Pod Insights Bankless The zkEVM is Here | zkSync's Steve Newcomb About this episode By the end of October, zkSync is going to be shipping the world's first zkEVM. We brought on zkSync's Chief Product Officer, Steve Newcomb to share all about it and how it's going to impact the space.
We also had to ask Steve, wen token? Tune into the episode to hear his response!
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
9:38 Wen Mainnet?
11:22 What is zkSync Shipping?
12:36 zkEVM Design Choices
19:26 Why zkEVM is Progressing Fast
22:56 Optimistic Rollups vs. zkEVMs
27:00 The Layer 3 Ecosystem & Narrative
41:48 Losing Sovereignty?
44:08 Prover Competition
46:39 Same Circuit & Hyper Bridges
52:15 The Cosmos Vision
58:01 L1s to L3s
1:04:10 Onboarding Strategy
1:10:16 Wen Token?
1:13:33 2/3's Distribution
1:15:42 Open Source
1:25:08 zkSync 2.0 & 3.0 and Beyond
1:29:17 Closing & Disclaimers
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Resources:
Steve Newcomb
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenewcomb/
zkSync
https://zksync.io/
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Transcript 16,066 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:08 Ryan Sean Adams? Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation, where David and I get into something topical, super topical item today. ZK EVMs, they are here. Well, David, they are almost here. And we have brought on someone from the ZK EVM team, Matter Labs, to talk about it. What are we covering today, David?
0:27 David Hoffman? The ZK EVM is something that has really been exciting a lot of people in the Layer 2 space, the scaling space, because it is generally considered the gold standard of scalability. ZK rollups plus the EVM. We already know that the EVM itself, it was a huge player in the 2021 bull market. So many people forked the EVM, spun out their own chains. But that was as an alternative Layer 1. You add some cryptography magic with zero knowledge onto the ZK EVM, and it unlocks new frontiers, Ryan, if you will, for us to explore as we explore out the crypto frontier. So that is why we are super excited today to talk to Steve Newcomb of the ZK Sync, the Matter Labs team, and all about the incoming ZK EVM
1:12 David Hoffman? that is imminent upon arrival.
1:15 Ryan Sean Adams? This is a technology that Vitalik, in our episode earlier this week that released on Monday, he said he was even surprised at how quickly ZK EVMs are coming to market. And I think this episode will fill you in on some of those details. A quick disclosure before we get in. David and I are angel investors in the Matter Labs, which is the entity behind ZK Sync. We're also advisors to the ZK Sync project. We think that highly of it. And ZK Sync is currently a Bankless sponsor. We wanted to get those disclosures up on the front of the show. We take disclosures seriously, so we are mentioning them at the top of every show from now on. There's also a link in the show notes where you can see all of the disclosure details
1:56 Ryan Sean Adams? for David and I get a peek into what we own, what projects we're excited about. Also, want to tell the Bankless Nation about Swell. This is the next frontier, I think, when it comes to decentralized staking technology. This is a thing that we have to get better at in crypto. It would be a massive failure if all of our stake ended up in centralized exchanges. And with Swell, we are pushing back against that narrative. David, what is Swell? And how can folks get involved at this stage in the project?
2:27 David Hoffman? Yes, Swell is joining the ranks of Rocketpool and Lido as a decentralized staking as a service provider. And so we all know these things. We want our stake to be liquid, but we also don't want to stake with centralized exchanges. And so it is a new staking as a service system with a liquid staking token that is trying to do the best of both worlds for both Rocketpool and Lido. Rocketpool, of course, anyone can add their node to the Rocketpool network. That's why we love it. But also with Lido, Lido has such an amount of scalability because their permission validator set. Swell is trying to do the best of both worlds. So you can actually do both with Swell. There is a DAO that governs the permission validator set, but regardless, you can also permissionlessly join the network.
3:12 David Hoffman? So interesting strategy. We'll see how it plays out for them. If you want to join the Discord, there is a link in the show notes. Check out Swell. And also disclaimer, Ryan and I are also angel advisors into Swell as well, and they also sponsor this message. So thank you, Swell.
3:26 Ryan Sean Adams? David, why are we talking about ZK EVMs today? Why is this the topic of the week that we decided to delve into?
