Bankless - zkSync Era Mainnet Launch & NEW zkEVM with Alex Gluchowski and Anthony Rose

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Alex Gluchowski is the Co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs and the creator of zkSync. Anthony Rose is the head of engineering at Matter Labs and has a background in software and machine learning. Prior to joining Matter Labs, Anthony spent a number of years in the industry building teams at SpaceX.  In today’s episode, the four talk about zkSync’s massive announcement, they’ve launched their zkEVM to mainnet! They also delve into the engineering challenges, what zk unlocks, the difference between zkEVM vs Optimistic Rollups, what builders need to know, and of course…wen token?!  ------ 📣 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 8:15 zkSync’s Era Mainnet Launch 8:53 The Importance of zkSync Era 9:53 zkSync Era 13:53 Staged Roll-Out 18:50 zkSync Era Projects 21:14 Engineering Challenges  26:25 What Does zk Unlock?  28:16 zkEVMd vs Optimistic Rollups 36:35 How Low Can Gas Fees Go? 39:22 The Power of zkEVMs 48:58 How is zkSync Era Different? 53:08 New Risks to Pay Attention to 55:35 Path to Decentralization & Security 1:03:42 What Do Builders Need to Know?  1:05:36 Resources 1:07:12 Token?!  1:08:20 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: zkSync Website https://zksync.io/  Alex Gluchowski https://twitter.com/gluk64  Anthony Rose https://twitter.com/anthonykrose  ------ 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 

If we want to build a truly limitless internet of value, internet of roll-ups, it has to be trustless. So all the bridges must be ZK, and that means that all the chains participating in this network have to be ZK chains. This is our vision for hyper-scalability. The ZK EVM is here. It's on Mainnet. David, we've got the episode. Announcement just went out as we are pressing publish on this episode. What are we talking about today? We are talking about ZK Sync era. The main net is live. As of right now, so we've got the two people from the ZKSync team.

We got Alex Glukowski, who's been with ZKSink since forever, co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind ZKSink. We also got Anthony. Anthony is the new head of engineering, which is a very ambitious role as it relates to ZK stuff. That sounds challenging. We're going to walk through what this announcement is. What does it mean for a ZK EVM to go live?

In the era of bank failures, we have a new era for Ethereum. At least that is what the ZKSync is saying along with. There's ZKSync era chain. So that is the announcement we're going to get into all these details and more. So you can be informed about what this new frontier of Ethereum is. Yes, this is the frontier of the frontiers. And that's where we're headed today. Hey, David, before we get in, got to do a shout out.

This one's for the devs. We got a special announcement for the devs, sponsored by our friends over at Consensus on the Inferences. your team. David, what do they want folks to know? Yeah, specifically for the NFT devs out there. This is coming down from Infura. So Infura's got an NFT SDK and toolkit for you to build your NFT projects. And so it's got 14 different endpoints that allows you to read data from eight different blockchains. You can aggregate it, analyze it, filter it, build a dashboard. And this SDK allows you, provides you tools to write to five different blockchains. All of the use cases that you need

for your basic NFT stuff, selling an IFT, buying an NFT, minting NFT, all of this SDK from Infira is to help you the NFT dev build your NFT product. There is a link in the show notes to get started with this spiffy new SDK from Infira. That's really cool. Infura, of course, started with Ethereum nodes. Now they're providing a full NFT API SDK for the devs. Go check that out. David, before we get in, we have some disclosures to make. Of course, you can always find all of our disclosures on our disclosure page at bankless.com slash disclosures. Just want to let the bankless audience know. We are advisors to ZK Sync.

We are friends of the project. We believe in its mission. We believe in scaling Ethereum through ZK EVMs. That is not why they're on the podcast today. They are on the podcast today because they built something. They launched something really big. David, what should folks pay attention to going to this episode? This is truly a new frontier.

We all know what a roll-up is. we have experienced these roll-ups with Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. These are a different kind of roll-up. This is a new unlock. And so simply put, Z-K-EvM, Z-K roll-ups, have more scale. But if you just think that they are optimistic roll-ups with more scale, you're going to miss the force for the trees. And that is a conversation that we have in this episode.

There are specific and unique new use cases that the Z-K roll-ups, the Z-K-roll-ups, the Z-K-EvMs unlock that are not unlocked by optimistic roll-ups. And so this is a new frontier. There's new treasure out here. There are new things to build. There's new optionality for devs to build cool new things that optimistic roll-ups, even though we love them as much as we do,

just don't offer. And so as you are listening to this episode, dear listener, perhaps dev listener, try to identify what those new opportunities lie. And we name some specific ones, but really it's up to your imagination because right now many new ZK EVMs are coming online. They are all relatively blank slates

of opportunity. And we've played this game before. We all remember, maybe not all of us, but I remember a time when Ethereum was just a layer one. And now there's been a bunch of layer two opportunities. Now we get to experience that all over again with the ZK EVM revolution with ZK Sync leading the charge. So, right, that is my long rant about what listeners

should pay attention to in this episode. Yeah, here you go, guys. We told you that layer two, summer was coming. We've been telling you for two years. It's here. How do we know that? because we're shipping a mainnet. That's how you know. Go try this out. Of course, there'll be some risks in the episode. You can listen to that. But this is an opportunity for you to get on board

to the ZK EVM platform. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange. Cracken, go create an account. Go check them out. There's a link in the show notes. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Cracken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Cracken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Cracken U.S. is simple, intuitive, and frictionless, making the Cracken app a great place for all to get involved

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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.medamask.io and add Metamask learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. Bankless Nation, we are here with the Matter Labs team. Matter Labs, the creators of ZK. Sink. We got Alex Gloukowski, the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. He has been on the podcast before. Alex, welcome back to the show. Hi, David. Hi, Ryan. How? Hello, everyone.

