Bankless - Polygon zkEVM Launch with Mihailo Bjelic and Jordi Baylina

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Ryan talks to Polygon's Mihailo and Jordi about the launch of their zkEVM!  ------ 📣 Infura | New SDK for NFT APIs For Devs https://bankless.cc/Infura  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://www.bankless.com/dashboard  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  👻 PHANTOM | FRIENDLY MULTICHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist  🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:58 Polygon zkEVM 10:40 What Polygon zkEVM Unlocks? 16:40 Polygon zkEVM vs. PoS  18:20 Polygon PoS Chain 22:24 Cost Per Transaction 24:30 Optimistic Rollup vs. zkEVM 29:37 Polygon Ecosystem 38:06 Polygon zkEVM Value Proposition  46:00 Risks of New Tech 54:15 $MATIC 56:20 Closing, Resources, & Disclaimers  ------ Resources: Mihailo https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic  Jordi https://twitter.com/jbaylina   Polygon Labs Launches zkEVM Layer 2 https://www.theblock.co/post/222950/polygon-labs-unveils-zkevm-layer-2-scaling-solution  https://wiki.polygon.technology/docs/zkEVM/develop/  ------ 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. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. We're talking today about scaling Ethereum with the Polygon ZK EVM that was just announced today. David couldn't make it for this episode, so I am solo with Mahalo and Jordi from the Polygon ZKEVM project. Really excited to dive into this conversation. A few things we're talking about. Of course, as we said before, this is ZKEVM season. We had ZK Sync on Friday. Today, the Polygon ZK.EVM is not.

now out, so we talk about it. As we get into this episode, we're about to discuss what just dropped today, so what you can use today. And we discuss ZK roll-ups versus optimistic roll-ups, which ones are better, and for what purposes. We also discuss what happens to the Polygon proof of stake chain. We discuss the new frontiers in opportunities that this unlocks. And of course, we talk about the future of thematic token. One disclosure before we get in, I am an advisor to the Polygon Project, been supportive of this project for a long time and excited to see what they're doing here. Okay, guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Polygon. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including

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or you can go to phantom. com slash waitlist to get access in late February. Bankless Nation, I'm super excited to introduce. you yet again to Mahalo, who is the co-founder of Polygon, and also Jordi, who is the technical lead for Polygon Hermes, otherwise known as the Polygon ZKEVM. Jordi, Mahalo, how are you guys doing today? Very good. You guys just dropped something big.

We got some news. Let's start there. What just happened? The Polygon ZK. EVM, what just hit us? I'm going to hand it over to Jordi first because he's the one who's created this amazing technology. let him start and maybe i can add something well uh many is uh it's a milestone so this is a milestone

for scaling ethereum that's what's happening so uh if we go two years ago scaling ethereum was uh i mean nobody so nobody knew how to do it actually it was two years ago after a blog from vitalik that uh people start realized how to do that and then then we started with roll-ups and start talking about optimistic roll-ups, Z-K roll-ups, especially in the ZK, then we started to build, I mean, only payments for apps, but the big challenge here was to do ZKV so on Ethereum-compatible, so something that works exactly the same that Ethereum, but scales, which is what means scaling Ethereum. And here is where the challenge started, and well, we started that two years ago, not even two years ago, and has been a, I mean, a long trip in, it's a short

trip maybe in time, but it's a long trip in, in, in engineering, in going deep, in solving problems and in figuring out how to do this, how to bring this technology practical, practical. And today is, I mean, it's not the end of the road. is a milestone, but just putting this technology, creating the system, and making it available in the real system in MayNet, this is really, it's really an important achievement. And this is what's happening. I mean, this is what's happening today. And this is why we believe this is an important moment for the, for the Ethereum community. So this is an important moment for Ethereum because we've been on the quest in crypto to basically scale our trustless technology, to scale, to scale,

Ethereum for the past, what, eight years? I mean, since the inception, since Ethereum's birthday, it's been a long time. And before that, we were even trying to scale Bitcoin. And now we've come this far. We've got this new technology called ZK technology. We've built an EVM around it, so we can have ZK layer 2s that are programmable. And what just launched, as I understand it, is the Polygon ZK EVM. And when you guys say launched, do you mean on Mainnet? Is this available for users? Mahalo, What just launched this morning? What can people go do right now? Yes, it's a great question.

And it's important to state that this is an actual main net, right? So we have been running ZK Aviam on TestNet for months already with very good results. We learned a lot. We have more than, I believe, 7,000 applications and smart contracts deployed. Thousands of transactions and thousands of users have already tried TestNet with test assets, right? We are now hitting the main net. It's the actual main net and we are fulfilling, I would say, or ticking all the checkbox that you would normally expect from a full-blown main net.

