Bankless - The zkEVM is Here | Alex Gluchowski of zkSync

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

zkEVM is here! Alex Gluchowski, CEO & Co-Founder of Matter Labs and of zkSync is here to talk about the huge accomplishment he and his team brought to market this past week. This is the first EVM-compatible ZK Rollup on Ethereum’s testnet!  Is this the endgame of blockchain scalability? How were Alex and his team able to bring this to market way sooner than expected? Why is this important and a monumental leap forward for the space? Find out the answers to these questions and much more on this week's State of the Nation with Ryan and David!  DONATE TO UKRAINE USING CRYPTO: https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1497594592438497282?s=20&t=kiFqqEmK2QtdOA8KcwUq1g  ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:         https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot  🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:00 Alex from Matter Labs 9:51 What is a zkEVM? 15:57 The Breakthrough 19:08 zkSync 2.0 Public Testnet 24:04 The User Experience 29:37 Developer Tooling 32:48 Why zkRollups? 37:22 Security, Centralization, Trust 41:51 Justin Drake's Question 46:33 The Roadmap 50:30 Wen Mainnet? 53:15 Wen Token? 58:51 zkDAO 1:00:52 Ukraine 1:06:57 Crypto's Impact in Ukraine 1:11:00 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: UkraineDAO https://twitter.com/Ukraine_DAO?s=20&t=k_QiuIA3ZukqUPd9gy--LA  Alex Gluchowski on Twitter https://twitter.com/gluk64  zkSync on Twitter https://twitter.com/zksync  zkDAO https://twitter.com/zkdao_official?s=20&t=9HO7KyxvPEwqBhAo6SgbEA  zkSync's Website zksync.io  zkSync 2.0: Public Testnet is Live! https://matterlabs.medium.com/zksync-2-0-public-testnet-is-live-de870ba9632a  Modular vs Monolithic Blockchains https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/modular-vs-monolithic-blockchains?s=w  ----- 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://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode. We've got a fantastic episode here for you. Look, something we thought they said was years away, apparently has just come to Ethereum. This is a key cornerstone in the efforts to scale Ethereum into the future, and that is a ZK-EVM-compatible roll-up. We're going to be talking about that today. David, who do we have? on the show today to speak about that. Yeah, we have Alex, the co-founder, CEO of Matter Labs, who is the team behind ZK Sync and ZK EVMs, what we're talking about today, or ZK roll-ups, especially in the last year of 2021 of Ethereum, that video of Vitalik talking about how the internet of money needs to cost five cents has been a source of comedy for everyone who

pointing at how high Ethereum's gas fees are. Well, when Vitalik made that comment about how the internet of money needs to be $0.5.5. cents, he's talking about ZK roll-ups. He's talking about the ZK EVM. And as very recently, the ZK Sync team, the Matterlabs team, has been able to put a ZK EVM on a test net, which means we have a ZK EVM ready to go. We just got tested out first. And so we're going to ask Alex about all of these questions that we have as what's left in this roadmap, what can people do now, when is this going to be ready for users? And of course, the obvious and most fun question, when token and just a few more conversations of that nature. Yeah, it's an incredibly important subject,

particularly this year. This is the year. It's a proof year for Ethereum's scalability approach. We're also going to be talking about probably toward the end of the episode, maybe at the front two, about Ukraine. Understand many of the Matterlapse team is actually located in Ukraine. Alex himself was born in Ukraine. I think crypto has a story to tell and a role to play there. so we'll be talking about that. David, before we get into the episode, though, we've got a special PSA from our friends at Opolis. All right. Opolis is awesome, like straight up awesome. If you want to become a self-sovereign Web3 worker, you got to check out Opus. What does it do, David? Opolis is a Dow that helps people work for other DAO's. It's a Dow that supports the Dow's.

And so a lot of people would love to work in Web3, would love to be, a self-solven worker, but we still haven't figured out things like health care and benefits and payroll and taxes and all that stuff. And Opelis is bridging the world of traditional employee benefits to people that work for a Dow. So it's like a employee infrastructure collective. And so we all get to share our resources that we need in order to live a self-sovereign life when it comes to our employment, but also still get all the benefits that we need to make sure that our risk, our personal risk, our health care risk, family risk, all that stuff is taken care of.

So you can actually sign, if you sign up for Opolis before, I believe, March 1st, which is, you know, you got some time, but not too much time. You actually get a bonus of a thousand work tokens, which is the Opelis Dow token and a thousand bank tokens out of the bankless Dow. Oh, May 1st, excuse me, May 1st, even more time.

So if you are trying to get into the world of Web 3, if you are listening to Ryan and I yell at you every single weekly roll up about getting a job, OPLIS might make this life easier, this transition easier for you. Yeah, totally. I mean, I resisted becoming a self-employed individual for a number of years just because I got health care insurance, health insurance through my corporate employer. And I couldn't let that go.

But OPLUS provides an awesome off-ramp to that. They give you health insurance, take care of your benefits, all the messy stuff. So go check that out, guys. All right, David, got to start with the question. I always ask you any state of the nation. episodes, which is this. What is the state of the nation today? Right. The state of the nation is we are getting synced. We're talking with the ZK sink and we're getting synced with ZK sink. I really wanted to do like a zip. That's synced, not sunk, right? Sinct, yes, not sunk. I really wanted

to do like a zip metaphor because for some reason ZK sink and ZKs always feels like very zippy to me. Fast. But I couldn't figure out, yeah, fast, yeah. But I couldn't figure out how to roll that into metaphor, but I'll just talk about how we're getting synced with Alex from ZK Sync today. Awesome. We definitely want to get in sync on ZK Sync. And that is coming up for you. We're going to get to Alex in just a moment. But before we do, we want to talk about the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Many of your favorite apps are already live, with many more coming over soon. You can find these apps at portal.arbitrum.1, and you can bridge your assets over to Arbitrum using bridge. orghum.com. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, and friction-free. Hey, guys, we are back with Alex Glukovsky. He's the co-founder of Matter Labs. Matter Labs is the team behind ZK Sync.