Pleasure to be here. And new to Bankless, we have Anthony Rose. Anthony Rose is the head of engineering at Matter Labs and has a background in software and machine learning. Interestingly enough, prior to joining Matter Labs. Anthony spent a number of years in the industry building teams at SpaceX, but pretty cool that we snagged him for the crypto world. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot. Yeah, very happy to be here.

So we always love frontier metaphors here at Bankless. And with this announcement that we're going to walk through today, we have discovered a new frontier to explore. Explore. Can you guys walk us through the announcement of what you guys are dropping today? What is the big news? Well, the ZKSync era, our ZKVM solution is now open to the users. Everyone can now start using it. It's a consummation of the launch, which took a very long time, but that's also the beginning of the new journey. And that's that. All right. We're wrapped. The network is live. It's here. It's fine. Okay, but what does this mean, Alex, kind of walk us through the significance of this.

Can you kind of place this into perhaps even like Ethereum's history? Why is this a significant thing both for Matter Labs and ZKSink? And why is this significant for Ethereum at large? I genuinely think it's significant for Ethereum as a large because ZK AVMs have been considered the holy grail of scaling Ethereum from the inception of this concept. It took a very long time. People thought it's going to take much longer. but here we are and this is really the pivotal point for Ethereum where the real mass adoption

with like full preservation of all the things that make Ethereum valuable really begins. We will talk about those things but this is where you know we there is by now I think a broad consensus that zero knowledge tag ZKRO specifically and more specifically ZKVMs is this pass into the future and it has multiple reasons. And there's also a new name for this network. Can you walk us through this new brand for ZK Sync? Yes, we really think it's a new era for humanity where you can fully own yourself, your assets, your identity, all of your transactions.

So for us, we started ZKSing four years ago with the, from day one, there was a mission there. We won't accelerate the mass adoption of crypto. We love the ideas. from Bitcoin. We love Ethereum. We love those technologies because they open humanity to more freedom, gives you the ability to actually, you know, transact with anyone in the world without barriers, without asking for permission, without banks, without any kind of intermediaries.

And it was revolutionary. It's for the first time in history that we have this technology of global-scale cooperation without the trust assumptions. And for me, the question was like, how can we bring it to anyone in the world? What needs to happen to get there? And it was clear that a few things must be changed or must be invented and implemented.

We had a long way to improve the UX. People had to build applications. People had to build wallets and all the infrastructure around the crypto. But there was this one technical problem of scaling, which seemed impossible from the point point of view of technologies that we had four years ago. And when I stumbled upon the idea of ZK proofs,

16-0 knowledge proofs, or better call them proofs of computational integrity or snarks, it was this aha moment where I thought, wow, this could be it. It feels like magic, like not clear why it works, but it works. And you can really verify any number of transactions with a single lightweight hardware like your cell phone or a full node or Raspberry Pi. And there is no limit. You can think, you do one verification. All the blocks, all the transactions are processed.

So you're not breaking out of the blockchain. Or you are breaking out of a blockchain. You're not introducing new trust assumptions. You don't have to trust anyone. You still verify everything, but in a trustless way. So the new name is called ZK Sync Era. That's what you are launching. with. And certainly we are living in an interesting era and interesting times. David and I have

done so many podcasts this week, and I think we will next week and probably the weeks to come, about a bank crisis that seems to be going on in the United States and Europe and other parts of the world. We're not sure how far this will spread or what all of the implications are. We're still trying to unpack that, as is everyone else. But the root of it is kind of a, you know, a meta-banking crisis that we will probably never be able to resolve in the existing banking system, and that is we cannot verify transactions. We don't know if the dollars in our account are actually backed or what they're backed by. This is the promise of something like a technology like Ethereum. The reason Ethereum has fallen short on living up to that promise so

far is it hasn't been scalable as of yet, although a lot of talented engineers have been working on that, including Matter Labs. And now here we have a ZK EVM launching on chain on Mainnet, and available with the next stage of that promise being fulfilled for Ethereum. And I got to say, while the world is kind of on fire in various ways, crypto is silently building this new scalable infrastructure that we hope, and I know you guys hope, can onboard the world into this bankless money system. So, congrats and thank you for shipping. And this is hugely, it's a monumental event that we have a ZK EVM in production on MayNet. And you guys have been doing fantastic work in the background to make that happen.

One question I have for you is we've talked to many layer twos, you know, previously on bank lists. Our listeners will be familiar of this. What kind of staged rollout might we see at this point? So when you guys say it's available on Mainnet, it's here, what does that mean? What's the user experience? Are there gates? Are there still kind of, you know, places that are off limits for now?

or is this fully enabled, fully permissionless, fully open? Can you talk about that for a minute? I am happy to talk about that. Before that, I just want to say thank you for all the good words. And I also want to extend this gratitude to the entire community, to all the people who are contributing work, first of all, to all the employees of Meta Labs and all the people who we worked with to make this happen.

And to all the people who contributed to the creation of zero knowledge proofs, to the creation of Ethereum, to Bitcoin, and all of these technologies, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. It's not an isolated thing. Everything is interconnected and everything is contributing to everyone else's work. So this is really a combination of the work of the entire community. It's not just our children. So to the user experience and what you expect from the minute,

the staged rollout is here. In fact, it started a long time ago. we deployed the existing Mainnet contract with the address that everyone can see now. And if you look carefully at the address, you might know this interesting thing about it.

Half a year ago. So it was the first moment where we touched the MayNet as we promised at EFCC back in summer. We started experimenting with ourselves internally. We conducted

a number of security audits and a bunch of stress tests and a lot of things, a lot of experimentation, lot of learnings from operating the Mayanet. And we opened it to developers about a month ago. So the builders who registered could deploy their applications, bridge their whatever tokens they wanted, EF or EFC-20 tokens, and start building and start experimenting on the test net. Oh, sorry, on the magnet.