So these are real actual assets bridged from layer one. The ZKVM is full-featured. We have multiple external and internal audits. Prover is running. All code is visible and with permissive open-source license. So basically, it's a full-featured complete, full-blown main net, I would say. It's important to state and Jordy can add to that this is a mainnet beta. And this is a very, very complex bleeding edge technology.

For us, it's very important in this moment. We are incredibly excited and incredibly proud that we have been able to ship this bleeding technology. And as you probably know, and many people familiar with the matter, know that estimates that it's going to take three to five years probably to ship this technology. And even then it was uncertain whether it's going to be practical, what will be the computational requirements, will we need data centers to run right this provers, how everything will turn out. We're very, very excited and very happy that we have full-featured main net with very, very practical prover. We have been running prover.

The whole test net basically is running, the prover is running on regular AWS instances that are costing us, I believe, around $2 per hour. So this is really, really practical technology. And we are very happy about all of this. But all that being said, we really want to advise caution to users of the main net. This is bleeding edge technology. This has never been shipped. Polygon is the first one to put this into production now.

We're excited about that. But users should be mindful when bridging especially larger amounts of assets to mainnet. So that's something that is very important for us to communicate. Every code, every complex code needs some time to mature. this technology will certainly need some months to become, you know, really battle tested and proven. Yeah, I want to definitely emphasize that, guys. And we'll have a time to discuss sort of security. But when Mahalo says bleeding edge, bleeding means you can get cut, right? And so, you know, be cautious as we enter here. We'll talk about security, the status now, and where you want to

evolve that to you and how it becomes safer in that trajectory. But before we do, let's talk about a user and what they can experience. on Polygon ZK EVM right now. And just to refresh people, Mahalo is absolutely right. We've been talking about the holy grail of the ZK EVM for a while. So we have some ZK technology that allows us to do sort of simple transaction-based, kind of back-and-forth, Bitcoin type of things. But we haven't had the technology previously to create a general purpose EVM,

which is the programmability that Ethereum brings to the market. And now we have that. And that's ahead of schedule. I want to emphasize that. I mean, two years ago, like the crypto world was saying, I don't know, this is five years away? Can it even be done? Is it 10 years away?

And now we're here. So that's why this is so monumental. But let's get back to kind of the users for a second. Our analogy at bank lists for a new layer two that opens is we got a theme park. Everyone's in a line to the theme park. The gates open. You can go start to use the rides. Now, right now, they may be dangerous rides.

You might have a roller coaster that kind of, you know, is tossing people off. People getting jostled around a little bit, all right? So there's some danger. But tell us about the rides. What can people do when they, you know, enter the gates of the theme park today? Do I just go and I set my metamask, you know, RPC to Polygon ZK, EVM? And then I can start using apps. What are the apps like?

What's the user experience like? Is this just like the Polygon proof of stake network? Can you tell us about that first, Mahalo? Yeah, very happy to answer that. The great thing about ZKVM and why, let's just take one step back and explain why ZKVM has been considered the Holy Grail scaling. Because it is a technology that simultaneously offers three very, very important features. One is scalability. The second one is security.

So we get to increase throughput significantly without sacrificing security. We will full-blown leverage the security of Ethereum. and the third very important component or feature is EVM compatibility or equivalence, if you will. The third component actually makes things incredibly easy for developers and users. Ethereum, EVM is the standard for web-free programming, right? And it's already a mature ecosystem. There are wallets like Metamask, developer tools like remix, hardhead, solidity is already a pretty mature language and all of that. So there is this whole ecosystem that has been built.

built around EVM. ZKVM, one fantastic thing about it is that it's completely leveraging all these tools and this whole experience. And both developers and users simply continue to use these networks in the same manner like they use Ethereum. So developers just simply take that their existing solidity contracts. They can deploy them on ZKAVM using the same tools like remix, like hardhead. There are basically no differences for developers.

for end users. End users simply connect their metamask. They submit transactions in the same manner like they would do on Ethereum. It's absolutely the same developer and end user experience with the comparable level of security and with much lower fees and much higher scalability. So, yeah, all in all, we are very, very excited and we believe this is a very important milestone. What would you add to that, Jordi? Yeah, to highlight to that because this is very important.

It's not, so we are not, so we are using. exactly the same tooling. That means that we are not maintaining a parallel version of hardhat to work in our system or a parallel version of a Metamask or a Matamal version of Solidity compiler. So we are using the Solidity, the Ethereum Solility compiler. We are using the Hard Hat. We are using whatever tooling that you have and we are using that tool. We are not maintaining any of those tools. Those tools are maintained by the third parties. And this is what defines the EBM. You know, it's like because we are executing the EBM. E is Ethereum virtual machine, okay. And this is the what's the Ethereum. So it's Ethereum virtual machine. Okay. And this is, so we are being

fully compatible with this by code. And this is what allows to, uh, uh, uh, uh, with this by code. And this is what allows to use any of this tooling, so any of the systems of Ethereum. Smart contract, you don't need to compile again the smart contract. You just take this smart contract and you deploy it there. So it's like an extension of Ethereum. It's not a new thing, it's extension of Ethereum. And this is, I mean, this simplicity, because I remember that, you say, the first time that I was doing a presentation about the ZKVM,