That's what we're going to talk about today. The ZK roll-up that is pined. pioneering a ZK EVM, just went to TestNet, want to hear all about that. Matter Labs is really special, I think, for bankless and for those who are decentralization maximists, because they've been uncompromising on many things, including open source values. This is also why we're excited to bring Alex on bankless. Alex, it's great to have you on bankless. Thank you, I, thank you, David. It's an honor. You know, Alex, we want to start because we understand that a large part of the team or part of the team of Matter Labs is actually located, it has been located in Ukraine. How's everyone doing? Give us an update. Is everyone safe? What's happening? Yeah, so obviously everyone is in a lot of stress because we have a really large part of the team in both Russia and Ukraine. And we were lucky we managed to evacuate most of our Ukrainian team in safe places, mostly abroad, before that happened because we are security first company.

Security is the paramount concern of Manoraps and is kissing. And we live by the motto only the paranoid survive. And the rumors appear that the situation might escalate. We just thought we can take risks. The history is full of black swans. And if things happen, you know that it's going to be really, really difficult to do anything. But it's really cheap to get a team on a few weeks' vacation abroad. So we decided we should go for this, even if the probability is very low.

Unfortunately, though, a lot of team members have family members back in Ukraine, and some of them are trying to evacuate them. So, yeah, there is a lot of stress going on. It sounds like a very stressful time. We are glad that you guys were able to make some provisions and keep everyone safe during this time as well. Alex, if you're okay with it, we want to talk a bit more about Ukraine. Understand you're born Ukraine. You have some personal experience there.

Also, in the world of crypto, of course, you are here for reasons of values alignment with what we're doing in the space and decentralization. So I think we want to talk more about that, maybe toward the end of the episode. Would you be okay with that? Absolutely. Okay. Awesome. Well, let's see that. First, we want to get into some of the recent events and news from a technology perspective, which is this. And this is very big. This happened last week, I believe. The ZK. EVM on TestNet. Okay, this is something I think the crypto community thought was years away. In fact, as recently as a year ago, when we had Vitalik on the podcast, we talked about the future of roll-ups and scalability. And he was very, very optimistic about ZK roll-ups, in particular ZK EVM roll-ups. EVM stands for the Ethereum virtual machine, of course,

which allows all the programmatic defy magic that people experience on Ethereum. But he thought at the time that would be years away, like years plural, you know, maybe three to five. And here we are one year later, and you guys have just released an EVMZK roll-up on TestNet. Was this a surprise development? Tell us about what was actually released and how you were able to deliver it maybe ahead of what a lot of people thought was going to be the schedule for this thing. Absolutely. It was not just Vitale's prediction, but actually an opinion of a lot of top cryptographers in the world that this will take a lot longer to deliver because of inefficiencies of zero knowledge proofs for general computation. Your knowledge proofs are, you know, you have to convert your program into specialized arithmeticization form, like essentially in some mathematical representation of this program. And it only works well if your program is fixed and well defined. But with generic computation, we have loops, we have recursion, we have all week during complete flexibility.

We can build any programs. And it just doesn't convert well. Like you have a lot of overhead when you're trying to represent. this flexibility in terms of pure mathematical function. You can imagine like huge polynomial mathematical function. So and everyone thought, well, this has to stay. So we just have to find better ways to be more efficient with proving, with overcoming this massive overhead through maybe more efficient hardware,

maybe more efficient proof systems and so on. But what we did was we just realized there can be there are shortcuts to make and they will compensate for this huge inefficiency in in interesting ways. So what we realized is that during complete part of the program is only going to take maybe 1% of the entire computational power that we need, while most computations will be spent on heavy specialized operations, which include hashes. storage access and so on and so on. So what we did, we built a hybrid product which combines this

flexible part with the rigid part. And the rigid part is well optimized and we knew how to do this. And there was a number of breakthroughs also in the crypto cryptography around which proves. So this combination gave us this breakthrough, which allowed to deliver technology much quicker. So Alex, let me regurgitate that to make sure that, that I'm following because as much as I like to think that I understand zero knowledge cryptography, it's not really my strong suit. And I would imagine that's probably true for the listeners. So you talked about two components of a ZKEVM that are really needed to have a fully fledged, fully expressive roll-up that has all the composability that we all enjoy in Defi. Really the thing

that really makes DeFi powerful is its composability. And make making sure that we retain composability in a ZK EVM on a ZK roll-up is a tough challenge. And you talked about how there's the expressive, flexible side, and then there's the other side of things that are, I think, just always the same, something like signatures or things about a roll-up that just like don't change but are necessary and rigid and always there for all the roll-ups. And so you've been able to compartmentalize these things. And the things that don't change, you've been able to extremely, extremely optimize,

and then that's been able for you to separate or compartmentalize away from the flexible things and allowing you to maybe tackle these two problems separately simultaneously. Is that a fair way to put this? Yeah, you can think of it as imagine a computer which has a CPU, which can execute any program. And then you have some specialized microschems for digital processes. like a, let's say, a GPU specifically for graphic processing. It can do one thing, but it can do it really, really well and much more efficient than the CPU.