3:34 David Hoffman? Yeah, crypto right now is looking for a new narrative. What's next is a really big conversation in crypto right now. In fact, it's the name of the podcast that we just did with Vitalik Buterin. Post-merge, we're not really sure what to be hopeful for. And so instead of being hopeful, we just look at the macro markets and like cry a little bit. So crypto is in search for what is next, what is on their horizon, what is something to be excited for. And Ryan, I remember the 2018 to 2020 bear market. As it went on, you could just see the kindling being laid that eventually manifested into the 2021 bull market. And that kindling was using the Ethereum Layer 1 to build out these new things called DeFi apps and later NFTs.
4:19 David Hoffman? And now that's kind of the status that we've had that bull market. But what we haven't had is a bull market in like the Layer 2 space, the scalability space on Ethereum. So first comes the protocols, then comes the apps. And the ZK EVM, like I said at the intro, the ZK EVM is this new surface area for new frontiers. It is the thing that so many devs have been looking forward to and waiting to deploy on. So while it's not, the ZK EVM isn't as something as like massive as the merge. It's going to be hard to compete with the merge. But it is something to answer the question, what's next? What to look forward to? And while we're all going through this bear market together, where to look for alpha? Because eventually, the retail market is going to come back and they're very likely going to come back on top of a ZK EVM.
5:02 David Hoffman? If you are here now, listening to this, the ZK EVM is a frontier for you to glom onto some alpha for. So at least that's what's going on in my mind while we listen to this.
5:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I think that we are pretty close to the ZK EVM as well. So it's not something that is far into the future. This is something that is weeks away, potentially. We'll get into the timeline as well. Last thing, David, really quick for us. What should listeners be paying attention to in this episode?
5:28 David Hoffman? Yeah, there's many different components of a ZK EVM. There isn't one standard ZK EVM. So ZK Sync and Matter Labs are coming into the world of the ZK EVM with their flavor. There's also conversations as to how these organizations and entities interoperate and interact with each other. There's going to be conversations around bridging. How is bridging in a ZK EVM world different than an alt layer one world? So that's something to pay attention to. Onboarding is going to be a huge, huge conversation. We've seen some chains onboard in the bull market very, very well and other chains not onboard so well. So how is ZK Sync approaching this? How are they going to capture some of the market share once their EVM goes to, goes to mainnet? And also, they're not the only ZK EVM coming.
6:12 David Hoffman? So what does that competition landscape look like? What else, what are you looking forward to, Ryan, in this episode?
6:17 Ryan Sean Adams? I'm going to be looking for the differences between ZK EVMs and optimistic rollups. I want to hear more about that. Of course, I want to hear about ZK Sync's plan for a token. Is that a component of the strategy? Where does that fit in? And I also want to hear about this concept that I've heard a lot bandied about, which is layer threes. What are Layer 3s? This idea of self-sovereign chains that are also somehow secured by Ethereum? How does that mesh with Cosmos' app chain model? So these are some of the things I'll be looking for with Steve. Guys, hang with us for just another minute. We're going to be right back with Steve, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.
6:58 David Hoffman? Lens Protocol is an open-source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our Web2 apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made. We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control, rather than them controlling us. Lens isn't a social media app. It's a protocol to let 1,000 Web3 social apps bloom. Lens is a permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. In crypto, we say "not your keys, not your crypto," and on Lens, we say "not your keys, not your profile." With Lens, your followers go with you to whatever social media application you want to use. And instead of being trapped by an algorithm chosen by that app, Lens lets you choose the way you want to experience your social media.
7:41 David Hoffman? Lens is the last social media handle that you'll ever need to create. So in order to get started, there's a secret code word in the show notes. Enter that code word in the Google Form link, and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of Web3 social. Rocketpool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH in Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocketpool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating Ethereum nodes. Setting up your Rocketpool node is easier than running a node solo, and you only need 16 ETH to get started. You get an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH that uses your node to stake. You also get RPL token rewards on top.