I feel like but because I mean, okay, you would just, you just connect to remix, you just deploy some smart contracts, everything, I mean, there was nothing new in there. People know how to deploy smart contracts. Where do you see the difference? But this is the magic. And this is a cool thing of this project, is that the users don't notice a difference

on deploying on Ethereum or in the ZKVN, except, of course, on the price and on the throughput. Is it accurate? Is it accurate to say, guys, that everything that is available, on the Polygon Proof-Stake Network, like all of the smart contracts, all of the apps, all of the things that you can do there, you can fairly easily or maybe like perfectly easily, port those over to or duplicate those on the Polygon ZKEVM.

Is that what we're talking about here? Yeah, most of them, I hear there are, I mean, I need to be, just to be very clear. there are some we have mainly we have some pre-compiled smart contracts that are not implemented yet. We are working on that and we are going to implement in the next version. We are talking about paintings or we are talking about Shadow 56 or some extended. So if your smart contract is not using this, you can just copy them. I mean, just deploy here, deploy there. The same way that you can deploy something in Polygon POS or you can deploy that in Mainnet

or you can deploy that in worldly or in any other Ethereum network, you can deploy it in ZKDM. Here there is these exceptions of these percompile smart contracts. They are not used very much, most of them. So I would say most applications should not have any problem. But we are working on that and we hope that in a few months we can extend that so that every time we're going to be more more compatible on that. So Jordy, can you...

Can you guys underline this for me? or for listeners, rather. So why would someone want to deploy on Polygon ZKEVM versus the Polygon Proof-Stake Network? Why would an app want to be there? Why would a user want to be there? Is there a difference in terms of the underlying security guarantees? Can you highlight what that difference is and tell us about that, Mahalo?

Yes, of course. So we have made this commitment a while ago that in Polygon, we will commit all our resources, all available resources to push the frontier of innovation and to ship more reliable, more performant and more secure technology. And we always have known that Polygon POS chain is not the end game, right? This is very dynamic industry, fast-evolving industry, and ZKAVM is the next generation of scaling technology that is more advanced, more secure than Polygon POS chain itself. And that's the main motivation here.

Why would someone want to migrate, for example, from Polygon POS chain to ZKVM? When we speak about mainnet, people would want to migrate from mainnet to ZKVM because there's higher throughput and there are lower fees without sacrificing security. So, yeah, all in all, this is the next generation tech. And we are not stopping here. As Jordy said, this is a very monumental, very important milestones. but we have very, very exciting plans for the future as well. This is not still the endgame, but it's a very, very important, very big milestone.

So end game technology, but we're not at the end game. We're just at kind of, you know, chapter one of it. What happens to the Polygon proof of stake chain? So I think there's been some, you know, conversation on Twitter, for instance, that, hey, when, you know, Polygon ZK. Evm comes out, maybe the Polygon proof of stake chain, kind of migrates to this technology. I don't know if that's how you see it. I know Polygon has always seen itself as a set of technologies to scale Ethereum,

whether it's using side chain type technology or whether it's using ZK type technology in layer two. But, I mean, obviously, the Polygon proof of stake chain has reached tremendous success and is one of the highest, one of the most used chains in crypto. What happens to it? What's the roadmap for the proof of stake chain? now legacy tech, Mahalo? Yeah, it's a great, great, very important question.

I would say certainly, and be completely honest, I would say Polygon POS chain is a legacy tech. We always wanted it to be legacy tech and we knew when we started, then I don't know, three or five years down the line, we have to be embarrassed by that technology. So to say, if you're not embarrassed, that means we haven't done our job well, right? This is, again, very dynamic industry and we constantly want to push this frontier of innovation and ship better technology. That being said,

we are, Polygon P-HN is not going away, is not becoming irrelevant. There is, I believe, strongly clear need for both networks in the market. So there are certain tradeoffs that I'm going to just explain

very, very briefly. Defy applications might want to definitely deploy to ZKVM because ZKVM offers ironclad security, it's fully secured by Ethereum, submits, since it's a lot of,

roll-up, it also submits user transactions to Ethereum, which gets stored there to ensure data availability of these transactions. However, ZKVM is the throughput is limited by submitting, because we're submitting these transactions to Ethereum, right? That's always going to be the bottleneck. So, and always going to increase the costs of transactions, because you have to pay Ethereum gas to store this transaction data. So ZK roll-ups will always have a little bit more limited.

throughput and a little bit higher transaction fees. For Defy applications, for example, that doesn't really matter if you have a lending application for many of the applications. For example, a landing market, you take a loan and then you repay a loan six months down the line. So for you, security is the priority. There's a lot of economic value here in these applications. So you will say ZKVM is the right choice for me.

