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">weigh in</a> on the side of Polygon, <a href="https://twitter.com/ukolodny/status/1687163140742529032?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">as did</a> Starkware CEO Uri Kolodny.



Louis Guthmann, ecosystem lead at StarkWare, clarified to Blockworks that the issue is Matter Labs&#8217; &#8220;did not have attribution in the right place, which is breaking the license.&#8221;



But Michael Lewellen, a security solutions architect at OpenZeppelin, which has an ongoing auditing contract with Matter Labs, <a href="https://twitter.com/lewellenmichael/status/1687164201800777740" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a> any shortcoming in attribution was “unintentional.”



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">It&#39;s important to call out proper attribution when borrowing open-source code but this appears to be a genuine mistake, not intentional. Plonky2 was previously mentioned in docs and in public tweets by the <a href="https://twitter.com/zksync?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@zksync</a> team. <a href="https://t.co/LkGFFGTqzy">https://t.co/LkGFFGTqzy</a>&mdash; Michael Lewellen (@LewellenMichael) <a href="https://twitter.com/LewellenMichael/status/1687164201800777740?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 3, 2023</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



&#8220;They didn&#8217;t include ALL the information that an official attribution should have: original license, link to original code, etc.,&#8221; Lewellen, told Blockworks.



Gluchowski acknowledged the deficit but suggested a more cooperative approach, saying, &#8220;If the Polygon Zero team wanted additional credit, the easiest way would have been to submit a pull request which we would have happily accepted.&#8221;



A Polygon spokesperson told Blockworks that Polygon had indeed submitted a pull request on Github.



Macauley Peterson contributed reporting.



Updated, Friday Aug. 4, 2023 at 9:40 am ET with additional comments and context.



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Polygon Zero and Matter Labs square off over open-source norms

Bessie Liu

PancakeSwap v3, a non-custodial decentralized exchange, has launched on zkSync Era.



PancakeSwap — currently deployed on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum, Linea and Polygon zkEVM — is the third largest DEX when it comes to total value locked (TVL), according to <a href="https://defillama.com/protocols/dexes">information</a> available on DeFiLlama. It is also one of the largest DEXes on BSC, with a market cap of $1.484 billion.



PancakeSwap’s v3 first launched in March 2023 and is known for its low trading and swap fees. This is likely due to the introduction of concentrated liquidity, Chef Mochi, the head chef of PancakeSwap, told Blockworks.



“Liquidity providers can concentrate their capital in active price ranges, reducing slippage and benefiting traders. Our multi-tier fee structure, ranging from 0.01% to 1%, provides flexible options for traders,” Chef Mochi said.



Stakers of CAKE, PancakeSwap’s native token, can also receive up to 10% on trading rebates, they noted.&nbsp;



“We earn revenue through trading fees distributed back to the protocol&#8217;s treasury, supporting our ongoing operations, development, and growth. For example, in v3, we distribute 9%-24% of the fees collected from the various trading fee tiers back to our treasury,” Chef Mochi said.



The DEX has previously noted that it had a goal of operating on multiple blockchains. The team said its decision to deploy on zkSync Era marks another milestone.&nbsp;



Many DEXes in the space seem to be embracing a multichain future. Uniswap v3 has also recently <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/uniswap-multichain-future">made the decision</a> to deploy on multiple chains including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BSC, Celo and Avalanche.&nbsp;



“Our commitment to providing our users with the best experience on PancakeSwap drove the decision,” Chef Mochi said. “With zkSync, we can significantly reduce transaction costs for our users with high levels of security, making trading on PancakeSwap even more cost-effective and efficient.”



ZkSync Era will be the third destination of the DEX’s &#8220;Traverse the Treasure Islands Galxe&#8221; campaign where users can earn rewards for participating in the ecosystem. This push also comes right before PancakeSwap is set to launch its Initial Farm Offering (IFO), meant to enable users to participate in token offerings.



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zkSync Era welcomes PancakeSwap to the ecosystem

Katherine Ross

Ankr teamed up with Matter Labs to bring zkSync Era Nodes and Hyperchain blockchain solutions to Ankr’s Azure Marketplace.&nbsp;



<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/microsoft" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ankr</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/microsoft" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Microsoft</a> teamed up earlier this year, with Ankr’s Azure listings launched in June. 



Ankr is a Web3 infrastructure provider, while <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/matter-labs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matter Labs</a> is the developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 rollup zkSync.



According to a press release, the aim is to integrate technology from all three — Microsoft&#8217;s cloud infrastructure, zkSync Era’s blockchain network and Ankr’s solutions.



“The zkSync Era node deployment service will offer global blockchain connections enabling any enterprise or web3 project to connect to or build web3 apps on top of zkSync Era, a zkEVM Ethereum Layer-2 scaling protocol,” the release said.



In a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-embodies-integrity-privacy-magic" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">June document focused on zero-knowledge tech</a>, the team at Matter Labs said they want zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology to embody “integrity, privacy and magic.”



“If we want to scale blockchain technology like the internet, we need to be able to accommodate the most complex Web2 use cases with the most stringent requirements in terms of security, performance and privacy, among other factors,” said Marco Cora, senior vice president of business and operations at Matter Labs.



Cora also hopes the partnership will “lower the barrier to entry and ignite enterprise adoption of blockchains. With the addition of our recently announced ZK Stack, we expect more and more enterprise use cases to take off on zkSync Era.”



