Bankless - EthCC #4 | "The Polygon zkEVM Frontier" - Mihailo Bjelic

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

🇫🇷 Welcome to the Bankless EthCC 2022 Experience 🇫🇷 With fantastic guests from all corners of the ecosystem, this 8-part series is an exploration of crypto culture and the current state of Ethereum. In episode 4, Mihailo Bjelic joins us to discuss the announcement of Polygon’s zkEVM. This explosive headline comes alongside three other zkEVM announcements.  Why now? What does this all mean?! ------ 📣Rhino.Fi | Massive Mystery Airdrop https://bit.ly/3o9trRE ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: WAGMI https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Polygon zkEVM Announcements 6:50 How it Works 10:00 Road to Maine 15:30 EVM Equivalence 19:30 EthCC 2021 ------ Resources: Mihailo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic Polygon: https://twitter.com/0xPolygon ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Welcome Bank of the Station back to the ETH-C-ECC experience. We are almost halfway through. This one is with me, Holo, from Polygon. Polygon was super hyping up their announcement, which they announced at the ETHC number six conference, which was their ZK-EVM. And as it turns out, fate would have it decide that they were actually just one of three teams

that decided to release their ZKEVM during ETHC week. ECC is big like that in the sense that people wait to release their announcements for ECC, they like rush to get their thing announced at ECC. ECC is actually quite a big deal as far as conferences go. And Polygon waited for ECC to release their ZKEVM, but the ZKEVM wars are on. So we talked to Mahalo about everything they're doing with the ZKEVM at Polygon and of course all the other peripheral topics around Polygon. And there's a fun little backstory because I was hanging out with me, Hollow at the last ECC, which is really where the ZKEVM announcement really got incepted

behind the scenes way back when with a phone call, which I was just like sitting with my good friend, Mariano Conti, having a beer with Usri and Mahalo when he received a phone call. Fast forward one later, they release a ZKEVM TestNet as a fallout of that phone call. So it's a fun little story. So we tell this story and more in this fantastic episode of the ECC experience. Each one of these ECC episodes is being recorded separately for optimum candy for you, the listener. But usually we do our full pre-recorded ads, but instead I'm going to do them all right here right now super fast. So here we go. One of the big themes of ETHCC week was the launch of the ZKEVM.

Three different teams all launched their test net. And while everyone is trying to claim who was first, we can confidently say that ZK Sync has been focused on the ZKEVM for the longest. The golden end game of the ZKEVM has been the vision of ZK. Sink since the beginning. And during ETHCC week, they launched their 100 days to Mainnet plan, which is now already down to 93 days. So if you're going to join the ZKEVM Wars,

make sure you post about it on Lens. the first decentralized social networking graph. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto, but on lens, we say not your keys, not your content. Own your own social media handle, choose your own algorithm, and mint your profile using the secret code word in the show notes. And something that's likely going to be talked about on lens is, of course, the Ethereum merge.

And the merge is why you should be staking your ETH with Rocket Pool. It's a decentralized Ethereum validator network where you deposit ETH and get your REth in return, and then you can take that REth into DFI. And if you run a node, you can let other people to be able to, deposit their eth into your node and you earn 15% of their staking commission as payment for your node operating services. And then maybe you want to take your REEth over to Arbitrum. For all of your defy things, Arbitrum is where you have to be. With over 35,000 contracts deployed and 1 million unique addresses, Arbitrum is leading the way into the age of roll-ups. You know how I know all these

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bankless. And now I bring you my conversation in person with Mihalo from Polygon. What's that, Mahalo? How's it going? Hello, David. Just all over the place with all the great announcements coming from the Polygon side. And yeah, thanks for taking your time to chat. Oh, of course, of course. Every time I see you at a conference, you're always moving a mile a minute. And it's always because you have something to announce. Yes, fortunately, it's like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good place to be in. So what is it this time, Mahalo? What did you guys announce this time? We are very, very excited. a very big day for Polygon. I would say it's probably the single most important event ever since we announced Polygon. Today, as you probably know, and as some people already saw the news,

we announced ZKEVM. So Polygon is the first project that actually shipped ZKVM, which is basically considered the holy grail of scaling. So ZKVM, for those who don't know, is basically a ZK-friendly EVM implementation, and EVM is, as most of us know, I guess, Ethereum virtual machine, the core execution component of the Ethereum itself. And for quite some time, we have been kind of as a community pursuing this holy grail of scaling that is going to have these three major, very important features in one. One is, of course, Ethereum compatibility or ideally VM equivalence, which is even a step further.