The test net is live for over a year and has processed, I think something like 8 million transactions by now. So this time we are opening the gates to everyone. We actually started to onboarding the users also two weeks ago

at Yt Denver where we sponsored the food truck experience. So all the people who got the food truck tokens from Yt Denver could use them in a very limited way, not interacting with smart contracts, but just using

them to pay for food trucks. using our account abstraction feature. But now it's opening to everyone. So what you can do? You can bridge your assets onto the KSync era. You can start interacting with projects that are live from day one. Every day we expect to see more and more projects going live. We know that the pipeline of projects about to deploy is much longer than it's currently live.

And we encourage everyone to do it gradually and only move. smaller amounts and do things, you know, like don't risk a lot because it's a brand new technology that has never been tested before. It has never been used in production before until now. So we don't want to rush. We want to, you know, to take the maximum cautious approach to this. So what would it mean in practice for the users? Basically, there are no limitations except that withdrawals will be delayed by some small time frame. So the withdrawals or finalization of the blocks, rather to say, initially is going to happen after 24 hours from the moment of the book commitment.

We soon will reduce this time to several hours, and eventually we want to get rid of it once we get read of the word alpha in the name of the network. Right now it's in alpha, so the contracts are upgradable, there is yet no security console, like treat it as a guarded, managed network that is life in production. It's fully available, no limits,

but it's still in kind of this test flight mode. Okay, so the theme park is opening, gates of the theme park are opening, users can go in, there are some rides there. Some of these rides might throw you off and, like, you know, might have a bad time on the roller coaster. So be careful. There's caution tape right now.

right now around some these things. Only cross the line if you are an explorer, if you're on the frontier, as I know many bankless listeners are. But once they're there... Otherwise, let someone else go first. Yeah, I'll let David go first. JK, I'll be there. So, but like what can we actually do there when we get there?

So you mentioned some projects are launching, have launched. So what are some of these early theme rides? I know more will be added over time, of course. But is there, you know, what would be kind of the, you know, your first recommendation on a project? are a place to visit once folks have bridged across to ZKSync era. I don't want to pick to pick favorites. You just go to ecosystem.cinct.aio and you will see the status of the project who is

life, who is not alive, and you can just experiment going from there. All right. Well, well said, I guess an incredibly neutral approach. Yeah, I wanted to emphasize, like we really, we are doing our best to remain fully neutral from all aspects. So we have not, like we opened the, uh, the main. that to developers with the wide listed

registration, but we have not centered a single application. Everyone who applied could use the network. So it was more for us to gather contacts and to be in touch with those people, but not to prevent anyone from launching. We're following a strict fair launch approach. We're not going to pick

any favorites to push them, to make them special case. We want to create an even plain field for everyone. This is really important. That's cool. Okay. So Anthony and Alex cannot pick favorites, but of course, David and I can. So we'll go test this out and we'll probably release some updates in the bankless newsletter about some of our favorite places to visit.

Anthony, did you want to say something to? Just I would definitely recommend taking a look at the page that Alex mentioned regarding the ecosystem. There is a sort of huge cross-section of the projects that many people will be familiar from layer one. But some of the other things that are exciting are, you know, the projects that are building sort of layer two native and, you know, thinking through what you can do in an environment. with, you know, higher transaction throughput, much lower fees, you actually start to open up

the design space for applications. Because we often get this question about, you know, what do you expect people to build at layer two? But I feel like maybe I have a very bad imagination. But if I, like, rewind the clock, I don't think I would have predicted, you know, some of the really interesting things we've seen in the world of defy. I definitely wouldn't have predicted some of the, you know, really interesting use cases for NFTs. So, you know, for me, the exciting thing about layer too is also, you know, I wonder what we'll see next and some of the sort of creative ideas that you can build in an environment that like unlocks application development that isn't maybe economically prohibited in the way it might have been at layer one. Yeah. And Anthony, I got more

of engineering questions, but really just to drive this point home, if to make this just super cleanly obvious, I know we have this drop down menu in Metamask, for example, when we need to switch to arbitram or optimism. And we expect to see just ZK sync just added to that network list as soon is you add the RPC endpoint inside of MetaMath. So now, you know, Arbitrum, Polygon, optimism, ZK Sync, the first ZKEVM to be added in this dropdown menu. I'm excited to see that logo there. But, Anthony, this is different because it's a ZKEVM,

not an optimistic roll-up. Optimistic Rolus have the benefit of just being able to be basically clones of Ethereum, like microcosms of Ethereum. But this is different. And so as the head of engineering, I can't imagine a more intimidating job to be the head of engineering of a ZK EVM. I can think of one, David, maybe launching rockets, right? That's a good point.

Tusha. So, Anthony, like, when it comes to a security. Security is another interesting thing. Yeah, we have a whole entire security conversation to talk about. But as it comes to teams that are onboarding from regular old Ethereum layer one or other layer two's. What are the engineering challenges about that? What are the engineering challenges that I don't even know to ask about? Like, how big of a lift is this whole thing? And how do you expect to get new projects migrated onto ZKSink? Yeah, this is a great question. And obviously, something we think

a huge amount about. I would say that a lot of the, the way that we're thinking about this is broadly, you know, attempt to make decisions with, like, developer first in mind. You know, obviously the engineering team, we are engineers and we think about the people that we're building for. So first approximation, I mean, are also developers, you know. We have a system that ultimately we expect the application layer to add value to, you know, eventually millions and tens of millions of users. But in terms of the design decisions that we make, the people that are probably affected

most directly, particularly today, are the developers who are going to be building on ZCasing. So we do think a lot about, you know, a good UX. and the good you X is not just the user experience, but also the developer experience. So when it comes to building on era or migrating from, say, layer one or another EVM-compatible layer two, the goal is to reduce that friction

as much as as possible. We've invested heavily in building a compiler, such that we are source code compatible that to a first approximation, most teams experience in terms of, like, you know, migrating from layer one onto the test net or now the main net, has been that sort of things just worked.