Enterprises will be able to both build and launch a customizable hyperchain blockchain to further push their Web3 aspirations. Additionally, Ankr’s team will offer support and engineering.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ankr-doubles-down-on-decentralization-of-web3-infrastructure" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ankr Doubles Down on Decentralization of Web3 Infrastructure</a>



“By offering the ability to build on zkSync Era via Ankr’s Microsoft Azure Marketplace solutions, we are breaking barriers to entry for an array of businesses that need their unique scalability and performance requirements met before they begin building out their Web3 initiatives,” Ankr CEO Chandler Song said.



Microsoft also <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/microsoft-axelar-team-up" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced a partnership with Axelar</a> earlier this month. The team-up between the technology company and the interoperability network would also help companies on the Azure Marketplace access services and developer tools for their pushes into blockchain technology.



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Microsoft Azure node deployment opens door for easier Web3 app development

Validity proof-based rollups have gone from purely hypothetical to potentially hyperscaling Ethereum in just a few years.&nbsp;



Blockchain interoperability protocol Celer has a new framework to benchmark a key component of these rollups — the prover —&nbsp;revised on Monday to include the latest edition of zkSync’s prover, called Boojum.



The name derives from a fictional animal in Lewis Carroll&#8217;s poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43909/the-hunting-of-the-snark">The Hunting of the Snark</a>, where a Boojum was a particularly dangerous kind of snark — one that can make its victims “softly and suddenly vanish away,” never to be seen again.



That’s not unlike the modern day cryptographic SNARK, or Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, which is a core component of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-rollups-future-of-smart-contract-blockchains">some of today’s zero-knowledge rollups</a>, such as <a href="https://zkevm.polygon.technology/docs/zkProver/overview/#zk-snark-prover">Polygon’s zkEVM</a>.



The validity proof in a zk rollup is a cryptographic assurance that a batch of transactions was processed faithfully, while the transactions themselves can be softly vanished off-chain.&nbsp;



ZkSync Era <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksyncs-evm-era-opens-to-the-public">launched its zkEVM in March 2023</a> with a SNARK-based system as well, but one which Boojum is now poised to replace.



A new polynomial commitment scheme (in the cryptographic lingo du jour) is on the hunt, out to <a href="https://aszepieniec.github.io/stark-anatomy/fri.html">FRI</a> the SNARK and turn it into an even more fearsome creature, a STARK.



STARKs provide a couple of key advantages: There’s no need to worry about the security of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/addresses-helping-ethereum-scale">a trusted setup</a>, or the future computational prowess of quantum computing.



Modern SNARKs utilize a universal trusted setup that can rely on randomness contributed by anyone, and remain secure as long as there is at least one honest participant. While Ethereum itself is not quantum resistant, it may be overly optimistic to solely rely on the post-quantum security of layer-2 rollups.



The more immediate benefit — and the one motivating the switch from zkSync — is speed and scalability, according to Alex Gluchowski, CEO of development company MatterLabs.



Zk-STARKs generate proofs faster, and they become <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-rollups-cheaper-with-scale">more efficient</a> as the number of transactions increases.



“The new proof system is orders of magnitude more performant than what we had before,” Gluchowski told Blockworks. “If you look at the Celer benchmarks, it&#8217;s basically an order of magnitude of the fastest proof systems in general. So it&#8217;s an order of magnitude faster than Plonky2 used in Polygon and it&#8217;s comparable to some of the fastest, pure STARKS.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/NCJz59BHuuF9xXskb1HIOeQqULuTFeUOU8oBnRhc7gB7MbdEEbJodrQD8a60clcyu8BHkIoaKw9JJWwWXUqQehIR3gyynKVpBubwP9rNXxAVWb-ogdEJo8flpVgE0Z3lNEwKTDXT_7SMm7hN6iiSUww" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Celer Network</figcaption></figure>



Starky is an alternative prover from Polygon, which did not return Blockworks request for comment by publication.



StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson, who co-authored the original paper on STARKs, <a href="https://twitter.com/EliBenSasson/status/1680863153322590208?s=20">called </a>zkSync’s move “amazing news.”



“It shows what we&#8217;ve said from day 1: [STARKS] are most scalable,” Ben-Sasson told Blockworks. “That&#8217;s what you see from [Boojum] and Starky!”



StarkWare’s prover was not included in the published benchmarks, and StarkWare did not provide a comparable benchmark reference.



Celer refers to <a href="https://blog.celer.network/2023/07/14/the-pantheon-of-zero-knowledge-proof-development-frameworks/">their benchmark framework</a> as the Pantheon of Zero Knowledge Proof and calls it, “a public good community initiative,” with the goal that the findings “will enable developers to make informed decisions when selecting the most suitable framework for their projects.”



Comparing proof systems is a challenge, according to Elena Nadolinski, CEO at the Iron Fish Foundation, which contributes to a decentralized zero-knowledge based privacy solution.



“For example, some zero-knowledge proof systems (like STARKs) do exceptionally better for <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#sha-256">SHA-256 hashes</a> than some of the pairing based systems like certain SNARKs (like groth16),” Nadolinski told Blockworks.



But groth16 is incompatible with a zkEVM implementation, she added.