8:26 David Hoffman? So if you're bullish ETH staking, you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized Rocketpool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent node operators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocketpool.net, and you can also join the Rocketpool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, while DeFi protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Huobi, and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees, allowing you to explore new frontiers of the crypto universe. New
9:08 David Hoffman? to Arbitrum, for a limited time, you can get Arbitrum NFTs designed by the famous artists Ratwell and Sugoi for joining the Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is an eight-week-long event where you complete on-chain activities and receive a free NFT as a reward. Find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.gg/Arbitrum. You can also bridge your assets to Arbitrum at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of Arbitrum's apps at portal.arbitrum.1 in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, secure, and fiction-free.
9:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Alright guys, we are back. The ZK EVM, this mysterious bit of technology that came actually earlier than scheduled. This is the promised technology to scale Ethereum. We've got Steve Newcomb here, who is the Chief Product Officer at Matter Labs. He's the team behind ZK Sync, that's what we're going to be talking about today, and he is no stranger to startups. He's founded four companies already. He brings a ton of experience to the frontier technologies in the world, including, of course, Ethereum scalability technologies. And he's also recently joined Matter Labs to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto. He aligns very much with some of our personal sovereignty goals at Bankless. And Steve, it's great to have you on. How you doing?
10:22 Speaker 02 I'm doing great. Really excited to be here with you guys.
10:25 Ryan Sean Adams? Alright, you guys are getting close to mainnet. And by mainnet, I'm talking about a ZK EVM on mainnet. Can you give us the countdown? Like, how many days? Because I've been following you guys on Twitter, and there have been some commitments made.
10:38 Speaker 02 Wen mainnet?
10:39 Ryan Sean Adams? And I'm wondering, I remember like 100 days out, and I just, my time schedule's got lost somewhere. So like, how many days out are we? And are you going to hit that date?
10:48 Speaker 02 We are, so yeah, we said 100 days a while ago, and as soon as we said it was 100 days to mainnet, I think everybody in the company threw up because we're like so worried about hitting it. But we're 31 days away right now, and I think we're gonna hit it. One month. Things are looking, you know, I would say more than a non-zero chance that we'll hit it.
11:08 Ryan Sean Adams? More than a non-zero chance, but there's also a chance that you won't then, I assume. But like-
11:13 Speaker 02 I think, I think we're looking pretty good.
11:15 Ryan Sean Adams? I think we're looking pretty good. All right. The TTD numbers coming in healthy, I guess. So we're gonna, we're gonna hit ZK. So what is actually shipping? Can you give us the high level? This is a thing that I've heard some people call ZK Sync 2.0. So maybe that's a term that people are familiar with. The other, the high level, I think, is this is the first ZK EVM compatible ZK rollup on mainnet, I believe. So maybe that's a milestone. But what is the thing that you are actually shipping?
11:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think this is gonna be a big moment for not only us, but for Ethereum, the whole community of us that have been after scaling not just the technology of Ethereum, but the mission of Ethereum. And we are shipping the long-awaited promise of the end game for scaling Ethereum. And this is a ZK EVM that is EVM-compatible, which I'm sure we're gonna get into a lot today.
12:16 Speaker 02 It supports solidity. It is really easy to port from wherever you are to ZK Sync, because it's compatible. It will be open source when we get to mainnet. We'll be talking about that. And it will be supported by, I think, a token model that expresses the mission of Ethereum and expands it.
12:37 Ryan Sean Adams? And so Steve, in the beginning, we were talking about what should listeners listen for? What should they look out for while they listen to this episode? And you just gave a list of characteristics or parameters about ZK Sync-specific ZK EVM. Can you talk a little bit about those design choices? The flavor of ZK EVM, why you chose them, and how they differ from other possible ZK EVMs that might appear on the market in the future?
13:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that one of the things that we strive every day to do is to really be a mission more than a company and our mission is to scale Ethereum. And so we listened to the Ethereum community and we said, what, what do you guys want? What is it that makes it so special for us? And it really was those five ingredients that is a, a general purpose, uh, EVM compatible, open source, uh, supported by a token model that we, that we all have consensus around being the right way to do things. And it allows developers to use solidity. So when you have those five magic components, it's really going to make it easy for people to adopt us, to port to us.