You know, you can take the contracts that you originally developed for, for Ethereum or for, you know, whatever other layer two happened to be, recompile with the ZK Sync compiler and redeploy. And to a first approximation, this has been, you know, it's kind of a good and bad thing for us during the test net phase because you want lots of feedback, but in cases where things just work, you know, the experience is sometimes smooth and there's not a lot for developers to say. There are differences, though.

you know, we are building a virtual machine, which is optimized with the future in mind. You know, a lot of the design decisions that we've been making are not so much based on, you know, what are the properties of the system that we want to see exist today, but really, you know, what are the design decisions that are going to allow us to extend the future in a way that makes sense, where we're talking about where we really want to be, you know, projecting forward six months, 12 months, 24 months, as we mature the system. you know, the version of the system that will be going live or is going live today is very much an alpha. You know, in the same way that I think many teams think about building, you know, the approach that we've taken is let's build the core critical pieces of the system.

Let's make design decisions today that set us up not just for the system, you know, to make good architectural choices for the system we want to see immediately, but really provide a firm foundation on which we can like build and extend towards a few. future. So we've extensively documented areas that I think are unique to ZKSync and where we've made design decisions that deviate from what people might expect elsewhere. And some of these are where we've made sort of opinionated decisions that are, in our opinion, probably, you know, going to provide a nice feature set for interesting and, you know, powerful application development. I think native account obstruction is a good example. You know, there is a, if the idea was to just go as fast as we could to build the system and get something on mainnet,

you almost certainly would have not attempted to take on a project like that, an extension like that. So for us, you know, this is a really exciting time. We have sort of the combination of two years plus of engineering work. Finally, you know, really, really ready for the external world to engage with in a way that we're excited about. But there's so much more to come. And, you know, this is sort of one step on a very, very long journey. as we really extend the system into the future. And Anthony, really just asking the barebone simple question,

what does all of this engineering effort get us? Again, we are familiar with Arbitrum and optimism, but when we zoom out and look at the massive engineering lift, that is a ZK EVM, and we try and look at the forest for the trees. Like, transactions on Arbitrum, pretty damn cheap. You know, like these ecosystems are pretty live. What does the ZK part of this whole thing really unlock for us that's new? And just as it relates to the user experience and user story and perhaps the applications that can also be built.

Yeah, I think the ZK part and the reason why I think I would argue this is critically important in the fullness of time is really about that trustlessness and that security. Like inheriting those properties that I think broadly, you know, everyone at Matter Labs and probably many of the listeners, like these are the properties of Ethereum that resonates so deeply. and the question is, you know, how do we take on this serious problem, the scalability problem, without compromising these in any serious degree? So the proof of computational integrity, like the guarantee of the correctness of the state transition of the layer two, is really the thing that I think today you can point at and say this is a massive step forward. In the fullness of time, I think, you know, when we're talking about hyperscale, when we're talking

about really, you know, sort of projecting the application layer much further into the future, talking about millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users. We believe that it is also true that the ZK, like this trustless aspect of the system, is going to provide, you know, this future architecture that can support hyperscale where you can have multiple instances trustlessly able to sort of communicate and move data or move, move, move, value between them. Alex, I just have a follow-up on that too, just to make this crystal clear. So what can you do with a ZK EVM that you can't with an optimistic roll-up? So is it to do with fraud proofs? Is it to do with like lower transactions, lower cost

transactions? What is kind of like the bottom line? And if we're not here yet, what do we hope we can get to from kind of a user experience perspective? This is a great question. I would split it into two separate groups. The first group of, like, the first answer will cover all ZKVMs. What are ZKVMs fundamentally give you our optimistic roll-ups or any other scaling solutions, or specifically optimistic roll-ups, because anything else about roll-ups doesn't really matter in the Ethereum world. And the second group, a second answer will be about the specifics of, like,

what you can get if you use the ZK technology to its maximum. So to answer the first one, ZK roll-ups basically allow you to bridge faster. Like what the users will feel, like apart from security and trustless as guarantees that you get, the tangible result of using ZK over optimistic roll-ups is to be able to bridge faster back to Ethereum. You don't have to wait seven days period. You don't even have to wait this 24 hours, which I mentioned. before because that's just the training wheel which is going to be removed, can bridge immediately. Now, you probably don't really want to bridge back a lot from the roll-up to layer one,

because roll-ups are here to enable scale. Layer one is going to remain for very few use cases which require some specific things to happen in the layer one context. Most of users and most of application will live in layer two space, but there will be a very important use case of bridging between the roll-ups and if you're bridging between optimistic roll-ups or between an optimistic and ziki roll-up you always will fall back on the longest weight period in optimistic cases it's like the seven days and you can't really accelerate that like you can only accelerate that by using external capital using some other things that

that work in you can't accelerate it without taking on additional risk or additional cost of capital capital capital cost requirements understood okay so you can't really so that that means like you you basically can't accelerate without having some trust assumptions introduced injected into the system if we want to build a truly limitless internet of value internet of roll-ups it has to be trustless. So all the bridges must be ZK and that means that all the chains participating in this network have to be ZK chains.

This is our vision for hyper-scalability. This is probably, this is a much bigger topic that will require several conversations, but this is long-term what the, what ZK attack will give you, like infiniteness or limitless of scale. But then there is the second aspect. It only applies if you use

ZKVM in a specific way. So you might opt to be as close to Ethereum as possible and just emulate optimistic roll-ups. And this is what we see many ZKVM projects that are currently existing in development are doing. They are going for this, like, let's get as close as possible to this old system. Let's be backwards compatible.

Let's do data availability management the way optimistic roll-ups do. let's publish data availability for every transaction. Let's publish the inputs of transactions, for example, as one thing. And here is where we deviate from all of them, from all the ZKVMs in existence today. We decided to look at ZK proofs and ask ourselves, like, what can it give you if you, like, what's the best way you can use them? And we decided, for example, that we want to manage data availability by publishing the state divs.