And CPU is very generic. It can execute any program arbitrarily, but it's slower. So this is the kind of analogy we have here. And as far as composability is concerned, if we can express an arbitrary program, an arbitrary Turing complete program, then we can do anything EVM can do. So we including composability, it's not some unique special case. So what's really important also in this regard is that we should be able to execute programs of arbitrary length. And it's a little bit hard with SNARKS because they have a limited proving capacity, but we use recursion, which was one of the breakthroughs I mentioned, where we

can combine, we can have a lot of circuits of limited size, but we pile them together in the line and then we recursively prove them with multiple layers until we get one single snark which attests to the validity of the entire execution of the block. So with this particular design of a ZKEVM, would you say that this is like the end state of or the end goal of a ZKEVM or do you think that further designs and further iterations will actually change the basic fundamental primitive? Or do you think that this is the design structure that we're going to go with for the foreseeable future? I think the design structure, the architecture, the big picture is going to remain roughly the

same. There are a few things which I expect to change. So first of all, I have to clarify that when we say ZKVM, it doesn't really mean that we execute EVM bytecode. What we execute, what we execute is the virtual machine bytecode, which is optimized for zero knowledge proves. And we have a compiler from solidity and from Viper, which and from like intermediate code, like any other languages, going through LLVM, which is a very optimized, very well-known compiler platform, compiling into this ZKVM bytecode. And then we execute this efficient bytecode. So LLVM actually allows us, in the future to integrate other, like most modern languages,

from RAS to C++ to Golan to Python, whatever, all of them have front ends for LLVM, and then we can reuse those frontends and then use our backend to produce the result in bytecode. So if people will find other languages to be more useful for specific tasks in the future, then they will be using those. And generally, I also think,

think that in a further future, we will switch from pure snarks based on Planck to something fully transparent that doesn't require a trusted setup. But generally, the architecture I expected to remain roughly the same. Well, opening up the design space for developers to make it life easier for developers is, of course, crucial for building out ecosystems. We're going to definitely talk about that later in the show. One last question before we get into some, back to some of the basic stuff about the test net. Is this ZK Sinks breakthrough? If breakthrough is the right word, is this ZK sinks breakthrough, or is this a just kind of shared knowledge?

Like, is this your guys' victory here with like the design pattern that you've discovered? Or how is this design structure being shared around just the greater ZK roll-up ecosystem? I think it's a general approach. It lies on the surface. So we independently came to it from guys from staff. for example, but we are building on the shoulders of giants. We are using the pattern of tiny RAM, which was introduced actually by founders of Stacra also a few years ago.

But then we are using this, like we invented this approach of combining the heavy and flexible parts together, I think independently from other teams, but I can confirm because I don't know what their decision process was. Okay, Alex, so tell us what is here today in the here and now with the ZK Sync 2.0 public test net release, which is a ZK EVM on test net. So what is this? The subtitle is the ZK EVM has arrived, the first EVM-compatible ZK roll-up on Ethereum's test net.

So what does this look like in practice? How mature is it? And then, you know, after this, the question we're about to ask is when mainnet. But first, tell us what's here now. Well, what you have now is a separate test net where you can deploy smart contracts written in solidity. And you can interact with them using Web3 API, which you normally use with other Ethereum devs. So it looks very similar to other L2s and side chains that people are currently using for scaling,

just that it's based on ZKVM technology. So how mature it is it? This announcement is about the opening the test to the public. It's been running in private for quite some time. We had teams building it, and we were collecting feedback and fixing problems. So we wanted to release something to the public that is more or less mature and people are not having children. diseases. So Alex, what are the goals of this test net? Are you trying to get developers to try and break it or are you just allowing them to get a feel for what it's like to build on

NCK EVM? What are you looking to get out of this test net? Well, we're just offering people to start building because the interface won't change. The interface will only be extended by certain things, which are clearly documented in our docs. But the basics will just work. So we wanted to show that you can take your existing code and deploy it without modifications or with only minor modifications. And it's really important that you can reuse your code bases across L1 and different L2s, and you don't have to worry, you have to rewrite everything completely from scratch. You can rely on existing security patterns, which you understand well, you can use code bases that have been heavily audited. It will all just work.

And yeah, we intend to release the mainnet as soon as the test shows mature and, you know, like everything around the full specification is fully internet. So, Alex, can we talk about that for a minute? So say I'm a defy app developer and I have something I've wired up in Solidity. It's working on the EVM right now. Maybe that same Solidity app I've now ported that to like Polygon, for example, there, you know, their proof of stake network. Maybe I'm trying to port that to you, arbitrium and optimism as well. If I take that code and I try to deploy it on the ZK Sync TestNet, how much modification is really required there?

Because our understanding is there's like degrees of the modification that is required. And could you contrast that with maybe something like Starkware? requires a developer to do to port their application? Absolutely. So the degree to which you have to make modifications depends on what your program is using. If you have just generic code, most likely you will not need to change anything. We support most things, most primitives, including creating contracts, create two, you know, like hashes, all the Ethereum hashes, which, by the way, translate to the same, you know, like we actually, like if you use K-Chac, it's going to produce

K-Chac hash. If you shot to 5-6, it's going to use shot to 5-6. They're not replacing them under the hood as previously was thought of that we'll need to. So there are a few things that aren't just not supported yet. So if you rely on them, you will either have to wait or you will have to circumvent, circumvent those by the code, replace them with something different. Those are some certain cryptographic primitives. So we don't support parings yet. We don't support more operations, although the compiler will soon also bridge that functionality.

And we don't support native if sending and receiving. So you have to wrap if as a your C-20 token for now. Apart, yeah, so apart from that, Yeah, so apart from that, everything should work. And whatever is not working is clearly documented. Could you contrast that with Starkware? So so far, a lot of that sounds similar to some of the optimistic roll-up style EVM change that we've seen.