It's highest possible level of security. And I don't mind that transactions are a little bit more. expensive. When you have something on the other side of the spectrum, like Polygon POS chain, where you have, for example, web-free games with in-game assets, which are on chain, and they are not really highly valuable. But these games have a lot of users and frequent transactions. They might say POS chain is still a very good choice for us, because it offers much higher throughput, much lower fees, and that's perfectly fine for some of these use cases. So I believe these two, sets of trade-offs and features for these two networks will remain relevant for different

types of applications. That's how we see it. And just basically because we can maybe just show a little bit of alpha there because you're always inviting us and you're always following what you're. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If you have alpha, please share. We are experimenting. We cannot confirm or commit to anything formally yet, but we are experimenting how we can leverage ZK technology given. now that Jordi's team has shipped ZKVM, we're exploring how we can potentially leverage ZK technology on the POS chain itself, which will give it, like, renewed even more obvious relevance moving forward. But we cannot share anything officially yet, but we are actively exploring that as well.

It's very cool. Okay. So just to go on what you said, we have, let's say, maybe if you could give some order of magnitude estimates, I understand, like these are just estimates. but like let's say transferring eith on main net cost a dollar. And in a kind of a layer to you roll up, like an optimistic rollup, maybe it costs five cents or 10 cents, five to 10, something like this, okay? And then if we go to Polygon, proof of stake chain, that's going to cost like far less than a fraction of a fraction of a penny. Right.

So very, very inexpensive. what are we looking at for Polygon ZK EVM? Is that going to still be in kind of like the layer two optimistic roll-up range as far as cost per transaction or is it going to even deliver an order of magnitude of lower cost versus that? I don't know if any of you guys have estimates

on kind of the numbers here, but this is how users view it. They're like, okay, it's going to cost me, you know, a dollar on main net, 10 cents on a layer two, how much is it going to cost me on Polygon ZK EVM? Currently, we are about the same that underwall-ups. I mean, it's like one-tenth of the cost of the Ethereum, I mean, depending on the transactions, because for example, that our ability, we need to pay the full price, okay,

and depend on the transaction, but it's going to be around one-tenth, one-fifth, something between that. So it's one order of magnitude at the beginning. We have plans to improve the technology and with the current technology, we thought, doing anything we can increase one order one one order of magnitude just by compressing transactions and when uh eip 4844 happens to ethereum this would be at least an other order of magnitude so here is like we have like three levels and of course in sharding like probably another one okay so that's that's the the but we get we see that at the level so if we see how ethereum it is we can scale easily two, three orders of magnitude for sure in the coming years.

Jordy, another question I think are in people's minds is we have some experience with layer twos now, right? For the last 18 months or so, I think Arbitrim was the first layer two that deployed. It's an optimistic roll-up, which is different than a ZK roll-up. Optimistic roll-up versus Z-K roll-up. What you guys are providing is a Z-K roll-up, a Z-K-EVM, fully programmable, what are the benefits? Can you discuss kind of the trade-offs or the benefits?

Why is a ZK, in what ways is a ZK EVM better than an optimistic roll-up, if that's even the right question to ask? The big difference here is that withdrawal time. With our time in an optimistic role-up, you need to wait one week, two weeks or three weeks, just for this challenging game to happen. in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the case this can go maybe i don't know can go maybe to five minutes or just even few seconds okay so you can can can be very very very fast

this is i mean you may think that this is okay if you are there it's what you need to leave there okay and you can think but there is one thing that's interesting and is the the the the the interconnection when you want to go possibility between these different networks so that one means when you have a possibility between different networks is that you need to maybe just have different networks and transfer phones from here to there and from there to here and just work in different days that means that you are leaving the the layer two and going to another layer two so in a zK roll up this this you can do that really fast and you can transfer and you can connect a lot of networks easily in a this is not an optimist

not optimistic, you cannot do that. I mean, you need to buy this challenging games. And the things get much more complex when you want to play in that. This is one of the advantages. The other is, of course, the cost of capital. I mean, there is this game, and the security is based on the quantity of capital that the mystery relaps have in there. This has its cost.

Of course, in the pruver, we have the proving cost, but this is getting really low right now. So it's becoming very insignificant. So for the rest, they are very much equivalent. At the end, they are roll-ups and things. For example, there is a lot of things in the compression. In the compression with the zero knowledge, we can compress much more than an optimistic roll-ups.

So even the prices are going to go lower on the future. So the future, of course, decay roll-ups. they are coming later because you know the educating developing this decade technology takes its time and needs to work but at the moment that where we are that we somehow we solve this technology when i'm saying solve i mean there is a lot of challenges pending but it's like but we have the proofer now i would say that optimistic roll-ups for me makes no much sense because at the end it's the same but you have this proof that you don't need to wait too weak so it's it's And that's the thing that this allows you to do many, much, many more, many more things.