So the updates of the storage slots that the transaction touches. And that gives you a few very interesting properties. For one, it gives you free call data. You don't have to pay for call data, for transaction inputs. You don't have to pay for data availability of this. You're only paying zero knowledge proofs. And the zero knowledge proof generation is cheap and is only going to get cheaper.

So it's just a fraction of a set. That is not important. So you can have a very large input. You can process a lot of data, which is very important for such use cases as account abstraction. Because in account abstraction, you want to submit,

you have your user key that controls the account, but then you want to submit some limits for this transaction. You want to submit the custom signature that maybe you signed on your iPhone in a secure enclave. Maybe you want to submit some additional metadata for the trading routes and limits that you want to take on interacting with smart contracts. All of that will come essentially for free. So that's one big gain. Second big gain is data compression. That is, imagine a use case such as Oracle updates.

On optimistic crawlups and on ZKADMs that use this optimistic. optimistic approach, optimistic roll-up approach to data availability. You would have to pay data availability for each individual Oracle update. And remember, data availability is our scarcest resource.

That's what all roll-ups share. Like, there is a single limited bandwidth of data availability on Ethereum. It doesn't matter how scalable your ZK proofs are in circuits. You still have to, like, share that and, like, all the roll-ups compete for this. limited space. So the more transactions we have, we will see the same dynamics that the transaction prices will go up. So Oracle updates, you have to pay individually for each of them with optimistic

approach. With what we're doing, you're only going to pay the final price for the single storage slots at the end of the huge batch. So you can do the Oracle updates as frequently as you want. You can do them every second. They still will be trustless. They will still be feeding you. You can use a lot of oracles, but then they're going to be much cheaper. And the same thing applies to all use cases where users interact with the same contract, with the same data, or with train in data, for that matter, within the one single batch, and the batch can be very large. For example, trading on liquidity pools, like uniswap pools, you do a lot of trades, but at the end, you only pay for one, or all the users in the batch will pay for one. So that is, that is,

to data compression and finally you can do data extension there was the architecture we introduced a long time ago called Ezeke Porter

which is a variation of a Validium system where the data some of the data does not need to be published on Ethereum for some accounts or for some specific

use cases you don't need the absolute 100% security inherited from Ethereum you only need the validity of your transactions

to be guaranteed by Ethereum so that no one can do wrong things. But the data, maybe it's discardable. Maybe it's, you know, like just some one-time voting campaign, or maybe it's a wallet that you only use for some small, like your current account where you put little money and you don't want to pay huge fees, but you want to do a lot of cheap transactions. You can use Zika Porter for that. And in our architecture, Ziki Porter will be seamlessly interoperable with the ZK roll-up, which is not possible again if you're using

transaction inputs. So those are things around just one specific aspect. So Alex, just kind of from the user perspective, bridging much faster, it can be instant, that can't happen in an optimistic roll-up. You know, you have kind of seven days

and this will reap many benefits. Just curious on kind of a way a user experiences what you just said, that optimization, that efficiency. So if like a main net transaction costs a dollar on Ethereum, right, and something like an optimistic roll-up gets it down to like, you know, 10 cents or maybe five cents or maybe one cent or something, is our ZK roll-ups and is ZK Sync era going to

deliver another order of magnitude, lower cost on transactions? That's one, like, this may be a layman's question to you, but this is one way users see it. It's like, are my transaction is going to be cheaper? Another way I want to ask the same question is like, I remember in the early days of arbitram deploying. They were like, hey, we're deploying main net. This is our first deployment. We still have some guardrails on. We have just increased the capacity of Ethereum by one. So we just shipped one more Ethereums. And that was easy for bankless listeners to understand.

And then they delivered some efficiency. And they were like, now we have three more Ethereums, right? Can you give us some comparables? Okay, there's seven Ethereums there. How many Ethereums are we going to get out of ZK Sync? How low can our gas? fees go. We will get at least as many as optimistic roll-ups key view. But in addition to that, it depends on the use case. For some transaction types, it will be comparable to optimistic roll-ups. Just because it's an individual transaction, you still have to pay for it full data availability. But for other transactions, you will have to pay zero fees because the contract will subsidize

this transaction. And this is possible with account obstruction. This is possible because we support it natively and from the economic perspective for this for this protocol it will make sense because they are only subsidizing at once for all the users because they will be then reusing the same data availability storage and this gives you like hundreds ethereum's or thousands of ethereum's but from the user perspective like the magic is really you don't have to pay anything it's like the transaction is completely gas-free and this is why it was important to implement it natively, unfortunately, things like EAP 4337 would not allow this today on Ethereum. Even if you use this relayer, if you agree to use this third-party relayer, they still cannot do it for externally owned accounts, which are most wallets in an adverb today, but it's possible in the case.

So the idea of like how many Ethereums do we get is a very easy way to just imagine this. And the answer is with ZK Sync, we get a lot of Ethereum's with ZK Tech. But I really want to double down. Yes. I really want to double down on like that there's this idea of the sum, the parts. I always mess up this phrase. The whole. Yeah.

The whole is greater than some of the parts. Thank you. That's the Kickstarter I needed. And so yes, we get we get more Ethereum's. We get more scale. things get cheaper. They're also faster, but it's not such a just a linear as like, oh, we can do things cheaper and faster. It's more than that. Not only do you get cheaper and faster, which enables new use cases like oracles, we can have more oracles because more oracles become viable.

We have more use cases because more use cases become viable. We have native account abstraction because account abstraction becomes viable. We have cross ZK EVM composability because that is now viable. you have instantaneous withdrawals to layer one, and that's now viable. All of these use cases can relate to each other and offer surface area for builders to extract the value out of those interrelations that specifically ZKEVMs create.