But how does that compare with Starkware? I mean, I understand they have a different programming language. They have a completely different programming language, which you have to use from, like you have to actually rewrite your code from scratch in that. language. They have a transpiler, but I'm not sure to what degree it's functional. And my understanding it, it will produce Kaira code, which you will have to then manually review and adjust. You can just keep your code in solidity, but maybe I'm wrong here. But in any case, the input for Starkro compiler is called in Kaira. Whereas for us, it's EVM code. And what's really important, we support the same,

Web3 API as all the other depths. You most likely will not have to change your interface. You will be able to rely on the interface, and you will be able to integrate services that or have integration of services that already implement this Web3 API, like EtherScan and the graph and, you know, like a bunch of tools that work with EVM today on Mainet and on different L2s. and they will just work out of books, which is not the case for Kairn as far as I know.

I want to just reorient to the user's perspective here. So are you saying that it could come to pass that your favorite defy application, say an AVE, a compound, you know, a maker or uniswap, same interface you're using on the existing Ethereum mainnet with high gas fees, of course. And then one day you have the option with the exact same interface.

to use ZK Sync instead. And it's all EVM ZK under the hood. And suddenly your gas fees drop from like dollars to cents. And from a user perspective, yeah, you know, it's the same kind of UX experience that I've always received, except now there's far lower gas fees. Is that the sort of thing that we can expect? I mean, same block explore, same wallet, same user interface, just lower gas fees? or is it going to be a bit more incremental and clunky than that?

No, it's actually the exact same user experience. So a big part of that is that we allow people to reuse wallets. So any Ethereum wallets works natively. And the keys are actually kept in the wallet. So you can sign a transaction, you just sign it from the wallet. So that's really important. So yes, this allows for the migration of the entire ecosystem on like, you know, or not. So you can strap the ecosystem by default. You don't have to write all of that

transferage. I think Argent is maybe one example of this with people. Are they using, they're using ZK Sync. I'm not sure if they're using the ZKEVM under the hood. But, you know, Argin is kind of a wallet wrapper that's generally been on Ethereum for most of its life. And now it's, it's starting to spin up wallets on ZK Sync. Is that an example of this? Are they using the same infrastructure technology here? Well, Argent is a really interesting example of, so Argent is on the mission to allow mainstream adoption for Ethereum in general because they solve the problem of security and usability.

You don't have to mess with their seed phrase, which is hard for most people. Like, they don't understand security of it. They have never been hacked in their history of Argent. So right now, we integrated Argent with the KSIMP version 1, where people can make transfers, can make trades, can interact with existing defy contracts on Maynett Ethereum through batches with liquidity providers. But it's also going to be used on version 2. For the users, the experience will remain the same. You will just have more functionality because you will be able to interact with contracts on a duals of direct.

So when I say the experience is going to be the same, it's actually not true because the experience is going to be better. So there are a lot of things which will be possible on layer two, which are currently limited in Ethereum, for example, account obstruction. So Argent, for example, will work much better on Zikisink than it works on Ethereum. It's going to be a lot cheaper and easier to maintain the code. you will not need real layers. People will be able to interact directly with a peer-to-peer network to propagate transactions. People will actually be able to pay a native gas, not just in ETH, but in any token they transact in. So it's going to open a lot of possibilities.

And also for other use cases, other debts that, you know, use cases, other debts that, you know, that will do interesting things with the counterstraction, with meta-transactions, et cetera. This is why a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem think that the ZK-EVM, ZK roll-ups, are going to unlock the golden age of UX for DFI, which is something that we've just been missing, basically since the entirety of DFI's existence. And Alex, one of the properties about optimistic roll-ups is that they both, both Arbitroman optimism just boast about how you can just take your code

and immediately deploy it on an optimistic roll-up, and that's one of the benefits of optimistic roll-ups, is that it's just a very low-touch transition. And that's what I'm hearing coming out of you in ZK-Sink, is that it doesn't actually take all that much work to deploy your code on ZKSync, which is just phenomenal, because we already have so much of DeFi built out on the Ethereum L1,

as soon as just being able to copy and paste it and put it on a ZK roll-up is, it kind of almost sounds too good to be true. But what I do know, that I want to check with you is that while we do have this benefit of just being able to copy and paste and put it on ZK Sync, the developer tooling I think still is going to be something that the ZKEVM ecosystem needs to build out. Because the developer tooling for building Defi on the EthereumL1 has been extremely robust because that's what we've been having. That's what we've had for the last six years. Is this an important conversation when it comes to building out the ZKK?

EVM ecosystem, how much rewriting and just like rebuilding of the developer tooling needs to be done to truly enable developers to unlock their full potential for building out defy on a ZK EVM? Yeah, this is a great question. So we have to split developer tooling into two categories. One is the tooling around the code itself, and the other one is general tooling around smart contracts, deployment, and so on. So the second category is completely. completely covered by our support of Web 3 API. So things like Ether scan or the graph and so on, we'll just work out the box. Chain link oracles, stuff like this?

Chainlink oracles and so, yeah. So this will be all provided at default. Now there is a smaller part of the developer tooling is like when you have to debug your code, where you have to see what's happening. And by the way, also events are fully compatible with Ethereum. So like everything around the, where like code doesn't matter will work. Everything, what concerns the code,

will have to be adjusted, but that's a small part. And we're working with teams to make those changes and to provide whatever you need to make it work. So for example, we built an extension of the hard hat plugin, physically sync to just deploy contracts. Like you can use your hot hat to test, deploy, compile, build contracts. And yeah, so like if you tools will have to be adjusted there.