And this is why, this is why advocates of ZK EVM have kind of pointed to these two advantages. So I'll just kind of summarize and highlight like advantage one of a, of a ZK, ZK technology is you can dial it and optimize it far larger. So even though you're starting with this like, you know, it's five times cheaper, 10 times cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet, you're saying you can push the technology and push the compression, push the cryptography to get transactions from like five cents to like fractions of a penny. And you have more leeway to do that, that compression than on an optimistic rollup. And the second piece I think is important because, you know, people could see this in at least the U.S. banking system, which, you know, as you know, sucks, hence the name bankless.

Settlement times. If I want to wire money from one bank to another internationally, could take three to five days. There's a settlement time attached to that. A similar settlement time actually happens with an optimistic roll-up, because rather than having it settle in kind of like the Fed Now or whatever master central bank settlement engine underlies all of the banking systems, you kind of have to settle this on Ethereum mainnet, right? Optimistic roll-ups, that takes days right now because there's the fraud proof,

there's this crypto-economic mechanism. With ZK technology, you're able to just take the shortcut, and you can settle on mainnet in minutes. And then that becomes very important when we talk about chain to chain, layer two to layer two types of interactions. And so that is kind of the network benefit that we're also excited about with ZK EVMs.

The other thing I'm kind of excited about is you guys are launching, of course, Polygons not a new chain. So it's well known. Polygon is well known for its business development. And I'm just reading a list of things that you guys are launching with, Phantom, Trust Wallet, D-Bank, Rainbow, Wallet Connect, Zerion.

These are some of the partners that you're launching with, which is also very exciting. Mahalo, maybe you could speak to kind of the ecosystem that Polygon has fostered in general and how much of that will, how much of that business development that Polygon is so credited for will kind of bleed over and get leveraged by this new Polygon ZKEVM. Yeah, that's a great question. Absolutely. What we see, first, we'll see, we're already seeing a huge level of organic interest for ZKVM. ZKAVM is really the bleeding edge technology.

I think in general there is consensus about that in the industry. So first of all, we're really seeing high, high level of interest. People want to use this bleeding edge, the most advanced technology that we have in the industry now. That's number one. Number two, Polygon Labs, as you rightly said, is doing, I believe, great job in onboarding, Web 2 companies, big enterprises, traditional companies from all industries to Web3, and I believe Polygon Labs will continue to do that as well, especially now when we have even more advanced technology.

The third thing that is important to mention here is that these two networks, especially because of these benefits that Jordan mentioned, of how convenient is to interconnect these ZK secure chains. We believe very soon you will be able to observe Polygon POS chain community and ZKVM community and ecosystem as one single very, very interconnected ecosystem, practically like a single ecosystem. And that is very, very important. One specific, to say specifically what I'm talking about is we have something that we call internally LXLY bridge, which is a bridge that enables seamlessly, seamless message exchange. change between two ZK secure networks and assuming we're able to leverage ZK security for Polygon POS chain with LXLY bridge, these two networks practically become one network when it

comes to moving assets, information, any sort of arbitrary messages, tokens, et cetera. Is that the idea Mahalo of a layer three that people have talked about or is that sort of something different? What is great about this LXLI bridge implementation and Jordy maybe can chime a little bit more because it transforms all these EK secure chains into a mesh. There is no, any more, layer two, layer three, layer four, layer 16. This bridge enables seamless connectivity between any networks that participate,

any two networks that participate within this ecosystem. So you can transfer from layer two to layer 16, back to layer one on Ethereum. It doesn't really matter anymore. It's like very... Is it basically a layer one? Like, so Ethereum would be a layer one. And then rather than layer two, three, four, five, and six, layer two is just this mesh of all sorts of other layers.

And it's all kind of economically secured in the same way. So it's all a mesh of layer two, basically. And that's what we need. Ideally, I think we cannot achieve mass adoption if these chains live in some sort of isolation. We need all this mesh of networks to become a single, homogeneous execution layer, right, that can support massive adoption. Well, that is how the internet works. So mesh networks are pretty important.

Jordy, what would you add to that? I mean, for me it's funny, people talking about layer three, when we don't even have a layer two. So let's build first. Let's be first layer two. I think that with the ZK technology, you don't need, with a good ZK technology, you don't need that much the layer three. And you can, I mean, this is what we're talking about.

We can build all these mesh. of networks and all of that connecting one each other. Of course you can always build layer three in talk, but it's for me it's like, okay, and layer 15. I mean, it's like let's build layer two, layer two, let's put some of these networks, let's connect these networks together, let's see how we transfer one each other,

and let's learn how all this thing will work, and then we think about layer three. But it's, for me, from the technical perspective, is okay, it's like because layer two are not good enough, because maybe the proof is too expensive, or maybe because you have these delay times that it makes, and let's build a layer three so that we can bypass these limitations of the layer two and so on.