So understanding like, yeah, we get 10 Ethereum's is like a great way to start, but also you get the level of composability that Ethereum created in a zero to one moment from like Bitcoin to Ethereum on the app layer. and smart contracts. We have like another zero to one moment

in terms of use case composability because of the instantaneous nature of ZK Tech across all use cases. In addition to the raw cheapness of the transactions that in of itself also unlocks new economic activity. And so like this is kind of a tough idea to wrap people's head around

so like all of these security dependencies. But I really think like the whole the sum is greater than the whole of the parts. I think it's a great like mental model to be left with when we walk away from my mental model here david anytime you say that and by the way that always gives me shivers when you go on your zk evms are amazing uh you know play it's just like it's going to feel just like fintech it's going to feel just like the best fintech platform you've ever used except now you're not dependent on the banks like and i'm not saying now i'm not

saying day one i'm not saying like when you guys released but when we get account abstraction and smart contracts and everything david already said we we develop that app layer it's just going to feel like a Web 2 app, except it's completely backed by, you know, trustless guarantees and crypto economic security, which is with the amazing thing. Is that about right? Or are we like overselling it? Yes, absolutely right. And I just have one thing to add, like, if you throw ZK Porter into this mix, then you basically get infinite number of almost Ethereums. In addition to multiplying Ethereum, you also have almost Ethereum, which is is coming very, very close to the security guarantees of Ethereum, not quite there, but it's good

for a lot of good things, and you can get infinitely many of them. So this infinite part is really important, like, or I should rather say not infinite, because it's a mathematical term, limitless. We want to get to a point where there are no limits on how many users we can accommodate, how many transactions, how many things can run in parallel. this trustlessly is only possible with ZKTag. And if we want it to be on Ethereum, then it's only possible with ZK EVM so that all the applications can leave on all those infinite parallel chains that are like this multiverse world of multi-roll-ups interconnected, interbridgeable.

Maybe just to echo something you said there, because I think you really captured at least a sort of reflection of how we think about this, that I think is really important to highlight. You know, when you first start thinking about scale, it can feel like an infrastructure problem, right? It can feel like how do we optimize the system to be able to process lots of transactions, drive down fees, and it can start to feel very much like this is really the way to think

about solving the scalability problem. But actually, I don't think that's enough, right? It's account abstraction because if we don't address the user experience that I think many of us have like, you know, come to learn to live with at layer one, this isn't for everybody, right? You know, it's still true today that I think the user experience at layer one can feel, you know, janky, awkward at times even scary.

You know, when you're, you know, moving substantial value. This, you know, it's not a super friendly experience at times. And I think it's that sort of combination of both tackling those architecture problems, you know, thinking about how you think about performance, thinking about how you drive down fees. But then also, you know, you do need to have an environment, in which people can build applications that millions of people will want to use, and millions of people won't be, you know, forced to confront some, like, awkward user experience

just to engage with the system. So I do think, you know, what we're working towards you kind of have as an infrastructure problem, but as a user experience problem as well. And I think account of construction is, like, a critically important part of solving that part. Yeah, well said, well said, Anthony. And I really just want to drive this point home one more time. Like, Ryan and I, infinitely bullish on optimistic roll-ups. We love all of our layer twos.

But linear scaling is not going to be like the quote unquote broadband moment that made the internet into what it is today. Like once upon the time, internet 1.0 was a text-based forum experience where JPEGs loaded over 10 minutes, right? And now we have YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. That was a broadband moment. That was a zero to one paradigm shift. And, you know, optimistic roles are great for adding, you know, single digit more

Ethereum's to layer 2s, but really, like, the linear scale isn't really going to take this revolution that we are all trying to make people feel into the mainstream. And it's really going to take what is, you know, more than 10 Ethereums, but then also the second order consequences that I also illustrated. So this is just what I really want to impress upon listeners about why this ZK cryptography magic is so impactful. Alex, Anthony, I want to ask you a few more questions in a couple of of different categories. Polygon ZK. Evm, hot on your guys' heels. We want to talk about how ZK syncs era is different. What is the era chain optimized for? What have you guys really

emphasize here and prioritize? And what is your competitive differentiator between the other ZK EVMs that are coming onto the scene? And so I want to ask about that. And overall, just like, where does this go from here? What are the next steps? What are the short-term goals and long-term milestones that we should all be paying attention to as this thing developed? But first, before we get to these conversations, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show 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 ramp?

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I've been hounding you for a podcast for a while now and we'll eventually get that one recorded. But I want to ask you about how ZK Sync era has come to express certain priorities. What is it really doubling down on? What makes it unique? There are so many other, not so many, there are other ZK EVMs that are coming on to Mainnet. I believe ZK Sync might be first. I think that's right. But why is ZK Sync era different than the alternatives that are out there on the scene?

I can highlight a few things which I think are really at the core of ZK Sync. And I think that makes them different. I mean, there might be other projects who also want to embrace this ADS and implement them, who will be really happy to see the space get a richer through it. But I think what defines us is these three core priorities. Number one, alignment with on ethos, with Ethereum, with the general crypto community. We are here for a mission.

We have always been there for a mission and will always be there for a mission. It's not a commercial project in the first place. It's a mission-driven project. It's a mission. We're not a company. We are really a mission. Our mission is to accelerate a mass adoption of crypto or to say it's simpler to scale freedom. We're in it for freedom because freedom is what empowers people,

what creates wealth, what creates fairness in the world, what lets people defend themselves against corrupt regimes, corrupt institutions, and so on. So freedom is everything that, like, the end goal and also the way we operate. The Matterlabs, the company, our team is structured in a way that everyone has very broad autonomy, very broad ownership over topics, and they own them. freedom to operate the way they want. So freedom is number one and ethos.