Celer said it opted to use SHA-256 for its benchmark “due to its applicability to a wide range of ZKP use cases, including blockchain systems, digital signatures, zkDID and more.”



ZkSync’s implementation will wrap the proof in a SNARK as a final step. This reduces the size of the data needed to include an Ethereum mainnet block.



“For now what matters is performance and the costs,” Gluchowski said.



And decentralization — a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-embodies-integrity-privacy-magic">core part of the ZK Credo</a>.



“With this new implementation, it opens the path for complete decentralization of the prover because now you can run it on any GPUs that have been used for Bitcoin or Ethereum mining,” he said. “You can use it on gaming machines that people have at home.”



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Zk rollups vie for throughput crown

Polygon spin-off Avail unveiled its data attestation bridge to Ethereum, Friday, as it seeks to carve out a niche in Ethereum’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap.



Layer-2 rollups currently use Ethereum mainnet for posting their transaction data, which represents the majority of the transaction cost to users. These costs are expected to come down significantly following the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-cancun-upgrade-blobs">next Ethereum upgrade “Dencun”</a> later this year, which will implement EIP-4844.



Further scaling gains should be found higher up the stack, on layer-3 networks envisioned such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/arbitrum-arb-token-airdrop">Arbitrum Orbit</a>, or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-launches-op-stack-rival">zkSync’s hyperchains</a>. That’s where Avail’s solution will likely come in, Anurag Arjun, Avail’s co-founder, told Blockworks in an interview.



“With computation with something like [zero-knowledge proofs], you are able to compress proofs, you&#8217;re able to do recursive proofs and make it small, but with data, you cannot do it,” Arjun said.



Right now, some early attempts make use of what are known as data availability committees (DACs), but in the future Avail or <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blockchain-goes-modular">Celestia</a> could provide a better alternative because they use a technique known as <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">data availability sampling</a> (DAS). Ethereum’s own implementation of DAS is still likely years away.



&#8220;By enabling rollup constructions to run in validium, optimistic chains, and volition modes, we are not only reducing costs but also paving the way for a more inclusive and efficient layer-2 and layer-3 ecosystem,” Arjun said in a statement.



There are some <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/layer-2-secured-by-ethereum">trade-offs in terms of security</a>, but for the kinds of use cases that are most likely to require layer-3s, the cost, performance, and privacy concerns will make off-chain data availability options worth it, according to zkSync co-founder Alex Gluchowski.



“It&#8217;s very cheap, but you only have a partial inheritance of Ethereum security,” Gluchowski said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Avail opted to become an independent company outside of the Polygon product suite so that it could service all kinds of rollups, not only those from Polygon.



“We wanted it to be more credibly neutral in that aspect because Avail is a general purpose base layer,” Arjun told Blockworks.



The transition, completed about three months ago, saw Arjun leave his operational role at Polygon, which will now be one customer of many for the new firm.



Polygon’s PoS chain, which <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-pos-to-validium">Polygon recently announced</a> would morph into a zkEVM validium,&nbsp; will initially make use of its own validator set to provide data availability, but it could also use Avail in the future, Arjun said.



Avail is built using Polkadot’s <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#substrate-polkadot-development-framework" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Substrate</a> technology due to its use of nominated proof-of-stake (nPOS) and tendency to facilitate wide distribution of stake.



Arjun observed from his experience with <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#tendermint-core-byzantine-fault-tolerance-bft-consensus" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tendermint</a> consensus used by the Polygon PoS chain that there is a concentration of stake with a majority controlled by eight to 10 validators.



A new staking token, AVAIL, will facilitate a permissionless validator set of up to 1,000 validators.



Other than that, there is no connection to the Polkadot ecosystem. They may be able to help Polkadot build zk rollups on a Polkadot parachain using Avail, Arjun said, but this idea is very new and will require a lot of further development.



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Avail offers to bridge the data availability gap for Ethereum rollups

Darren Kleine

It’s official. ZK Stack is now available to developers.



Matter Labs, developers of the zero-knowledge layer-2 scaling solution zkSync Era, recently released the open-source code to the public.



So what’s so special about it?



Matter Labs’ Alex Gluchowski and Anthony Rose spoke to Blockworks on the 0xResearch podcast (<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-hyperchains-the-scaling-end-game-alex-gluchowski/id1651683074?i=1000618738693">Apple</a>/<a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nZ9iEzKuMCDV3p5tPxbhS?si=7421bfb1da6745cc">Spotify</a>) about the nuts and bolts of the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/ethereum">Ethereum</a>-compatible open-source protocol that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-launches-op-stack-rival">rivals Optimism’s OP Stack</a>.



ZK Stack is a modular framework for building highly customizable blockchains, CEO Gluchowski told Blockworks. The <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/layer-2-2">layer-2</a> tech uses cryptographic <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/zero-knowledge-rollup">zero-knowledge proofs</a> rather than the “<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/optimism">optimistic</a>” approach to rollups, which assumes transaction validity unless proven otherwise.&nbsp;



Senior vice-president of technology Rose says the system includes all the “core components” that together would be used to form “hyperchains.”