But we have a very good layer two. So we have an extremely good layer two. So let's see what we can get. I mean, I don't want to discard layer three, because it's perfectly possible, but I think that the industry should focus and layer twos. Well, whatever the marketing folks decide to end up calling these things from a buzzword and narrative perspective, right? The vision we're talking about is a layer two mesh network that is

secured by Ethereum, which is super exciting. Guys, we have a few more things to cover, including how this ZK EVM is different from some of the others that have come to market and are coming to market recently. And also, the risks. We said we would get back to that. So if you bridge, what are the risks? We need to conclude by talking about the Maddick token, of course. But before we have all of those conversations, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets. Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange. But you know this because you've been listening to Bankless. But did you know that the Uniswop web app has a shiny new Fiat on-ram? Now you could go

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takes the time to define Web3 specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon-free experience for the crypto-curious user. Friendly, not scary. Metamask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience. So, are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? Go to learn.menomask.io and add Metamask learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. All right, we're back. How is the Polygon ZK EVM different than some of the other ZK EVMs that are coming to market recently? Mahalo, what's the competitive advantage here? What is the secret edge? Or how have you approached this problem in the way that other solutions haven't? Yeah, first of all, I just want to say that we're very excited that we see multiple ZK AVM projects in the ecosystem. That's very useful for everyone, primarily for Ethereum.

And again, we're very excited to see that. We're also very excited and we strongly believe that Jordi's team has found a very good balance between this EVM equivalence and what exactly what do we mean by it and practicalities of the network. So there are different approaches here that maybe even Jordy can cover or I can cover. But the point being is that we were able, I think, to strike the great balance where we're fully, really compatible with Ethereum. All the tools are working, both developer tools and end user tools, as we said. Solidity works out of the box. They are zero basically, there's zero impact on developer and user experience. And at the same time, we delivered something.

It's not like we're one year or far. It's not like it's impractical. It's not like you need a data center. You're just creating proofs today on a commodity cloud instances. So I think it's more about the balance that we were able to strike. And then some great engineering and cryptography breakthroughs that our team has achieved on this part. And it has been really incredibly exciting being part of the process and observing the great energy. all these breakthroughs and everything.

And I think when you just look at the facts, Polygon ZKVM is the only one that is now on the main net with real world assets, full feature, apart from pairings, as Jordy said. It's the code is fully open source, fully visible, Prover is running, every transaction is being proven and verified on Ethereum layer one. So basically, multiple audits,

both internal and external, of all the components of the, ZK EVM, including the Prover, including circuits. So I would say all these important checkboxes that you would expect for a full-blown mainnet, Polygon ZK-AVM is ticking them. So, yeah, I think that's just as the state of the matter at the moment. But I can leave to Jordy maybe if he wants to add some more. Yeah, Jordy, I'm curious, what do you make of this?

Some people have called this the ZKEVM wars that are going to come, of course. you know, the benefit is of these wars is decentralization and Ethereum, certainly. We all kind of benefit from this. But what do you make of this? What is the Polygon competitive advantage here? Yeah, we're climbing a mountain. I mean, when you are cleaning a mountain, and it's the community that's cleaning a mountain. Of course, somebody, there is people in the community that maybe you're probably in the marketing sites and they want to fight.

But at the end, we are cleaning the mountain together. I mean, it's like we all want, we want this technology becomes. available to the society so it's talking about competition here is i mean there are different projects and when you but there is a challenge like that uh even from the engineering perspective there is different ways to approach the the problem and they are not good or bad a priori you start with something you see the ideas you imagine how the system is and then you just go one way. And other engineers going to do a different way.

And even the starting points are not the same. I mean, sometimes when we started the project, for example, we had some technology we had some technology available. Other projects maybe started before, they started later and maybe they started without a given technology or they are starting later and they have a technology that was not available with we starting. So even the starting points were not the same. okay and we are depending the beginning so all the projects are trying to do their best

to to try to to to solve this problem in different matters so for me is purely respect to all the systems but said that is i mean there is a lot of difference a lot it's not one it's just different approach different ways different teams doing a different thing what i would recommend and here is maybe for the technical people you know if you are just if you don't care about the technical but what i would recommend to the technical people it's just just for example go to the source code and try to deploy a just try to deploy your one just go to goarly or polygo POS or that's cheap I mean well sometimes I think it's even cheaper than Gordley I don't know that but it's like but it's I mean just go to a network

just try to I mean get the get the prover get the no get the synchronizer get the database and just go to all the different pieces they are available there you can't there you can see there you can see how they work and and the good thing is that it's you can use that and at least in our site or spirit is to to to to give as much as we can to the to the community so we take as much as we can and to give as much as we can and this is the spirit that we have and the cool thing is that doing that if we do that between different projects we can learn a lot. I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure that there are things that other projects are doing better than us and we can learn. And I'm sure that we are doing things that are better than others