How much of a lift is this going to be? Like on just like, can you kind of measure how much work needs to go in in order to provide developers a comparable developer ecosystem to building on ZK Sync? As I said, like the the tools that are missing or need adjustment are a minority. So it won't be, it won't be much. We expect everything to be free of. in a few weeks, months or more. Alex, you said earlier that, you know,

we're talking about not just the same UX as the Ethereum may not people have come to expect, but better user experience, potentially in this ZK roll-up-enabled world. Can we also, because this is not something we've talked about yet in the show, but we've talked about on many bankless episodes, including our episode on Monolithic versus modular blockchains

that people can go back and listen to. But can we talk about the decentralization that we're trying to preserve here? It's like take us a few notches above. Let's go to the higher level and talk about why are we going to all this effort in the first place? Like why ZK roll-ups in the first place

and what sort of trust assumptions exist in something like the ZK EVM? What are we trusting versus versus? versus other techniques on other chains and monolithic layer ones. Talk to us about that. So this is a really interesting question which goes to the roots of why we were building Ziki Sync in the first place. So we started with a very clear mission and it's still rooted as the, like, we are a very,

very mission-focused project where we want all the world to go bankless. We want people to have full control over financial assets and be fully self-sovereign. And that means we need to go absolute mainstream. We need to be able to serve millions of people, billions of people without limits. We can only do this if we keep resilience of the network. We cannot have centralized entities performing, like, you know, it would not even work physically, that we have one entity that controls all of the internet of value, where all of the transactions have to go through a bottleneck of a single server or a few old servers.

We just want to work. So we need to decentralize these things. And we need to make sure that they cannot be killed by really powerful actors, because what we see right now in the world, that politics is going way beyond what people would entrust them with and taking too many authorities on them. So we want to keep this limits in place. So Ziki roll-ups are the only technology we have today that can allow truly limitless extension of this Internet of value.

The reason for this is since we cannot have a single cluster where everything will be happening, because we will be limited by a throughput of a single consensus of decentralized nodes or a single two-to-peer network or single data availability sharding system and so on. We'll have to have many of those clusters and they will need to be able to trust each other and trust each other in an objective manner. When I say objective, I mean like machine-to-machine, not people-to-people because you will have like like an internet, you have a whole big network of those subnets that interact with each other.

So whenever you pass a message in internet, the systems on the other side of the world can verify the digital signatures, they can verify encryption and see that it's coming from the person or the entity that actually produced the message. With digital, with the word of value, it's a lot harder because we're not just passing a message, to be passing value. So we have to trust that consensus mechanisms were enforced in the other subsystems. And we preserve the scarcity. So if you send something from one side, then it actually disappeared on that side and it appeared

on the other side. And this requires this fully objective way to check that, like, you can trust the other systems. And this is only possible with your knowledge proofs. for the reasons that Vitalik explained in a recent post about bridges, we can try to go into them and explain it more technically. But... Alex, I'm curious if you agree with the bottom line here,

which I've heard described with ZK, the ZK-EVM, is basically you're trusting two things. You're trusting, one, the security of the Ethereum mainnet, and two, you're trusting ZK. ZK math, that kind of cryptography. Are those the two trust assumptions or are there are others here? Those are the two trust assumptions with the cryptography. If you rely on trusted setup, you would also trust the correctness of the setup, but that's kind of minor and transitory we expect in a long run to not be required. But yes, you trust Ethereum as

the settlement layer and the main data availability layer. And the source of of consensus and you trust the math and the code that implemented this. And is there like with ZK Sync Evm right now on TestNet and, you know, I still haven't asked about the date of when made net, which we'll get to you, I promise. But are there any kind of centralized operators in the mix here? Are there any sort of escape hatches? I know many roll-up solutions have sort of left in some centralization vectors on purpose because they are still, you know, testing the systems.

How about in ZK Sync, are there still some centralization vectors that you have in place in these early stages that you plan to take away later on? We do have centralization of the sequence right now because it's a lot easier and faster to develop. So all the transactions will have to go to the central server, and this server then produces the box. And this is only for a short time until we have L2 consensus running, which will be fully decentralized. But where we're not willing to take any compromises is the security of the assets. And the security prerequisite for that is that you have this escape hatches. What this means is you should be able to enforce any transaction. So if you have any money in L2 on Zika-Sync, any assets,

you should be able to take those assets out if you don't trust the network anymore. If the network becomes malicious, either because. the server is compromised or is just down and is not responding or if we don't have a server, maybe you have a consensus mechanism governed by some community by Sandoah, but maybe the majority of the stakeholders is compromised or was subject to malicious takeover. So you just don't trust them anymore. You should be able to go to Ethereum as a court of higher appeal and demand your assets be out. And this is what we will have from day one on ZK Sync. And this is actually a big difference from stock net.

In Starknet, for example, they took a decision to implement zero knowledge proves in a slightly different way. And they cannot currently build this enforcement mechanism. Because they cannot prove that a failed transaction failed. They can only prove successful transaction. So we decided to take additional overhead in the way virtual machine works in order to be able to prove that any transaction, you made a call to this address, to this arguments. This call was coming from Ethereum Maina as like through a priority queue, which enforces transactions.

And then we can prove that here is the outcome of this call. Here is what happened and what could have happened is that transaction failed and nothing executed. But we will still include this transaction and we will still be able to prove that it's not executed. And for the listeners that are familiar with Arbitromb and optimism, and they also have centralized sequencers at this at the same time. So ZK Sync is about comparable with the current centralization levels of the other roll-ups that users might have, might be, have already, have already interacted with. basically what a centralized sequencer means is just that ZK Sync, optimism, arbitrauma, are the people that are ordering the transactions in the roll-up.

And so this is kind of par for the course for where we are in the current state of roll-up technology. Alex, I have a question here coming out of Justin Drake, and I'm going to actually have to ask you to help me ask the question and understand the importance of it. But he asks, can we ask about the Prover Cost, denominated in either U.S. dollars or gas and also the Prover setup as in what type of AWS instances they use in how many. Alex, why is this question significant and also what's the answer?