The stack will also include “the tooling around that,” he says, like compilers, SDKs for configurations and so forth. “Essentially,” it’s everything needed “to be able to deploy a version of this system that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksyncs-evm-era-opens-to-the-public">looks like Era today</a>, but over time could be more flexible.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Customize or copy-paste</h2>



“You can start with all the defaults. Just copy the configuration of zkSync Era,” Gluchowski explains. “Or you can say, I want this component to look differently.”&nbsp;



Gluchowski explains the sequencer can be customized to be <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/shared-sequencers-decentralization">centralized or decentralized</a> in functionality, depending on the developer’s needs and preferences.&nbsp;



While certain enterprises, banks or gaming companies might not feel a need to decentralize the sequencer, Gluchowski expects most chains to sequence transactions in a decentralized manner.



“You will be able to choose all of the parameters, which consensus algorithm you want to use, how you secure it, what token you want to use there and so on.”



The <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sovereign-rollups-blockchain-scaling">data availability</a> mechanism is also customizable, Gluchowski continues.&nbsp;



“ZK <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/rollups">rollup</a> is an architecture in which you publish data availability through the Ethereum network,” He says. “You rely on Ethereum&#8217;s layer-1 as your data availability layer.”



Because the technology relies on Ethereum’s mainnet for security, it is “by far, the most secure option,” he says. But as of now, he admits, this security comes “at a price.”



“All the rollups on Ethereum — Optimistic and ZK rollups alike — share the same data bandwidth, the same limited block space which you can utilize for your data.”



“It&#8217;s currently pretty limited,” he says, but will be extended once <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/addresses-helping-ethereum-scale">proto-danksharding</a> is implemented on Ethereum. Data availability demands will be “a bottleneck” for now, he says, adding it may need to be managed by other parties in the meantime to handle demands.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A seamless experience</h2>



According to Gluchowski, one major advantage of the new tech is its ability to provide complex interactions between decentralized parties in seamless transactions.&nbsp;



Users will be able to interact with all the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/defi">DeFi</a> protocols like <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/uniswap">Uniswap</a> or <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/curve">Curve</a> “on the ZK rollup side,” he says.



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“Imagine Uniswap would launch their own ‘Uni-chain’ as a separate hyper chain in the zkSync network,” he says. The chain would be fully separate with its own sequencer and enjoy all the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-rollups-future-of-smart-contract-blockchains">benefits of security provided by Ethereum</a>.



If an individual with funds in a wallet on zkSync Era wanted to interact with Uniswap on-chain and execute a trade, it would appear as one seamless transaction to the user, he says.&nbsp;



The transaction would bridge from Era over a “hyper-bridge” to the Uniswap chain, where it would reach the smart contract and swap tokens. The tokens would then be sent back over the bridge to the user wallet.



“All of that will happen asynchronously, but atomically,” Gluchowski says. In other words, “all of these transactions will be scheduled and they cannot be stopped.”



“For you as a user, you just wait a couple of minutes and the funds come back.”



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ZK Stack developers can now build custom ‘hyperchains’ on Ethereum

The team behind zkSync Era, an Ethereum-compatible layer-2 zk-rollup, is launching an open-source framework for building zk-rollups and layer-3s, which they call “hyperchains,” based on its code.



The concept — called ZK Stack — is meant to address a subset of developers for whom sovereignty is paramount. In addition to being free and open source, resulting chains remain customizable while maintaining the security of an Ethereum zk-rollup.



Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski told Blockworks that no other current solution for builders provides the combination of permissive open-source license — MIT/Apache — and scalability afforded by zero-knowledge proof technology.



“The creator (you) possesses full rights to the code and enjoys unrestricted autonomy to customize and shape every aspect of the chain,” zkSync said in a <a href="https://medium.com/matter-labs/introducing-the-zk-stack-c24240c2532a" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog post</a>. “Hyperchains operate independently, relying solely on Ethereum [mainnet] for their liveness and security.”



A platform to rival <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/optimism-bedrock-upgrade-superchain">the Optimism “superchain” concept</a> is clearly a goal, but one which front-loads the philosophical underpinnings of Matter Labs’ <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-embodies-integrity-privacy-magic">“ZK Credo,” released on Friday</a>.



“It&#8217;s going to be the only alternative — fully open-source alternative — to Optimism’s stack that is available today for anyone to build rollups,” Gluchowski told Blockworks.



Among the key features is that the ZK Stack will be modular and composable. That means builders will be able to choose among a bevy of options for the sequencer and data availability layers, but without fragmenting liquidity and users.



In principle, “a seamless trustless network with low latency and shared liquidity,” will appeal to applications that don’t require synchronous composability. Rather than having chains be siloed and requiring the use of often-risky cross-chain bridges, they will be able to execute user actions across a &#8220;unified liquidity network.&#8221;



“If you look at Optimism’s superchains, in order to build a trustless bridge between superchains, the user will have to wait seven days,” Gluchowski said.



That’s not good enough, he reckons.



“The latency has to be down to seconds, maybe minutes, but really, really short for the liquidity on all of those chains and for interoperability of messages between all of those chains to feel seamless to the end users.”



A spokesperson for OP Labs told Blockworks the OP Stack can mitigate this current shortcoming, noting that the Optimism Foundation recently <a href="https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/ecosystem-contributions/issues/61" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">released</a> a request for proposal on this issue.