Number two is we are, we prioritize security. It's really important for us. We understand that this is a space where there is basically no margin for error. And you can't rush and you can't cut corners. Because one big mistake can throw the entire space like here's back because the trust can be undermine. So we're taking security very seriously and we are like we are anti-hype in this regard. We always emphasize this. We always push. We always like from from all the choices that we can make, we take the one which is most safe. Now that doesn't guarantee that like things will not happen. And like this is again

my attempt to convince everyone to take things slower, not rush experiment, only with, with like this very high risk awareness. So security is number two. And number three is we are in for a very long run. We understand that this space will only succeed if we all run marathon, not a sprint. So we are building things for the future that might set us back slightly in the beginning. Like, you know, like we're not going for fully the M equivalence. It would obviously be easier to just like go for fully the MECRivalence and have.

have all the applications not like not to have to change a single line of code. No one is really doing that. No one, no one can do that. Like some modifications are required in any role up in no matter optimistic or ZK. It's just the degree of this modifications that varies. And we're not going to optimize that part. We are optimizing for the future, not for the past. This future orientiveness is the third priority.

So to recap values. security and building for the future. Alex, we're on this new frontier. There's a bunch of new use cases that we're all very excited about. There's also new risks. And so as users come and use ZKSink as builders build on ZKSink, what are the new concerns? What are the new risks that they might need to be informed about?

Certainly, let's begin with this. Like, this is a brand new technology. So we have like just basic systematic risks of any smart contract that you deploy needs to be tested with time. You know, like recently we have a buck in Euler finance that has been live there for eight months and it has been audited and there was still this bug and it was later exploited.

So you need time, you need to put significant stake at risk and then like bottle tested. But then even that is not enough. you want to put in more mechanisms, more mitigations, like layers of security. Like if one thing fails, you always want better things to rely on. But things happen. Even planes can fall. So even if you take it with the most conservative approach, these complex systems have inherent risks.

It's really hard to predict where in the complex system risk can materialize. So that's why you want to build systems that are as simple as possible. As isolated as possible, if you have multiple subsystems, they should work through clearly defined interfaces, and you want some guards between those interfaces. But really, from the end user perspective, it's hard to say what can go wrong. So basically, the only same approach would be like take things carefully.

Yeah, my take on this is how we end every bankless podcast. By the way, we're not ending right now. But recall Bankless Nation what we say, crypto is risky, defy is risky. You could lose what you put in. This is the frontier, right? And that's really where we are. We're on the frontier of the frontier with some of this ZK EVM technology. And we wouldn't rather be anywhere else.

This is where we want to be. And yet at the same time, your explorers and things, can happen on the frontier for sure. One, I think, I guess, tradeoff or a decision point for any roll-up team to make is kind of this trade-off between security and decentralization. And maybe that's not even the right vector, but a lot of teams have needed to keep access, like maybe we'll call it root-level access to be able to make changes and modifications to a roll-up in case something goes wrong in case funds are locked and that sort of thing. Can you talk to us about the path towards full decentralization? Because I have to imagine this is somewhat similar to other

roll-up implementations in that stage one is not fully decentralized yet. You have some safeguards in place. You have some training wheels in place. And we would probably expect that, right? I mean, you want to make sure that you can unlock the keys if you lock them in the car. Anthony, I'm wondering if you could talk about this path to decentralization and how. ZK Sync is thinking about this. Maybe if you allow me to begin, because I was part of this journey with ZKSync version 1, which we can now call ZK Sync Light,

and I just want to touch a little bit on those points. Yeah, go for it. I would say that this is a choice or dilemma between security and trustlessness. Not so much decentralization. At this point, like decentralization is a broader concept, but here you're really asking yourself, am I going to keep

some trust assumptions on the team or do I want to go fully trustless but then no one can intervene and fix my problems? That's right. So we encountered that back when we launched the first roll-up for EZK Synclyte, the EZKROLO-WP specialized in payments. The very first version was completely immutable with a time-locked upgrade ability

where the team could propose an upgrade but there was no way for us to accelerate it was it would take several weeks and the users would have an option to withdraw from layer two to layer one fully permissionlessly without any censorship through layer one emergency or like the priority queue we then realized that it's not going to it's not freedom to do this because there was a vulnerability and we had to

make an upgrade and luckily everything was fine but we realized it's really important to go slower and introduce some trust assumptions in the system because the probability of a bug is much higher

initially at least even from the user perspective from external user perspective than the probability that the team is going to be corrupt So for the alpha, we decided that we just going to introduce the instant upgradeability for the QSig era. For light, what we did was we came up with the concept of Security Council. We were the first to introduce this idea where we said, let's summon a group of highly trusted community members from Ethereum community.

we had 15 of them, and it will require their permission and approval to accelerate and upgrade for an emergency use case. If there is an emergency, then the team can propose an upgrade, the Security Council can approve it, and then it goes faster on a fast track by passing this upgradeability time lock. And this is the next stage which we will use for error. after we feel that the protocol is stable enough and mature enough, we will transition to a security council, but we don't want to stop there because the security council is also a you know, there is this like set of people that can basically do anything with the protocol.

Even though it's a broad set of people, it's not what we want the crypto to be. So for the ultimate vision, we can imagine going beyond that and lowering trust assumptions even further. So for example, we could say that the Security Council can only initiate freezing of the protocol, not immediately upgrading, but only freezing for a short period of time. And then we could rely on the broader protocol governance to decide what's going to happen with this problem. Is this a real problem or was the Security Council corrupt? If it was a real problem, then the governance can approve an upgrade path forward. And we can go even further from there.

What if the governance, if we have some broad community participating through, I don't know, some means to decentralize it, maybe we have a token, maybe we have, like, we have to, like, the token holders have to vote for it. But what if the majority of the token holders is again corrupt, then we need to save the minority, because that's what crypto is standing for. Full trustlessness, not relying on all this majorities. So eventually we can build a system

where the security council could freeze the contracts, and then it would take the soft fork of the layer one itself to resolve the conflict if there is any problem there. So this is my rough thinking. I see that Ryan wants to ask something. No, I was just going to say that's really cool. You know, well spelled out. And I guess we're in the first stage where the team still has some of the control.