and they can learn. And if we get in this spirit of collaboration, the full system will go much, much, much, much faster. Here, we have a good example, for example, internal in Polygon. In Polygon, we have like, we have three teams working, like, separate, in three different projects. But we have been collaborating a lot between these projects. And this collaboration, I would say that the result of this collaboration is that we could go much faster. The fact that, for example, we are using the proving system of Polygon Zero, or we are

using the Star, the same way that Polygon Myden is using. we are sharing the technology. We're sharing the things. We're sharing the technology without barriers, without any competition. It's just, okay, I explain you everything I know about this, and you explain everything about that. And this collaboration, I think, is the key of the success of this project, of the Polygon. We should be able to export this model to the fuel community.

because I personally believe that if we work together, and if we work together means just working together, in sharing the knowledge one each other, not competing, but sharing, that's the way that we can go faster. I agree with that. It's, you know, crypto likes to be so tribal at times, but ultimately, guys, it's, for bankless listeners,

It's us against the banks. It's decentralization versus centralization. And the benchmark on whether we're successful or not is how long we have protected decentralized assets and how much has entered the system. It's kind of the lindy effect of time and also value that we have unlocked in the decentralized ecosystem. And kind of that brings me to the risks, which we talked about earlier. Okay, so security is top of mind. And this is the benchmark. ultimately for success for all ZK EVMs. And I know, Mahalo said this is bleeding edge tech. No one's, like, people haven't done this before.

This is a first, all right? And there's some really, like, moon math, magic stuff that I'm not sure. Many people on the planet fully comprehend on how it, like, how it all works underneath, like, in the engine here. And so my question you is, like, what are the risks? is there the risk, for instance, that there is a hack that all assets transferred kind of go to zero? Like, is that a real risk right now? And what is Polygon ZK. Evm doing to mitigate those things?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here is, let's see. First of all, risk zero is not. But it's not about, this is not even about Polygon. I mean, you see, it's on any system. in the world.

Okay, so what you are trying to do, and what we are trying to do, and I think what all the projects are trying to do is, at least a serious project, is spend, invest as much as we can in security. That means just audits, internal audits, backbounties, code reviews between peers.

I mean, that's, whatever it's, whatever formal, you know, testing, formal, so whatever we can, and whatever is in our hand, we put there. But we need to understand also that the security, so if you don't take a risk, certain risk at a given point,

the security is not going to evolve. Securities also get evolves when you assume some risk. So here measuring how much risk you want to assume. And so what are these probabilities, this risk you want to assume in order to grow? this is a little, this is, this is probably one of the most difficult things in the space. Okay, because it's measuring this low risk is difficult. In our case, I can explain you, I can explain you the, the, the risks.

So who we are, think about risks, okay? So here in the ZKBM, we distinguish between four kind of risks, what we call smart contracts risk, what we call correctness risk, what we call sound as risk and what we call stop bluer, the brewer stops, okay? Smart contracts is like any other smart contract. It's a smart contract and the smart contract can have bucks, okay? And the cool thing here is that the community,

you know, after the launch of Ethereum, well, still some bucks, but we have a lot of knowledge. And there is a lot of auditing companies. There are a lot of procedures. And it's, I mean, it has been audited. two times, check it with the right code, and the probability I would say that it's relatively low. But again, if there is something wrong in the smart contract,

things can go bad. But like any other smart contract, it's no difference here that any other smart contracts. The other thing is that completeness. This is probably the most critical part. The completeness means that you are proving something that goes to a wrong state. okay but but this is a determining is that it's right from so you are you are this is in

general is that imagine that you put a transaction and this transaction the result of this state because how you program the state goes that you have more money okay that would be really bad okay for this i'm again zero risk doesn't exist but i here i'm quite confident on these uh on this mainly, and this is thank you very much to Ethereum and to the Ethereum Test Re. We not only did the full audit, the full audits, but we are also passing all the Ethereum test, of the Ethereum test suite. So if we are passing, I mean, we can guarantee that we are passing this Ethereum seat. So it should be, it could be something really weird for this, to have to have. happen there. Okay. So all the things together, this give us quite confidentiality.

Here, for this risk, we are also, at least at the beginning, we want to disable that at some point, but in this beginning training weeds here, we are running, we're going to run a kill switch, okay? Well, I mean, multi-see with many people kill-switch. We should remove that at some point, but if we see some we are checking some you know some balances and we see something if we have some some some checks that if we see something that goes wrong we can still switch the network okay on this side but again this is i see here are a relatively low probability okay uh the others are soanness soreness is probably the most uh is the most tricky one because it's the i mean it's not that you are doing the things okay is that you are checking that all the things are okay

And it's very difficult, it's very easy to forget some of the checks. Okay. And a soundness mistake in the Provers is relatively easy to do it. And here we don't have to, the community has not much experience here to auditing and to check here. Here we did a huge effort again with audits and reviews and we correct a lot of these soundness errors. Okay. But here, the cool thing is that in the system, the idea is that if a soundness error is detected by the smart contract, and that means that if there are two proofs, so if there are two proofs that with, that coming from the same state and with the same transactions, they go to two different states and you are able to prove to things, this is a soundless error.