We ideally want, we all know Ethereum is absolutely dominant in terms of developer, mine share, in terms of tooling, the maturity of the ecosystem and everything. And we, of course, want to leverage that. We want to stand on the shoulders of the giants, of the giant, and we don't want to waste all that great amount of work that the community has put so far in Ethereum and building all these tools and bullets and everything that we currently use. So with EVM equivalence, we get to leverage all that and keep the same developer experience that developers are used to, same programming languages, same developer environments, etc.

So that's what ideally we want. That's the first major feature. The second major feature is, of course, security. So we know Ethereum is the most secure programmable blockchain in the world. And ideally, of course, we want to leverage that security because in layer twos, we still have millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, and we really need highest level of security, and that is what Ethereum gives us. So ideally, we want to leverage that.

And the third major feature is scaling, of course. We need to scale significantly. We need to scale orders of magnitude. if you really want mass adoption and if you want to onboard billion plus people to Ethereum. So this was that holy grail that ZK AVM has been representing until today, basically. And we are very fortunate and incredibly humble

that we were able to actually ship it. It's full featured. It's fully open source, which is very, very important. Anyone can take a look at the code, examine. Make sure, first of all, that it's really a full-blown EVM implementation with all the important top codes and everything. And then, of course, we want this to be a community effort. And like everything that Polygon has done so far,

everything is, as I said, fully open source. We invite community to take a look at what we have built in the background throughout this past year to give us feedbacks. We expect contributions from other community members. So, yes, all in all, very exciting moment. Yeah, okay. So a ZK MVM, like you said, is considered, like, there are no further, like, scaling, like, degrees beyond a ZK EVM.

And since it's a development, developer conversation, this can take me a few questions to like really fully unpack this. So, you know, there's general consensus that a ZK roll-up is like the end state, kind of as we said. It's that EVM part that's the difficult part. We have like application-specific ZK roll-up so far, like Z-YDX chain used to be this. We had like Diversify used to be like a Stark X, like app-specific chain. A few others, like Immutable X used to be at a Stark X, app-specific EVM chain. It's that generalizability, which is the ZK EVM.

so the Ethereum virtual machine inside of a zero knowledge roll-up. And so that's what we're talking about. And so that's been like the end goal. What was actually shipped today? Like a main net? There is a road to main net that today announced. Of course, any sort of main net is very high responsibility, especially given that we're really seeing huge level of interest for ZKVM.

Everyone would like to try it. Everyone would like to deploy. People will transfer capital. So we want, today we announced this road to main net. Today we announced the code. Okay. We shared it with the world. The test net, internal test net, is basically days away, probably a week or something like that.

Fully permissionless public test net is weeks away, probably one month, roughly, one month, month and a half. It depends on several factors, but it will be live in a matter of weeks. And after that, the main net. Between public test net and the main net, we really want public scrutiny, we really want multiple audits. We really want battle tested test net that has been proved. quite a while. So it will definitely take several months, two to three months, I think. So we're basically targeting end of the year for the final main and release. Gotki has been released today is the code itself and everyone can actually see that we have

basically re-implemented the whole EVM, which was, as you said, exactly, the tough nut to crack, basically. Proving some of these expensive opcodes of Ethereum like Keckakak, ECDSA and some others was really, really hard to the point that some people were quite. Questioning, is it even practically possible? We were very fortunate that these great teams that we have under the polygon umbrella, Polygon Hermes, Polygon Zero, and Polygon Myden, there has been several cryptographic and engineering breakthroughs, very major ones.

For example, on the zero side, Polygon Zero side introduced this Plancky 2, which was the fastest recursive prover in the industry, basically. Goldilocks fields, which is this very specific arithmetic field that has some very interesting properties and allows us to get some, very significant efficiency improvements. So combining these breakthroughs and really great collaboration between these teams for the past 12 months, we have been able to crack this hard to implement top codes. And yes, we are like incredibly fortunate.

Amazing. Yeah, excited that this happened. What happened today was the starting pistol for the road to main net. So you guys published your code for like public peer review. People get to look under the hood. It's like it's finished code. including the Prover, which is the hardest part, the whole EV implementation and the Prover, everything is open source, everything, and it's full feature.