&#8220;[The OP Stack&#8217;s] modular design should allow operators to swap and add components according to their unique needs,&#8221; the spokesperson said. &#8220;An OP Chain operator might opt to use a [zero-knowledge validity proof] rather than a fault proof, for example.&#8221;



The ZK Stack is also well suited to applications that benefit from customizability, such as a game developer that wants to run its own sequencer, or an application-specific blockchain such as a decentralized exchange which requires super low latency.



It could also apply to private permissioned chains, such as one run by a bank, which nevertheless benefits from being connected to the rest of the ecosystem.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Decentralization roadmap</h2>



One of the goals of the initiative is community building —&nbsp;to attract developers into the zkSync ecosystem.



“We&#8217;ve been working on zkSync Era for several years to build the first [zero-knowledge] EVM-driven blockchain,” Gluchowski said. “And now it&#8217;s time to give it over to the community and enable everyone to build their own versions of it.”



This represents a shift in priorities for Matter Labs, to onboard more independent teams to contribute to the development of the network that began with zkSync Era.



In its early months, zkSync Era — which does not yet have a native token — has seen a surge in activity and total value locked, compared to competing rollups, according to Gracy Chen from crypto exchange Bitget.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">As of June 18th, the ZK rollup competition reveals two prominent characteristics: 1️⃣ zksync Era is the clear leader in all aspects, rightfully claiming the first spot. 2️⃣ zkEVM has slower capital accumulation but exhibits higher user activity. source <a href="https://twitter.com/DuneAnalytics?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DuneAnalytics</a> <a href="https://t.co/nxElWF2PJv">pic.twitter.com/nxElWF2PJv</a>&mdash; Gracy Chen @Bitget (@GracyBitget) <a href="https://twitter.com/GracyBitget/status/1671089025543798787?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 20, 2023</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Hyperchains can natively support decentralized sequencers using any existing consensus algorithm. ZkSync Era itself expects to switch away from its currently centralized sequencer to a decentralized option, “and will make its code available to the Hyperchain developers,” according to <a href="https://medium.com/matter-labs/introduction-to-hyperchains-fdb33414ead7" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a blog post</a> on hyperchains.



The first hyperchains are expected to go live later this year, but developers are encouraged to begin experimenting, so that once the requisite changes to zkSync Era are in place, they will be able to easily deploy their customized chains.



Updated June 26, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET: Added comment and context from OP Labs.



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ZkSync launches rival to Optimism’s OP Stack

The team at Matter Labs, developers of Ethereum layer-2 rollup zkSync published a “ZK Credo” document on its GitHub page Friday, outlining a vision for the “Internet of Value.”



It’s “a sort of manifesto,” CEO Alex Gluchowski told Blockworks. “A set of guiding principles that we see necessary for blockchain networks to embody.”



According to the document, zero-knowledge proof technology will be needed and specifically, on Ethereum, which “comes closest to realizing the vision,” according to <a href="https://github.com/zksync/credo">the document</a>.



“It&#8217;s not rhetoric,” Gluchowski said. “We&#8217;re coming with a very specific set of principles with very strict definitions as a North star for our community to judge are we on the right track or not.”



Most of the principles are familiar to all advocates of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/measuring-decentralization-is-your-crypto-decentralized">decentralized</a> public blockchains, such as <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#trustless">trustlessness</a>, security, reliability and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/censorship">censorship-resistance</a>.



But some are still aspirational for Ethereum, such as privacy, scalability — or what zkSync calls “hyperscalability” — accessibility, especially relative to centralized alternatives, and sovereignty.



This last criteria, sovereignty, may be underappreciated. The ZK Credo calls it “a moral obligation” defined as the property that “any group of users, even a minority, must have the right to exit — i.e., fork away from the network, while taking their assets with them at a minimal cost.”



To explain, the document draws a parallel to Web2 and the history of the internet as “a cautionary tale.”



“Its inception promised decentralization, but over time user data and traffic fell into the control of a few tech giants, shaping the digital landscape to their advantage,” the document says.



A <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-2-deployed-outside-us">similar, albeit more platform specific, vision statement</a> from Polygon last week referred to a notion of the “value layer” as “the missing piece of an Internet that serves users, not gate-keepers, rent-seekers or middle-men.”



One criticism sometimes <a href="https://twitter.com/_Checkmatey_/status/1555719158343532545">leveled</a> against Ethereum is that it has the potential to be co-opted by powerful interests, such as a major stablecoin issuer or dominant liquid staking protocol. Ethereum co-found Vitalik Buterin <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/dont-overuse-social-consensus-vitalik-warns">recently mused</a> on the risk of overreliance on the community’s social consensus decision-making.



But Gluchowski downplays such fears.



“I think people underestimate the power of the community,” he said, citing the events of Circle’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-stand-behind-usdc">USDC losing its peg</a> to the dollar in March as a prime example.



“All the rest of DeFi continued working fine — everything was still operational,” Gluchowski said. “We saw that the Ethereum systems — decentralized systems — turned out to be inherently much more resilient than this, allegedly, very powerful entity.”



Gluchowski, who grew up in Ukraine and immigrated to Germany as an adult, recently <a href="https://youtu.be/CdGsULWg6-4?t=61">described</a> to The Defiant how his interest in technology and freedom and their role in building a prosperous society, attracted him to Ethereum.



“If the community commits to forking away if the core principles of the decentralized networks — of the internet of value — are compromised, and there is a strong credible commitment to this, no one will attempt to compromise these principles,&#8221; he told Blockworks.