It's significant because it puts some limits on what the minimum transaction costs will look like. And I can share that, of course, it depends on the type of transactions and on what operations it employs like a single transaction can be having a lot of storage accesses and a lot of execution or it can be like something very simple like a token transfer but in general the costs estimates do not differ much from the cost costs on version one so you can like zikising version one you can think of the transfers there as you know like using roughly the same computational power as what we will have for like simple ERC token transfers

or Ethereum transfers in V2. And right now the basic cost is something like 0.1 cent. And this remains like the basis. So a simple transfer costs to this. Now if your contract call requires multiple transfers and some other logic and some of hashing, then it will be added on top of that. But that's the proof of cost. But of course, in roll-ups, costs are always dominated by the data availability costs.

So this is going to be the case for all roll-ups. We are all using the same Ethereum bandwidth space. We are competing for it. So the more usage will have an L2 shared by roll-ups, the higher this cost is going to be. We already see it in, you know, like optimistic roll-ups are not cheap, easy-k roll-ups are not, like, not as cheap as some side chains because we still have to pay those costs to Ethereum. But the beautiful thing about ZK. Singh is that we actually plan a volition called ZK. Porter. So the users will be able to choose how they want to secure their data available.

Do we want their account to leave in the role-up where they have the full security of Ethereum, this theoretically, like spare box? or they are willing to accept certain risks and have their data that will be secured by a group of special actors called Guardians, which is still pretty secure and like incentive aligned with the interests of the user, but they will pay a lot less. So if a roll-up transaction will cost, let's say, $1, then the portal users will pay maybe one cent for the transaction. That's really great, and I think that's helpful. So, you know, for bankless listeners, once again, I would refer you to that, the podcast, the, you know, monolithic versus modular design podcasts to make even more sense of what Alex just said. But, you know, a base understanding is the Ethereum scalability strategy in the modular design is we have three layers.

We have the consensus layer, the data availability layer, and the execution layer, right? The execution layer is what's happening. The data availability layers is what's happened. The consensus layer is what's true, okay? And then Ethereum in this design, the main net, remains the consensus layer. What you were just talking about, Alex, is ZK Sync being an execution layer, and then using ZK Porter for some data availability, right? could further reduce the costs of transactions.

And it's user-dependent, whether they want to use Ethereum for data availability or whether they want to use ZK Porter for data availability. So that's a whole topic in and of itself and is super cool. But the net result is two things. One, transactions are about to get a hell of a lot cheaper. Good news for defy. And number two, what Alex just said is super cool, is all of the roll-ups, all of the execution layers are competing for us right now.

You guys are all competing for us. You're competing for Defi users. That is a great thing, I think, for the ecosystem because it brings a lot of innovation. Alex, want to ask one more clarifying question on all of this, which is getting released. And this is kind of a roadmap type question. So ZK Sync 2.0, the EVM Public TestNet is live. That just went live last week, I believe. You've already had ZK Sync out in the wild.

Here it is on a layer 2 beat. It has $74 million in total locked value. It's a ZKV roll up. Can you talk about the difference between the ZK sync that's out in the world today? And like, people have used this. I've used this before for payments, for example. And the ZK sync that you just released to public test net and the trajectory of kind of what's next and how that relates. Should we think of the ZK sync that's on MayNet right now is kind of a one-neutral?

And this new EVM compatible ZK Sync is sort of the 2.0. Is that the way to think about this? That's absolutely correct. The ZK Sync 1.0 was a application-specific ZK roll-up, which you can only use for payments and swaps and since last summer also for NFTs. But nothing else. You cannot have arbitrary contracts. Whereas ZKSync 2 is the full extension of Ethereum where you can deploy anything.

You can build the entire ecosystem there. So this is like going from a Nokia 3100 to an iPhone. Well, I think that's the part of the story that everyone is really excited for. Alex, we have some questions that we still want to ask, such as how we go from TestNet to Mainnet, when we go from TestNet to Mainnet, and then, of course, when token. So we got these questions lined up coming for you next,

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Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. All right, guys, we are back with Alex from ZKSync. We're talking all about the current EVM, ZKEVM test net, but I want to hear, Alex, about when it becomes the ZK EVM main net. So how does that transition look? Are we just going to wipe the slate clean with the test net and start from scratch? Or are we going to roll the test net into a main net? How is the transition from test to main going to happen? And then also when is that going to happen?

So the test net from the developer perspective, it's going to remain essentially the same interface. As I said, a couple of features are coming. But the contracts that are compilable and deployable now will just work. You will not need to do anything. We expect one major upgrade of the virtual machine to happen before the main net happens. It's already on the way, so it's a different version of compiler and a virtual machine, which has been developed in like a internal sort of. And then just making sure that the test net is mature and we can cover all the functionality and, like, you know, everything just works.

and yeah it's we're not going to delay it for for unnecessary reasons we have got in our roadmap we have cut all the unnecessary things and we want to get to the main net really as soon as possible in the shortest possible and so is the the state of the test net going to be preserved as in if a developer deploys like suci swap a uniswap on zk on zk sync and then and then it goes into main net is all the state smart contracts and the assets on the test net preserved into main net? Oh, no, no, no. The test net is test net. Like, think of it as a Rinkabee or Gurley or Kauffin test net for Ethereum.

It's a completely separate deployment. So it's actually tied to a particular Ethereum test net. I think it's now we're on Gurley. So we actually have a deployment of the case in contract on that Ethereum test net, which the L2 state is attached to. and build it. So, Alex, how long are we talking here? I mean, there's this phrase in, you know, the Ethereum world that's become popular,

weeks, not months, right? Are we talking weeks? We talk in months here? Are we talking years? We're realistically probably talking months, but like not years for sure. Okay. It will happen this year. Before the merch.