And what we do is we just shut down, we just hold the network and go centralize. We shut down the network and then an update should be done. Okay. And the other protection is that at the beginning, we are going to be the only trooper that's running the system unless we stop doing the proof. So there is a mechanism that if in five days we are not generating a proof, so anybody will be able to generate a proof. But if we are running the proof, and we are not going to prove something wrong. Okay. So this is the other mechanism. So that's why soundness, even being more probable to happen in some soundness mistakes, which is not good because that would mean that it's a system

centralized. But the risk is that the system is centralized. Not that the risk, not that the user will lose money. I mean, the system is centralized will fix it. I get it, Jordi. And there are fallbacks for some of these cases, of course. And I think you've done a great job outlining kind of the risks of not just not just the Polygon ZK EVM, but all EVM technology. And at some extent, all layer two, is one thing I'll say to listeners is, I remember there was a time when people said a programmable blockchain would never work. Okay? Because it would have bugs, smart contracts would never work.

And then what happened? There was a Dow event. There was a re-entrancy type bug. And everyone was saying, ha, ha, we were right. smart contract blockchains, programmable blockchains, we'll never work. And now look at us. Okay? They do work. We've got strong lindy effects. The issues have been dealt with and we get stronger and stronger over time. I expect a similar trajectory. Not that there won't be bumps in the road. There could be bumps in the road, but we're talking about the long game here. And look,

cryptography, programmable blockchains can scale. We've already seen that proven. Guys, we've got to be quick on the last question here. But I want to know about a Matic token. How is Matic involved in the Polygon ZKEVM? What's it, its role? Do you pay gas fees in Madik? What's the relationship between Matic and Ethereum and something like Polygon ZK. EVM? Yeah. So a great question and great to close the interview with that. So first of all, when it comes to gas fees, we're using ether for gas fees. That's what community prefers. It makes user experience even better. And we're using Eater as the gas fee token in ZETHAs. ZKAVM itself. That being said, Polygons native token, METIC, will have a critical role in the

whole polygon ecosystem that we're establishing right now. So currently we're starting with a centralized sequencer. This delivering ZKVM itself was the grand goal. We just wanted to prove that it's possible and we're starting with a centralized sequencer, a improver like all other roll-ups in the Ethereum ecosystem. This network needs to be decentralized and Metic token will play a role in that decentralization of the network, as well as in tying the whole polygon ecosystem. We already touched up in this interview on this multitude of chains, right? We even have this concept of dedicated chains, which are super nets, polygon POS chain, ZKVM, all these networks will coexist in a very interconnected way, and Matic will play a critical

role in facilitating and securing that whole ecosystem. We will be sharing, I believe, very exciting news in the next couple of months. and our views and proposals, how everything will fit together. Because that's what community is now wondering. One question you already mentioned, how Polygon POS chain is relevant now after ZKVM. What about supernets? How these all components that you're working on? How they all come together?

And the token itself will play a critical role in our mind in connecting all these things together. I mean, we're very excited to share with you and with the community in the following months. everything that's been happening behind the scenes, kind of. We will stay tuned for that. Guys, I just want to say, congrats on the launch. This is a huge milestone, big accomplishment. cheering you on. I mean, as advocates for decentralization

and bankless money systems, this technology is pivotal in our ability to scale it. So well done on the launch. Fantastic news. Very exciting. Can we end with this then before I let you go? What can listeners do to get started on Polygon ZK EVM? a website they should go to,

how do I bridge across from Ethereum to the ZK EVM if I feel so inclined? Yeah. Jordy, I'll leave it too. Yeah, yeah. I'm just looking for the link, but you just go to the bridge.

I probably, if you go to, just one moment that I'm trying to here. How about this, Jordy, we will make sure to include it in the show notes for sure. I know you're busy building and doing other things,

but we'll have it in the show notes for you, bankless listeners. Yeah, just go. So just go to the bridge.zkvm slash rPC.com slash login and there you can start the bridge and just connect your metamask and you're there. Let's go to remix, deploy your smart contracts, just do some transfers. I mean, just work as a normal network and it's really easy.

I mean, new bankless frontiers opening up for you. As we speak, this is now available. Mahalo, thank you so much for coming on bankless and telling us more about it. Thanks so much, Ryan. Always a pleasure. Got to end with this. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. Heath is risky.

So is ZK technology. All of Defi is, really. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.