Right. Okay. So you've also published this, and like other people can take this code and run with it, if they so choose. In a sense that anyone can obviously use the code, examine the code. On the license itself, we are still deciding. It's definitely going to be an open source license. As I said, we open source the code today, and we definitely make it available to everyone

to reuse moving forward. We're just deciding when the exact open source. license format that we will help. It's definitely going to be the contribution to the community that people will be able to use. Okay, so code is out there. People get to look under the hood. People get to judge it. Make sure it's all there. There's going to be a devnet, sometimes soon, which sounds like a permission test net. So like let some early people in there start to try and break things. Then an actual test net comes later after that. And so public test net, permissionless test net, everyone gets to come and try and break this thing or start to build

their app or just do something. And then after that, kind of like the Ethereum test nets, after that gets like tried out in the wild for a little bit. We get more data. We get more feedback. We start to like polish off some edges. Then we'll go to main net. And now we have a fully public permission list, ZK, EVM on Mainnet. Exactly.

Exactly. And just I guess relatively important thing to note there is that what is ahead of us now is, I would say, a standard web-free software release process. There are no engineering challenges, no cryptographic challenges. This was the challenging part, proving this. these complicated dog codes, cracking that whole thing up, the whole EVM, basically, the whole implementation, that was the tough part. Now is basically just a more or less routine process of reaching the main net itself. That's certainly exciting. What we've been talking about on

bank this, I've already brought this up in a number of interviews, but we're in this like bear market, but we're not going to get out of it until we build our way out of the bare market. So we must build and like a ZK EVM can start to like produce some of this, solve some of the UX issues, at the top level for like, you know, instant transaction speeds, basically like zero transaction fees? Is that fair? Start discussing transaction fees. You can technically allow zero fee transactions, but then you have this spam problem, which was why the fees were introduced in Ethereum in the first place. But we are definitely discussing negligible transaction fees. You can easily, I guess,

compensate the transaction fees for users, but then again, you have this spam issue that maybe can be also addressed. It's a thing to discuss and consider. either. Certainly. If there isn't compensated fees, like I'm the user and I'm going to pay the transaction fee and I need to send you some ether, can we guesstimate how much that can cost? Currently, for us to actually produce, when you take everything into account, the computing power that you need to actually generate the proofs, when you take all the running, I guess, operational costs of this solution that we have, I can give you the exact figure, but it's $0.0087. Is less than a penny is the actual operational cost.

that we have to process the transaction, to generate proofs and everything. And also worth noting that this is the first iteration of the K-EVM. We have clear idea and clear part how we're going to improve the efficiency of the KVM. It was about proving that this is possible, basically, because no one was certain. Even us, you know, in certain times, we were questioning, you know, this is really too hard not to crack. But it was really important to prove that it is actually possible. Now when we have proven it, there are at least four. major ways how we can improve and how we are improving ZKVM.

Improve the cryptography itself. We have a very, very strong cryptographic team now. Improve the code itself. Optimize it, use optimal programming languages, et cetera. Pipeline the Provers. When you have a Prover that takes one minute to generate proof, you can pipeline 20 of them, and then instead of one minute, you have three seconds. The four thing is actually hardware acceleration.

We're also working on that very actively. That's not publicly known, I guess. but we have both GPU focused and FPGA focused efforts to accelerate on the hardware level itself. So there's four major ways how we can further improve the KVM. But current cost to actually process one transaction and prove it is, as I said, a little bit less than one cent. Well, yeah, so the base resource cost is less than a penny. So like maybe there's like a, because the fee market gets to like a penny or so. Yes, it's up to market then.

Like it might reach two pennies. Two or three pennies. Oh, no. What it can be. in the market. I mean, yeah. The other really exciting thing you said is the EVM equivalence aspect of this, which is something that I went down that rabbit hole and came out very, very appreciative

of what EVM equivalence is. And just to speed run the listener through that, you have EVM equivalence versus EVM compatibility. And EVM equivalence is like the true copy and pacing of code without having to change anything. Like the EVM stack is one-to-one comparable, where EVM compatibility is like, I might be fludging this, but like the bytecode works, but like, pretty much. but producing that by code is like a little different and like you need a different developer tooling.