13:47 Speaker 02 And our goal is to be the absolute number one choice amongst developers for layer two. We differ from a couple of the other different attempts. And you know, there's Starkware who has a project going on. There is Polygon, there is a company called Scroll that has a project that's going on. And there's a couple of important differences between all of us. And I, and I do want to say, I think the competition is healthy. It's good. And that when, when these projects have successes, we celebrate those successes too. Because again, we're really here just for Ethereum and to scale the Ethereum, uh, mission and values. But I think that, um, so first out was Starkware.
14:31 Speaker 02 They were the first one to come out with a general purpose, ZK roll up.
14:37 Speaker 02 And they were about eight months ahead of where, when we're going to come out, it might be nine months. But they only had two of the five components, uh, with their release. So they weren't really EVM, uh, they didn't support solidity. You had to use Cairo, a custom language.
14:55 Speaker 02 And they, and they weren't open source completely. It's sort of a, they have a complex, but very overt and then very transparent license that they shared. And then a little bit of the fourth one is that their token model wasn't exactly well received because they had 50% of the token going to insiders. And they they elected to charge gas fees in their own token.
15:21 Speaker 02 Anytime you don't hit these five magic criteria, I think you have a lot of adoption friction and a lot of friction within your community. We saw D Y D X leave largely because they didn't meet these five magic criteria. We may see other projects decide it's not for them. It's not a fit for them as well.
15:39 Speaker 02 And then in terms of scroll and polygons approaches.
15:44 Speaker 02 I think that both of the approaches that they have are completely valid and healthy that we are exploring and trying these things. But it's just a matter of timing. When are they coming out? When will they actually be available? And there's trade offs. We believe that since we've already launched a Z K roll up before, we have a lot of experience on main net. So through very principled thinking, we've made specific choices on purpose. We of course knew that these other two methods existed. But we passed on those methods in favor of the way that we're doing largely because of hard thought and battled experience. And we think that our solution has that magic mixture of EVM compatible that's almost perfected.
16:29 Speaker 02 There's only three op codes. We don't support. One of them is deprecated. The other one has been suggested to be deprecated and the other one no one uses. So we try to be accurate when we market the product and tell people about the product. So we always call ourselves compatible. We don't try to claim equivalence, but it's really it's a non event. It's very easy to port to us.
16:51 Speaker 02 But what really gives us advantages is we think we've optimized ourselves for most compatible, but highest performance. And that allows us to scale better than every other solution out there. Because that's our primary job. Our job is to scale Ethereum. So once all the porting is done, I think the EVM compatible versus equivalence argument. It'll just it'll just go poof, just like everybody was saying, hey, they're never going to get to proof of stake. Nobody's saying that all the haters are, you know, they can't say that anymore really, other than hating on proof of stake itself. The and then the other big difference is we have learned that you have to have patience as a strategy.
17:34 Speaker 02 You have to make sure security is a primary factor in your deployment plans. It took us nine months to go through test net because we wanted to make sure we took the safest route through test net. We're going through two full multimillion dollar security audits that are that are testing us in every single way we can possibly think of. And we think about nine months is about as fast as you can go through test net. And then even after we go through test net, when we launch main net, and we'll talk about this in more detail, we are having a very careful approach to getting to full production. So one of the bigger differences is Scroll and Polygon, while they have a valid white
18:17 Speaker 02 papers and valid approaches to how to do this, neither are even started on their test nets yet. So for about the next year in reality, unless somehow Polygon and Scroll have a magic way of getting through test net in three months, which we would say, good luck, that's not really safe, please don't do that for the whole community. That for about a year, we are going to be the ZK solution. And we can imagine a world in which we're very easy to port to, very easy to eat use. And a lot of projects will be interested in porting to it because not only is ZK Layer two part of the end game, but you get Layer three for free.
19:00 Speaker 02 And I'm sure we'll we'll jam a lot about Layer three, but it's future proof because of the the very way that ZK technology works. So everybody's saying they want to try ZK Sync and 31 days to starting and I'm still throwing up, I'm still a nervous wreck. But I'd rather I'd rather be throwing up on stage than be caught in the audience watching history being made. And I'm I'm I'm loving being on stage, but I'm a nervous wreck, you know?