“The users will say, we&#8217;re going to exit no matter what.”



ZKSync <a href="https://twitter.com/zksync/status/1672224311057285120?s=20">pitches</a> its statement of principles as non-exclusive, belonging to “the entire Web3 ecosystem.”



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‘ZK embodies integrity, privacy and magic’: Matter Labs

Zero-knowledge rollup solution zkSync Era has added its first liquid staking protocol, Rocket Pool, to its network.&nbsp;



ZkSync Era <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksyncs-evm-era-opens-to-the-public">first launched</a> on Ethereum in March. Including Rocket Pool, 58 projects are now live and operating on the layer-2 solution.



Users will have the ability to stake ether (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/eth">ETH</a>) on Era through holding <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/reth">rETH</a> in their wallets, with staking rewards accruing automatically, just like on mainnet. 



Nick Ashley, Rocket Pool’s marketing manager, told Blockworks that Rocket Pool has had to face specific challenges that present themselves in keeping the protocol running smoothly while staying true to the ethos of decentralization and remaining permissionless.&nbsp;



“These include shuttling validator statuses and balances from the Beacon Chain to the Execution Layer, monitoring for protocol compliance, and calculating rewards,” Ashley said.



The liquid staking derivative is keeping a close eye on industry developments, whether that’s distributed validator technology or zero-knowledge (zk) proof technology, Ashley noted.



Following its deployment on Era, Rocket Pool’s research team has been looking into how zk proof technology could assist in the competing oracle tasks in an even more decentralized way than it is currently.



“Potential benefits include lower costs, increased efficiency and reliability, and an overall more streamlined system,” Ashley said. “But at the same time, this is juxtaposed with an abundance of caution and strong safety culture.”



The liquid staking derivative is currently also deployed on optimistic rollups Arbitrum and Optimism, and Ashley remains cautious about deploying on new networks.&nbsp;



“The main factors that would be considered when choosing which network to launch on are whether there are similar shared core values […] we are committed to helping the ecosystem to grow and scale while also remaining secure and decentralized. We are always open to considering a launch elsewhere but don&#8217;t have any immediate plans right now.&#8221;



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zkSync Era Welcomes its First Liquid Staking Protocol

Ethereum has a new scaling solution reaching public mainnet, going live Friday. ZkSync’s EVM-compatible zero-knowledge proof-based rollup is open to the public from 10:00 am ET.



The zkEVM, which <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/matter-labs-rebrands-zkevm">rebranded to zkSync Era</a> last month, has been open to developers-only <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-sharpens-role-ethereum-200m-funding">since October 2022</a>. But now the proverbial training wheels are coming off and the public will have their first chance to interact with dapps on the platform.



ZkSync Era was previously known as zkSync 2.0, and its 1.0 cousin, launched by developer Matter Labs in December 2020, remains live as zkSync Lite.



A rival zkEVM from Polygon was <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-zkevm-beta-live-on-ethereum">announced in mid-February</a> and its equivalent offering, which the team calls “Mainnet Beta,” is expected to go live on Monday, March 27.



So, the zkSync folks can lay claim to being “the world’s first zkEVM mainnet,” if only by a weekend.



Matter Labs’ co-founder and CEO Alex Gluchowski told Blockworks the timing is coincidental, and Era’s alpha launch milestone is arriving right on schedule, following the completion of a second public <a href="http://code4rena.com/contests/2023-03-zksync-era-system-contracts-contest">security contest</a> via Code4rena.



“Now we feel completely safe to launch,” Gluchowski said, stressing that the testing of the product has been extensive.



The developers spent $3.8 million on testing and auditing, according to a statement shared with Blockworks, including seven independent security audits — <a href="https://blog.openzeppelin.com/zksync-layer-1-audit/">one</a> with leading auditor OpenZeppelin — and an open-ended bug bounty program <a href="https://immunefi.com/bounty/zksyncera/">with Immunefi</a>.



“You really need this layered approach to security,” Gluchowski said, adding, “Now we feel comfortable, but I mean it’s still Alpha — people have to understand it’s still brand new technology.”



He pointed to the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/euler-bounty-defi-flash-loan-attack">recent exploit of Euler Finance</a>, whose smart contracts were audited by a reputable firm and were live for the better part of a year, as an example of how audits alone aren’t enough.



The combination of external and internal audits, public security contests and bug bounties and a developer gated release, Gluchowki thinks should be industry standard practice.



The zkSync Era code is also fully <a href="https://github.com/matter-labs/zksync-era">open-source</a>, including the prover, which the team <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zksync-sharpens-role-ethereum-200m-funding">sees as a competitive differentiator</a>.



“We open-sourced everything the moment we opened the network to developers — as we promised — under a permissive MIT Apache 2 License,” Gluchowski said, explaining the rationale is that they “believe it’s fundamental to crypto have the code open-source and forkable, because that’s tied to the ethos and values of Ethereum.”



Another key feature is native <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/what-are-smart-contract-wallets">account abstraction</a>, which will allow Era users to pay transaction fees in any token or even let dapp developers pay users’ fees.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Looking forward: Decentralization</h2>



There remain guardrails in place, such as a delay period for withdrawals, initially set to 24 hours, but which will be reduced gradually, Gluchowski said.