And then you're moving to Security Council later. And then you limit the powers of the Security Council. And then you have some sort of governance coordination. And ultimately, it's kind of for choice rule in the same way that Ethereum or Bitcoin are on the main net. That's pretty cool. Anthony, do you have anything to add to this? I mean, I think Alex has subbed up really nicely. but one thing to say, maybe just to try and be unambiguous.

Like the plan for the alpha label is essentially to be a very strong signal to the community, to developers, to users about our sort of internal security posture and confidence in the state of the system. We aren't expecting, for example, there to be sort of this journey through the Greek alphabet of like, now we're alpha, now we're in beta. It's really more, once this, as long as this alpha label is attached to the system, This is meant to kind of imply that we're in this early phase where there are these trust assumptions. I mean, you can look at tools. I think there's this maybe many people are familiar with, this really beautiful page put together by the L2B team regarding sort of risks across the L2 space.

Phenominally helpful and a huge amount of work has gone to try and distill a lot of this sort of complexity when people have to think about the risk in these systems. But even, you know, you look at that tool and you realize the problem for users is, A, there's many of these systems, and B, the risk space is complex. And to have like a principled, you know, internal opinion on the risks of all of these different systems when you're not an expert is extremely difficult. And I would say maybe even impossibly difficult for most users because the opportunity cost of even reading, you know, every single one of these things is extremely high. So for us, the alpha label is our signal to the community about like our posture here.

and we will attempt to be extremely unambiguous when we're talking about risk. And we're talking about, you know, and we'll be releasing a huge amount more. Security, as Alex mentioned before, is always top of mind for us. And I think we've got a track record at this point of that being, you know, us having a serious commitment to that. But it's that alpha label that we'll attempt to distill everything into it to a degree for users. By the nature of this new technology, this new technology, this new. frontier. The risks are present today, yet there is still a bunch of building to do in the app layer with all the builders. And so all the cool fun stuff that we can imagine the future still needs to be

built yet the risks are always here on day one. So that is always just a word of caution for all the users out there. But Anthony, with all of this future state of the, you know, Ethereum's broadband moment, everything that ZK tech can really unlock for Ethereum, what do builders need to know? There's so much left, there's so much room for activities on ZKSync. How do builders find out what they need to do in order to start building on ZKSink? And where's the top of the funnel for this rabbit hole for the builders? Yeah, it's an excellent question. So I would say, you know, if you wanted to get started as a builder on ZK Sync,

we have overhauled all of our documentation in the sort of build up towards this moment and over the last few months. And we've also attempted to be thoughtful about how we consider the focus for this documentation so much overlaps in terms of what you can do with L1 given the EVM compatibility. So you'll see that where we've deviated from L1 or where we have sort of, you know, new things available at L2,

there'll be just a much richer set of documentation. You know, we've focused on things like account obstruction, things like bridges. So in terms of the documentation, there is a lot, there is also a lot of focus on the specifics that become available for you when you're thinking about working on ZKSync era. Beyond that, we have an extremely active and passionate community. The Discord is very, very active. We're growing, you know, DevRail and Dev Experience teams. So we have both, you know,

a highly engaged community, but also lots of technical support. And so for sort of real-time conversations about, you know, you have this idea. I'm thinking through how I implement this on ZKSink or I've run into this issue and I'm trying to work my way through it. There's multiple channels, but definitely the Discord is fun and helpful. So both technical support and, you know, lots of interesting community memes and bits and pieces. Well, we will get the links to the Discord and the docs into the show notes. And also, Anthony, what's the link for the users out there, the ecosystem applications link where they can go check all of those out.

If you could just say that one more time. Yeah, sure. So if anyone wants to see the state of what they can engage with, on the system today. It's just ecosystem. dot ZKSync.io. This will be a page with very frequent updates

in the coming weeks as more and more builders deploy and configure applications and yeah, things become available for users to test. Basically users can find all links from ZKSync.com.

It's the central hopper. They will get guided through. Beautiful. Alex, Anthony, thank you so much for walking us through this announcement. It's extremely exciting. There's a new frontiers and we love this frontier metaphor

here on bankless. Not too many people know. The ZK Sync was actually one of the first ZK rollups, not EVM, ZK rollups, where people could process payments. I remember using it back in 2019 on Gitcoin. So it was a way that I got started bootstrapping my own content production here in the Ethereum ecosystem. And Ryan would run in the bankless Gitcoin as well. So we have thanks to give you guys for that as well. Alex, I know you've been in the space a very long time.

Anthony, you're a little bit newer, but I know that this topic is very, very large and very, very big. Is there anything that we haven't touched on yet today in the show that we absolutely must before we close out here? I would just add that we're still growing our team. And if you are feeling like you want to help us scale Ethereum and create the stressless future, please check out the jobs that we have opened on our website. I'm sure there's a lot of milestones and developments ahead of us. When might one of those milestones involve a token? as soon as the token is really needed.

You had to ask. But the next things that we're focusing on is really decentralization. So are making the system fully permissionless, removing any points of trust, any points of central control that is to remain. And then also in parallel, improving performance, improving security, team implementing new mechanisms in new features. So what I'm hearing is that the when token conversation is similar to the when decentralized answer, perhaps.

Yeah, when necessary. When necessary. Anthony, Alex, it's actually one of the most clear answers we've ever gotten from a layer two team so far. When token? When it's necessary. Wow. Just that's it.

Well said. Alex, Anthony, thank you guys so much for joining us on. bankless today. I appreciate it. Thank you. Bankless Nation, got to end with this. None of this has been financial advice, of course. Your standard risk and disclaimers apply as with anything in crypto, even more so when you're on the frontier. But crypto is risky. So is Defi. So are new roll-ups. You could lose what you put in. We're 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.