19:26 Ryan Sean Adams? All right. Well, I mean, it's a big event. Certainly, I can imagine how the Ethereum devs felt before the merge, right? It's just like there are a lot of jitters here and you guys are 31 days out. So that's big. I want to go to, because this is still fresh in my mind. So David and I just had Vitalik on the podcast. We recorded last week and first part of that was released on Monday. And actually, when we asked him a question about layer twos, his answer somewhat surprised me. And I want to get kind of your reaction to this. So he said he was surprised at how fast ZK EVMs have progressed. That was the first part of it. Surprised at how fast they've come to market and are coming to market.
20:08 Ryan Sean Adams? And I want to ask you the question, Steve, of like, how has it been so fast? Like, how are we here now? Like, you've even surprised Vitalik, which is like, no easy thing to do. What about the technology has progressed? Because this never happens in software. It always takes like five times longer than you think. And this is happening faster than we think.
20:32 Speaker 02 Well, if it took, what was it, eight years to get from proof of work to proof of stake, I think?
20:38 Ryan Sean Adams? For Ethereum, yes.
20:40 Speaker 02 So consider then it was four years since we began to get to a true EVM compatible ZK rollup.
20:49 Speaker 02 Consider to get to layer three, consider maybe one year from now, we'll be really actually saying, oh, my God, that only took one year to actually get into a workable state. Technology, when you're working on really hard technology, it comes in fits and spurts. It's not smooth. One of the things that was just a huge unlock for us is when our crypto team figured out, a lot of people still think we're running on specialized hardware in the prover. And to get a prover working like on a GPU, for example, so that you can run it on normal machines and actually decentralize down the line. Well, we cracked it. We haven't told anybody until me telling you right now, but we cracked it.
21:31 Speaker 02 And once something like that is unlocked, you suddenly just go really faster in a bunch of different areas. Cause you're like, wow, that's easy. Or when you, when you complete your first ZK circuit inside of a prover and then you're like, okay, now we want to try doing recursive ZK proofs. And then you're like, oh, wow, that happened easier because the fundamental underlying work was done. So if you build a really good foundation, it's very easy to build the floors on top of that, that building. And what we're seeing is the foundation of Ethereum is now being well laid. And now we're seeing the foundation of ZK is now well laid. So things like the things that are happening in layer three,
22:14 Speaker 02 will be able to blossom much, much faster than it took to build those foundational layers. So look for, like I call them 10x moments. They just happen and then all of a sudden you have 100x use cases falling out of it. And your speed to get to market has these, has these moments where you just zoom forward. And we had some moments where we, we just solved some things that were really big unlocks that people didn't think we would solve for years. I still, I think everybody watched that Dan Bonet video when he said it's 10 years, you know, so we solve this sort of stuff. And all of a sudden some advances were made and everybody's like, wait a minute, it might be two years.
22:51 Speaker 02 So that, that's kind of how it happens. It's never a smooth ride. It's always, it's always fits and spurts.
22:56 Ryan Sean Adams? That was the first part of what Vitalik said. And the, and the second part, which was equally kind of interesting to me is that, he, he said he has been somewhat surprised at how difficult it's been to figure out optimistic roll up fraud proof technology. And that the, the top optimistic rollups today haven't fully implemented fraud proofs. And how he thought that ZK EVMs might almost like be a short circuit to getting to, not quite fraud proofs, but like the idea of like maybe converting some optimistic rollups to ZK type technology. And I'm wondering your reaction. Here because one thing we've seen it was it was just over a year ago when David and I hosted
23:41 Ryan Sean Adams? a state of the nation episode with the very first layer two that was actually deploying on mainnet. And that layer two was Arbitrum. Remember it well. They were getting ready to launch. They're somewhat like you and that they were like, you know, very nervous about launching.
23:57 Speaker 02 I can't believe that was just one year ago, by the way.
23:59 Ryan Sean Adams? That was just one year ago. I did not expect to have ZK EVMs just like one year later.
24:06 Ryan Sean Adams? But what do you make of maybe this contrast with optimistic rollups, which we have seen a lot of traction? I mean, they've been deployed for the last year getting traction. I don't know how many billions of dollars in value are now locked on layer twos, but the bulk of it is on optimistic rollups. So what do you make of the trade off between like optimistic rollups and ZK EVMs? And how do you think that plays out?