“In the initial phase, we will be still running the sequencer [and] we have the right to upgrade the contracts — it’s not yet fully decentralized,” he said.



The plan is to follow a similar approach to that of zkSync Lite, which has a <a href="https://blog.matter-labs.io/security-council-2-0-2337a555f17a" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">security council</a> that supervises protocol upgrades.



“We can’t guarantee that there are no problems, we encourage people to experiment slowly,” Gluchowski said.



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ZkSync’s zkEVM ‘Era’ Opens to the Public

The Ethereum layer-2 scaling race has just gotten tighter.



Pre-registered projects are now able to deploy Matter Labs’ latest zero knowledge (zk) roll-up technology on the Ethereum network.



To differentiate the distinct versions of their scaling solutions, Matter Labs has rebranded zkSync 1.0 to zkSync Lite and zkSync 2.0 to zkSync Era, the latter allowing dapps compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).



ZkSync Lite saw lackluster adoption compared to other layer-2s due to the lack of smart contract support, leaving it with minimal utility, <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Blockworks Research</a> analyst <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/research?author=sam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sam Martin</a> noted in a <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/research/zksync-a-peek-into-the-future-of-ethereum" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">report</a>.&nbsp;



Dubbed the Fair Onboarding Alpha Stage, this will be the final stage before zkSync Era becomes fully available for all projects on Ethereum mainnet.&nbsp;



This stage will last roughly four to six weeks before Full Launch Alpha, given that there are no security considerations, Anthony Rose, the head of engineering at Matter Labs, told Blockworks.&nbsp;



During this time, mainnet will be closed to end users, enabling projects to deploy and test their applications in a closed environment, Shazia Hasan, protocol marketing lead at Matter Labs wrote in a <a href="https://blog.matter-labs.io/all-aboard-zksync-era-mainnet-8b8964ba7c59" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog post</a>.&nbsp;



ZkSync Era will be completely open source — though Matter Labs does not advise forking the code now, as there may still be security updates that need to be addressed.



Rose does not envision a prover standard to emerge following the launch of ZkSync Era, but notes that “you could imagine a world in which there are the standard network effects — perhaps ~1-2 main players, space for a handful of smaller players — and it isn’t a given that a single prover is required for this scenario.”



“That being said, there are obvious benefits from standardization and our plans for <a href="https://blog.matter-labs.io/zksync-l3-pathfinder-to-hit-testnet-in-q1-2023-367a425592db" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hyperchains</a> are possible due to (in part) some functionality that is possible when you share a proof system,” Rose said.



Hyperchains are what Matter Labs calls layer-3 blockchains that the team says “will enable limitless scaling with limitless customization,” according to a <a href="https://blog.matter-labs.io/zksync-l3-pathfinder-to-hit-testnet-in-q1-2023-367a425592db" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog</a> post.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Fierce competition for roll-up technology solutions&nbsp;</h2>



Matter Lab’s launch of Era comes just two days after layer-2 scaling giant Polygon Labs announced that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/polygon-zkevm-beta-live-on-ethereum">its zkEVM solution would go live on Ethereum</a> mainnet next month.



This latest deployment “marks another milestone in zk rollup development as teams from Polygon, Scroll, Taiko, and others get closer to a fully fleshed out zkEVM fully accessible to everyone,” Martin said.



Unlike Polygon’s zkEVM which has been classified as a <a href="https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">type-3</a> by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Era is classified as a <a href="https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/08/04/zkevm.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">type-4</a> zkEVM.&nbsp;



This is because “it takes high-level smart contract source code written in Solidity and compiles it to a more zk-SNARK friendly language,” Martin said.



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Matter Labs Rebrands zkEVM, Opens Mainnet for Developers

Good software development takes money and time. Despite the present crypto winter — generally regarded as having started in late May but turned blizzard by <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/?s=ftx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FTX going bust</a> — venture capital has <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/tag/funding/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">continued to flow</a> into blockchain startups.



That may change now, as the full extent of the FTX contagion is just starting to emerge. But if it does, then Matter Labs, developers of Ethereum layer-2 zkSync, may have gotten in under the wire.



The company announced a $200 million Series C, Wednesday, co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant, plus Andreessen Horowitz and other prior venture partners.



Read More: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-rollups-future-of-smart-contract-blockchains">What Are ZK Rollups? The Future of Smart Contract Blockchains</a>



Throw in Matter Labs’ $58 million in venture funding from its Series B and earlier rounds, and a previously announced — though not yet delivered — $200 million ecosystem fund <a href="https://discourse.bitdao.io/t/passed-bip-7-zkdao-accelerating-the-mass-adoption-of-crypto-for-financial-sovereignty/1546" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">from BitDAO</a>, and the company claims $458 million in total funding lined up.



That should see the project through even the darkest winter days, according to chief product officer Steve Newcomb.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“No matter how bad this bear market gets, we are well positioned to grow our team, ship our protocol, and ship our mission,” he said.</blockquote>



The stated mission is “to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto for personal sovereignty,” according to a statement, one which Newcomb said is simpatico with Ethereum itself.



In an interview with Blockworks, Newcomb embraced the concept of the “network state” featured in Balaji Srinivasan’s book of the same name. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin <a href="https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">has called it</a> “an ideological successor to libertarianism,” and “an attempt to sketch out a possible broader political narrative for the crypto space.”