When's the merch going to be, David? June 4th. I did not say that. Okay, so Alex, I think the other question that everyone really wants to hear is win token. Well, that's also an interesting question. So we're going to deploy ZK syncing stages. In the first stage, we're only going to deploy ZKROLOC, which does not yet, like, really require a token. But the token is really needed for Ziki Porter because we need to secure the data with something that has,

inherent connection to this data that like you know like we will will have consequences if if the data becomes unavailable and it's hard to manipulate so we yeah we will definitely need token for that and we will need the token to introduce clear to consensus and we also don't want to delay those things so they are next on the roadmap right after launching the mainnet so the The token is needed to slash people that do not secure the ZK Porter appropriately. And then it's also needed to decentralize the sequencer. Are those the two use cases that you just stated? That's right.

Although we're not going to slash individual people securing the data. This is pretty interesting. In the key porter, you are never slashed. You're just like you're taking risks if you don't provide data. Like, you are only slashed if you are not providing data that you previously agreed to provide. This is very different. So on the normal circumstances, you never need to provide this data. It's only required in the case when the operator becomes malicious or the validator consensus becomes malicious and stop serving users,

which hopefully never happens. But you as a user, you actually don't have any consequences. You should not be afraid of running a guardian node that secure ZK Sync on your ordinary laptop or even like on this machine in the cloud that you control. There is nothing like nothing can go wrong immediately if you are compromised, unlike staking in normal consensus mechanisms. So is the theorized, one of the theorized uses of the token is to validate the ZK roll-up, the ZK Sync, and then receive compensation or fees from the sequencer.

And so if you are validating on ZK Sync, you get to order the transactions. And then the incentive would be that you get to extract some amount of MEV from the ZK roll-up. Is that right? Or perhaps is that right? So, yes, if you are validated in the ZK Sync, then you are the sequencer. The validators will serve as a collective decentralized sequencer. And yes, of course, you get some fees from the users to you for this work that you provide.

Do you have any details or notes? Because we want these things to be decentralized. But then when we mint this token, it starts off centralized. Do you have any notes for us and how you plan on what the theorized plan is from going from a centralized token supply to a decentralized token supply? So you mean, how are you going to defuse the token? How are we going to diffuse the token? This is a big question which I'm not ready to answer now, but it must be done in a in a way that maximizes decentralization because with data availability,

it's you don't want, like the malicious majority can do as much harm as comparable to the side chain. So it's not just about the controlling the sequence of transactions or extracting NB or something like that. It's really a matter of security. And it's really, really important for us to get it in the hands of individual people. And this is why it's important that you can run a guardian note on a normal laptop. Because we expect the, and also there are no latency requirements. You don't have to be online all the time.

You don't have to be online with a super fast internet. You can just run it on the laptops. We expect a lot of people to contribute to actually become validators. Just like they run Ethereum full nodes right now, requirements will be roughly the same, but you get paid for it, unlike Ethereum. So we think the decentralization of the portal will be very, very high. And it must be reflected in the initial distribution of the token,

which will have to design accordingly. That is fascinating. I hope bankless listeners are reading between the lines here a little bit. I mean, we have confirmed the existence of a token. It's necessary for the operation of ZK. Porter and for the ZK. Sync consensus layer. Don't have an answer on when token, of course, which is very difficult to answer, but it feels like it's a prerequisite for both of those two technologies. And it also feels like there's great opportunity to get plugged into this ecosystem and start, giving the network what it wants. What does the network want? It wants developers.

It wants users. It wants liquidity. It wants decentralization. Give it those things. You know, start trying to run some of this infrastructure. Run Guardian nodes. That's my footnote, I think, on everything you just said, Alex. There's also this other entity here called ZK Dow that has recently spun up.

Can you tell us a bit more about ZK Dow? What is this and how is it really? to the primary ZK Sync project that we've been talking about so far? Well, ZK Dow is a separate thing. It's a cooperation with BIDDAO that pledged to support the L2 ecosystem and invest in projects and support projects that are building on layer two. And, yes, so it's open as a source of funds for developers, which we encourage to start using.

And that was $200 million, I think. BitDAO committed to funding the ZK Dow with $200 million around coordinated milestones. So it's another way for bankless listeners to get plugged in. Go check out what ZK Dow is doing. I think they're just getting spun up right now. Alex, before we shift the conversation to Ukraine a little bit and talk a bit more about that,

Is there anything else you want to tell us that we haven't touched so far that you think is super interesting for the community to know about ZK Sync and your plans moving forward at Matter Labs? I think that I touched on this already, but it's really important to understand that zero knowledge proofs will be the technology that will enable us to go to this completely limitless Internet of value. And this is going to change, yeah, this is going to change the world, I think, in the way how freedom is promoted and how self-sovereignty is promoted, because literally everyone will be able to get a grasp of those things. And we will see the transformation of social media, of everything powered by this technology. So, yeah. As we shift the conversation, Alex, and thank you. so much for your massive contributions to the space. You know, on behalf of us at bank lists and crypto, we believe very much in the principles

of decentralization, and you guys are painstakingly building out those value systems into the code that you're pushing out there. And it's just fantastic to see. So as we transition the conversation of Ukraine, I'm just kind of curious to hear a bit more about your personal story, because it feels like you've got, you know, You got a story in Ukraine, having been born there, interested to hear about that. And then why crypto became important to you as well? So I guess, first of all, high level, what's your lens on everything that's going on in Ukraine right now?

And how do you think the crypto story dovetails with that? Does the crypto industry, the technology that we're building, does it offer any solutions, any help? to some of the conflict that's going on. What's your take here? Yeah. Well, I was born in Soviet Ukraine. I grew up in Ukraine. I was very small when Ukraine became independent. And the conflict we see now is really a continuation of the tragedy that the country experienced with the Soviet rule. And this is direct cause of like for me, what brought me, like, this is systematic, the root motive that brought me into crypto.