24:30 Speaker 02 So, yeah, I mean,
24:33 Speaker 02 before I joined Meta Labs, you know, I usually take a year between my projects that I work on. And I took, I took a year and a half actually to really study crypto, to understand these types of things. And I remember when I first started looking at the optimistic, you know, rollups versus ZK rollups. And I never had any problem understanding how an optimistic rollup might get a signal, a single, single order of magnitude improvement to Ethereum. Where I had trouble was how do you get many orders of magnitude? Like, how do we get to 100,000 transactions per second or a million transactions per second without degrading decentralization and without degrading security?
25:17 Speaker 02 And it's that last little bit. So there's the seven day settlement problem. There's the, the risk of centralizing as you scale up in optimistic rollups. And I don't want to bash on optimistic rollups. Rather, I'd, I'd, I'd say that.
25:42 Speaker 02 We in the Ethereum community seem to eventually find consensus around things. Like, we're like, okay, we argue about things for many years, and then we finally get to a point where like, I think there's consensus that this is the answer. And we certainly went through it with like, we know sidechains aren't the endgame. We all agree on that. That's an easy one. I think we're at the edge of all finally agreeing that optimistic rollups is valiant of an effort as it was, as much as it did advance the field for us. It's not the endgame, because when you go up into what we are about to call Layer 3, it is functionally inelegant, and it just isn't as clean. And especially when we get to talking about bridging up in Layer 3 and the magic that happens with ZK,
26:26 Speaker 02 that does not happen with optimistic. I think it's Layer 3, when we begin to understand what happens in Layer 3, is when I think we will begin to understand why Vitalik said it's the endgame. Because that's the true, true, true magic.
26:43 Speaker 02 That's as best I can say it, because I don't want to like, beat down on optimistic rollups. But I think we're all getting to the point where we're like, I think just ZK is more elegant. It's more scalable. It's more secure. And the last one, security, is a big one. Is a big one.
27:01 David Hoffman? Steve, I actually had the privilege of kind of getting a preview of the conversation that we're talking about today, because we did a mainnet panel with you, Ben from Optimism, and also a Coinbase representative about this. And so, since we've got to the topic of Layer 3s, I think what you just said is a pretty spicy take. I think a lot of listeners right now are like, oh, wow, like, we're already, we're already ready to put optimistic rollups back on the shelf and take off, take down the ZK rollup book? Like, that's, that happened so quickly. Again, like, we just had, it's been one year of optimistic rollups. So I think we have to go into like, why you think that that is true, and what the technology is that's supporting that statement. And in this, in this presentation we did, you've given me some of your slides.
27:45 David Hoffman? You produced a chart that said something about the scaling of the internet. So we're going to use What Bankless does really, very well, which is metaphors. So we're looking at a chart here where there's like 23,000 websites in about 1995. And then it goes to where we are closer to today, where there are 60 billion websites closer to today, which is like, you know, a significant amount of growth. And so, you know, this is the model that we in the crypto world have used quite frequently is like every, in the same way, like anyone can have a website, anyone can have a token. I think the metaphor that you're providing here is that like, well, yes, that, that model, that idea, you know, anybody can have a website, anybody can have a token works, but also anyone can have a layer two.
28:28 David Hoffman? And, and so this is going into this layer three conversation, which I also thought you put a pretty cool image together, which is like this fractal tree structure. And Bankless listeners that, that know what I like to pay attention to, they know I, I like the world, world fractal and the way that nature and blockchains intersect. And so for the podcast listeners here, we're seeing a graph where we have the Ethereum at the base layer as it is, the global sediment layer, and then we have the ZK sync layer two. And then we have this like branching tree structure that looks like arteries or like lungs or like lightning. And it's, it's spawning off into many, many, many different layer threes.
29:07 David Hoffman? And I'm, and what you just said is that the ZK technology, that the ZK tech stack is more apt to produce what we are looking at than the optimistic roll up tech stack. But can you also, can you, can you explain that and how this all works? It has to do with bridging, but also can you just explain like what this layer three ecosystem is? Like what, like maybe people, if they think layer three is layer two's layer one, they think, okay, the layer three settles down to the layer two, which settles down to the layer one, which is true, but it doesn't actually illustrate why there are so many layer threes. So can you kind of walk us through this layer three narrative and this layer three tech stack and what it, what it really means?