Newcomb describes Matter Labs’ approach as the “Mission to Citizen model,” which prioritizes the overall development of Ethereum above “any normal competitive advantage that you could go after.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The battle to out-open-source the competition</h3>



In blockchain software stacks, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/security-through-obscurity" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">security through obscurity</a> is a losing strategy. Open source software went from “a cancer” <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">derided by</a> Microsoft’s CEO in 2001 to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20131003190011-29380071-the-cloudera-model/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">becoming the norm</a> in little more than a decade. It’s been <a href="https://www.coincenter.org/education/advanced-topics/open-source/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a key part</a> of the crypto ethos since the beginning.



The “ZK” in zkSync refers to zero knowledge proofs. <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/news/defi-is-betting-big-on-zero-knowledge-is-the-technology-ready/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rollups using the technique</a> bundle transactions, drastically reducing the amount of data needed to be passed to mainnet Ethereum while preserving a high level of security, proponents say.



The intended end result is an ecosystem that can reliably handle more transactions, faster.



Matter Labs is one of several teams vying to build ZK-rollup-based scaling solutions compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). ZkSync 2.0 went live on mainnet on Oct. 28. Others include <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/?s=polygon">Po</a><a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/?s=polygon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">l</a><a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/?s=polygon">ygon</a> with its <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/news/polygon-unveils-zkevm-the-holy-grail-of-scaling/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">zkEVM</a>, unveiled in July, Scroll and new entrant Taiko which are still early in their development.



<a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/tag/starkware/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">StarkWare</a> doesn’t support dapps written for the EVM and instead has pursued its own approach to an execution layer which is theoretically more scalable. Loopring, which <a href="https://medium.loopring.io/loopring-launches-zkrollup-exchange-loopring-io-d6a85beeed21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">launched</a> a ZK-rollup exchange way back in February 2020 also falls into this category.



A key component of all <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-rollups-future-of-smart-contract-blockchains">ZK-rollups</a> is the “prover,” which essentially guarantees correctness in the system as transactions are processed. Part of today’s announcement from zkSync is that it will apply an MIT Open Source license to the whole technology stack — including the prover — sometime before the end of 2022.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“It will be the first time that a general-purpose ZK-rollup’s technology is released that offers developers the freedom to 1) view the code 2) modify the code and 3) fork the code,” Matter Labs said in a statement.</blockquote>



StarkWare is only partly open source and uses <a href="https://starkware.co/starkware-polaris-prover-license/">a more restrictive license</a>.



Building a prover is “a Herculean task in terms of math, engineering and software,” StarkWare president Eli Ben-Sasson, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/news/defi-is-betting-big-on-zero-knowledge-is-the-technology-ready/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">previously told</a> Blockworks. “We have a team of 100 and have been at it for four years.”



Polygon told Blockworks by email that its prover “does not currently have an open source license as it undergoes audits,” but added, “it will be freely licensed in the future.”



The Polygon team also said “the best way to verify that a team has a working prover is to examine source code,” noting that it has already published its zkEVM in full.



Having a fully open source prover increases the chances that an Ethereum rollup ecosystem will form around one shared prover, Newcomb said, which would bring benefits such as obviating the need for <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/?s=bridge" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bridges</a>.



What if Polygon or StarkWare opt to adopt MIT open source standards too?



“It would be huge!” Newcomb said. Such a development “guarantees that a mission driven prover is the prover that wins.”



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Dapps and decentralization</h3>



Both Polygon and zkSync have major DeFi projects planning to deploy on their respective zkEVMs, such as Uniswap, Aave, Curve and Chainlink.



In fact, Matter Labs says it has received commitments from more than 150 projects for its “Full Alpha Launch,” planned to coincide with the February 2023 ETH Denver conference, making it the “largest in history” for any layer-2 blockchain.



The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/matter-labs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">per Crunchbase</a>, with co-founders <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gluchowski/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alex Gluchowski</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandr-vlasov-4863404a/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alexandr Vlasov</a> located in Dubai, UAE, and Montreal, Canada, respectively.



While some rollup projects have issued a token as part of their rollout — such as <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/tag/optimism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Optimism</a> (OP) and, most recently, <a href="https://medium.com/starkware/starknet-token-is-deployed-on-ethereum-f27f0000b00c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">StarkWare&#8217;s Starknet (STRK)</a> — zkSync does not, and Newcomb said that among all Ethereum L-2s they will likely be the last to have a token.



“Decentralization” is on the team’s <a href="https://blog.matter-labs.io/baby-alpha-has-arrived-5b10798bc623" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">roadmap</a> for 2023, but they have no plans to follow others’ approach by launching a DAO or foundation, he said.



EVM-compatibility in a ZK-rollup is seen as a breakthrough technology thanks to the network effects of Ethereum — things like dapps, wallets, developer tooling, infrastructure — and one that was expected to take years to develop. Optimistic rollups, led by Arbitrum and Optimism have been <a href="https://medium.com/cortexlabs/wtf-is-zk-rollup-b7b8c7224700">viewed</a> by developers as a stepping stone. But <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/news/polygon-and-matter-labs-compete-on-zkevm-rollups/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">competing teams</a> and years of research have accelerated the timeline to the point that we now have two ZK-based EVM implementations just months away from being live and ready for ordinary users.



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