So with this EVM equivalent status of this EVM chain, you get to just port over the developer ecosystem, like whatever that means, like compiling tools and like solidity tools. I'm a little bit out of my element here talking about this, but like I kind of get the gist. When you launch this ZK EVM mainnet, you have everything else that all the other developers are familiar with on other EVM chains as well, like out of the box.

Yes, you're leveraging the whole. whole ecosystem, which is very, very important, as we all know. So what you are doing, we're discussing EVM equivalence. You're basically re-implementing the EVM, the way it should be implemented. It's like almost like you're implementing a new Ethereum know. Like you literally take the official EVM specification and you go op-code by op-code. You're literally implementing the EVM, but this CVM is ZK-friendly. So to say, in the background, it is able to generate ZK proofs for batches of transactions.

Otherwise, it's a normal EVM. It's implemented like Get EVM, like Erigone EVM. It literally follows the same specification. That's one thing. You just implement all the Ethereum RPC methods. Currently, we're actually running official Ethereum tests. There are thousands of tests that every client, for example, that wants to join the network should actually pass.

Currently, ZKVM is passing, the client is passing around 30% of the tests, but we just started. Like, we're very confident that the percentage is going to go up very, very quickly. So basically, if you implement all the RPC methods, you follow the official EVM specification, you pass all the Ethereum tests, you're very much Ethereum equivalent. That's what you want to ideally have. Right. And just to really illustrate why this is so powerful is that if something is EVM equivalent on one layer two or on the Ethereum layer one, you can instantly just take that whole thing that you've built and put it on any other EVM chain instantly. So like all the apps that are built on any other EVM equivalent chain work on all the other EVM equivalent chain. So like we get, there's tailwinds in the development labor when you work on an EVM equivalent chain. Exactly.

What's the name of this thing? I know there's always like a name for every single Polygon chain. What's the name of this one? It's still being discussed to be honest. You know, like also one, that gives me a good segue. Polygon Hermes officially shipped ZKVM. Okay. Very important to understand that this was really a collaborative process of almost one year of very

exciting collaboration between Polygon Hermes, Polygon Zero and Polygon Mid. And there was literally zero competition between these teams and 100% collaboration. And it was really amazing. We still have regular weekly calls between the teams, daily asynchronous communication. Every month or two we have in-person workshops, basically somewhere around the world. So for me, personally, it was really an amazing experience watching these smart people collaborate. And the reason I'm saying this is, that's also Polygon Hermes. People feel very grateful to these other two teams for all the help and contributions.

So that's why we're discussing currently the name that would maybe unified or symbolize that really this was a team effort. I remember ECC last year, Mahalo. It was you, me and Mariano, and we were getting drinks after the conference was over. And then you went and disappeared for like five or ten minutes to take a phone call. And then you came back and sat down the table just super excited. And you wouldn't and you couldn't tell me and Mariano what it was. But then like a couple days later. I told you.

Or I couldn't. You said something about we acquired a ZK. A-EV or a ZK team, but you couldn't give us all the details. And then like three days later, it announced that Polygon had acquired Hermes. I was like, oh, that's what that call was. Yes, in retrospect, it's, yeah. It's crazy how much has happened in a year. Yes, yes, very, very crazy timeline.

So with all layer twos, there's always like a token staking component, maybe not always, but that's kind of where we assume this is going. And I'm assuming Maddoch is the token that gets staked to validate this chain. Yes, and currently also there's so many things happening in, Polygon at every single moment. We are currently redesigning the token. That is something that is also actively happening as we speak. Basically, the Matic ticker is probably the last legacy of the previous project.

Because Maddox doesn't make any sense anymore. Yes, and we intentionally kept it that way because when we announced Polygon, it wasn't just a mirror rebranding. It was really a symbol for us of this pivot in the vision and this new vision, grand vision that we had. And we wanted to do the same with the token. We intentionally kept it the same ticker and the same design until we were actually confident that Polygon as a project and the vision has product market fit.

And now we are ready to actually upgrade the token, actually, to something that will reflect where a polygon is. And then we have made certain adjustments that will make it, I guess, a powerful utility and very important component of the Polygon Svider vision. Amazing. Well, Mahalo, what are you going to announce next year at NextC? That's too long of the framework. We can talk in two weeks. Yeah, it's genuinely, like, hard for me to perceive.

Like, what to do in 12 months? Awesome. Well, Mahalo. Thank you for coming on and sharing the story. Thank you so much, David, for pulling our work always. Of course. Thanks so much.