Because as a kid, I saw the consequences of the centralized economy, centralized political system playing out on the society where everything collapsed. You know, like, not that it collapsed, it's just like never really worked in the first place. The Soviet Union was a total mass. It was completely inadequate system of governance, economical system, where everything was in shortage, like shops were empty, everything was disbalanced, people were dismotivated. Only few branches that enjoyed a lot of attention by the government, like military, got some degree of world achievements, but the rest of the country was competing in the shape. So what we see now is like the empire strikes back and wants to take it back because the processes in Russia took it back earlier than than what we've seen now. And the antidote to this is to give more power to people.

economical power, which will enforce their political powers. As soon as we can get there, the less likely such scenarios on a huge scale will actually play. You have a single person which is capable of taking decisions that will destroy the world or destroy entire countries, because everything is subordinated and highly centralized. So I was, I think, seven when there was a hyperinflation going on in my country, where prices would rise by 30% every single day for a period of a year. I saw how that works. So I was surrounded by people that were highly mistrustful of governments and banks for sorts.

And since then, I once made a clash of bank, financial, or other types of crisis involving money that happened in the world ever since then, like almost every year in some part of the world, and sometimes globally, where people could not get money from the banks, where you could see the queues before ATMs, where the economy would stop working. you get capital controls, you would get mandatory orders to sell foreign, uh, uh, fiat reserves and stuff like that. Uh, and you would see people losing all of their fortunes overnight, uh, that they were working really hard to get and were hoping to pass on to their, to their kids and, you know,

like a lot of tragedy, a lot of suffering, uh, that all roots down in a ways. society is organized. Freedom is lacking because certain groups of interests want to preserve their interests and they're abusing the power. And you know, like most of the people in the world live under corrupt regimes. They are not living in democracies. Even if you live in a democracy, you can have a situation like, you know, we recently have in Canada where money is being confiscated without court orders, without any, like, any even like pretext of some legal decency. So it should be a really, really strong message to everyone. Like it will only stop if you don't let these things to happen.

And the way to not let this things happen is like to have full control, to empower the individual and not some authority that claims to work on people's behalf. And this is like to me this is all like what crypto is all about starting with Bitcoin and and then extending with Ethereum which gave it a lot more powerful capabilities to build like really really interesting things and expand it like to actually absorb all of the world's finance all of the world's values into this huge internet of internet 2.0 3.0. Alex, there's been a number of just examples of how crypto has been a part of this story.

There's a Ukraine Dow that has helped raise $4 million. There's the Bitcoin volumes jumping to all-time highs in the Russian RuPaul due to the devaluation of the ruple. There are stories of people being able to maintain their wealth as they flee from Kiev and other Ukraine stories because of the power of private keys. Are there any stories that you've heard that have? have stood out to you as examples of like crypto really helped here. Is there any stories that you've heard that you can share with us?

Well, the donations is a really big, powerful thing because it's really, you know, banking system is not reliable. It was already hard to send money in Ukraine for certain things. Like sometimes money comes back. It's just like a lot easier for, for you to donate. And I actually, I spoke personally to the founders of Ukraine. the unchain fund, the people who manage the people from the Minister of Digital Transformation donations on the Twitter at Ukraine, all of them are legit to please donate because as we speak

right now, there is work going on and people are dying, like people being bombarded, civil cities and in the mobardism. Please do something like there are close to half a million refugees now on the borders with 20 hours long queues to just leave the country. Not everyone can leave a huge tragedy, huge humanitarian crisis going on with now. So please donate. Well, we can definitely get those links into the show notes. I'll do that as you, as I ask this next question. Do you have any idea how when we send ether or Bitcoin to the addresses that have been

generated and verified by the Ukraine Dow and the actual Ukraine. digital organization. How does that, how does the ether that we send or the USC that we send, how does it actually translate into actual help on the ground? Do you actually,

do you know how those two things are bridged? Yeah, so they either sell it in Ukraine for Rurna and send to bank accounts or just get cash and pay people in cash for the goods that are needed on spot. Or they sell it abroad

on foreign accounts and purchase stuff that helps people and transport it. back into Ukraine. Alex, I'm curious as well. What does the crypto community look like in that part of the world, Ukraine, even parts of Russia? Is it strong?

Is it robust? Just in general, what does it look like? Well, there are a lot of technological projects coming from Russia and Ukraine with a lot of Russian and Ukraine and developers because the mathematical and, like, the mathematical and scientific school in Soviet Union was pretty strong because it was necessary for the defense and military. But the good outcome is that we have a lot of smart people who are really well-trained in mathematics, programming, and they are building stuff. There is less crypto, you know, business crypto projects, like most people who are founders of some projects like

guys from near protocol, Solan is part of the following by Ukrainians. A lot of others, they're mostly in the West because, like, crypto is a truly global movement and it doesn't know boundaries. And like people just move around and most people are just nomads to the different purposes as I've put the donation addresses of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have been verified into the YouTube showdown. So if you're watching live, you can go ahead and refresh the page. and the addresses will be there available to you,

and it'll also be in the podcast show notes as well. Alex, thank you for your perspective and also just sharing everything else with us on today's state of the nation with ZK. Sink, so thank you for your time, sir. Thank you, guys, and thank you all the listeners. It's incredible privilege to talk to folks like Alex. I'm saying this to you, to bankless listeners.

You know, I know we've had many generations of freedom fighters, And Alex to me and his team is an example of the freedom builder, which is fantastic. This is truly a technology for the people and by the people, whether you're Russian, Ukrainian, somewhere from the West. You know, this is why we're on the bankless journey for decentralization, for power back to the people, self-sovereignty. So it's a fantastic story to see. Anyway, guys, risks and disclaimers, of course, none of this has been financial advice.

It never is. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. So are roll-ups at this stage in the journey. So is Defi you could lose what you put in. But hey, the world's kind of risky too. So what do you have to lose? I don't know. We're headed west, though. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.