29:45 Speaker 02 I'll, I'll do my best and the whole layer one, layer two, layer three is just, we had to name it something. So I think these, this is as good as we can get. I think that the.
29:59 Speaker 02 At the highest level, what are these 10x moments that like even bring us from like back in the day in 1995, 23,000 websites to 2005 was 60 billion? And I know that number of 60 billion because that's when I built a search engine called PowerSet, which ultimately became Microsoft Bing. And I'll just never remember like, like, oh, my God, we have to index 60 billion.
30:24 Speaker 02 And thank God, like, most of them were WordPress sites that were were easy to to index. But the the fits and spurts, these 10x moments usually come in either you got way faster, way cheaper, way easier to use, you had more feature sets, or you were much more secure. And like, think of 1995 as like the back in the days, like, nobody trusted the Internet with their credit card. Everybody, remember, we thought the Internet was a fad. Nobody thought there was any real use cases for the Internet. That's kind of where we are today mentally. When you talk to like a norm, normal person.
31:01 Speaker 02 And it's exciting that that's where we are today because we're about to have a bunch of these 10x moments where you're where you're making it easier, faster, cheaper, more secure. And if we go into the the famous Tree of Life slide. And by the way, one of my other most proudest moments is I created this entire thing in Google Slides. I want everyone to know that it took me like five hours.
31:23 David Hoffman? Wow.
31:24 Speaker 02 But this is pure Google Slides.
31:29 Speaker 02 Think of, think of where are the 10x moments occurring? And when are they coming? What's next, right? So we had our proof of work to proof of stake, sort of 10,000x moment in reduction of energy. What's the next 10x moment that we're going to see? Well, it's going to be, it already did occur. It's Layer 2. So it's Arbitrum when we had Layer 2. They were about a 10x bump on top of Ethereum. A Layer 2 ZK rollup will be about the same, 10, 10 to maybe 100x, depending on the the situation.
32:03 David Hoffman? On top of the Arbitrum scale? In addition?
32:06 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, equivalent, roughly.
32:10 David Hoffman? Okay, okay.
32:10 Speaker 02 At first, at first. And that's, that's an important statement at first.
32:16 Speaker 02 But we have EIP 4844 coming.
32:20 Speaker 02 You know, my best guess, Q2, you know, you can, you can see how good I am at predicting things, who knows. That is going to be about a 10 to 20x. I know that if you go on blogs and the inner tubes, it says 100x. I would really bank on more of 10 to 20x range. And that's, this is proto Dank starting. And yeah, there it is, 100x, you know, that's the famous 100x number right there on the right. It, I think we should more realistically look at 10 to 20. But that's huge. Because every time we increase scalability of Ethereum
32:59 Speaker 02 by 10x, the use cases grow by 100x or 1000x. Think of all the things you can do at, so if we're sitting at 150 transactions per second right now on a layer two and EIP4844 comes, we're suddenly at 1,500 transactions per second. What can you do with that? And then imagine if we went to 10,500, 100,000 transactions per second, now you can power Visa's protocol at that standpoint. So it's like an important math equation. Every time these 10x moments occur, you have 100x or 1,000x response in the ecosystem. And that's
33:39 Speaker 02 why we went from 23,000 websites in, in 1995, and suddenly we had JavaScript come along, jQuery came along that made it way easier. Bandwidth speeds went from 10 kilobits to one megabit. And we didn't have a 10x reaction in the number of websites. It's 12,000x. That's what happens in the ecosystem. So now going back down into the Tree of Life slide, we have one 10x moment left. That's a big one in Ethereum, EIP4844. We have the 10x moment of layer twos themselves. Now, ZK sync and ZK rollups, as they mature,
34:20 Speaker 02 will trend towards 100x over time in layer two. And that's why I say at first. But where the real interesting thing is, is that in layer three, it's not one 10x moment.
34:34 Speaker 02 It's like a star cluster of 10x moments. It's a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of 10x moments that occur in layer three that revolve around either increased speed, reduction in cost, easier to use, more featureful to use, or and it's my favorite one, security. We can finally trust Ethereum and layer two, Ethereum and layer two, and we won't have these things where we're getting hacks in non-native bridges in layer three. So when you get up into layer three, think of it as layer three is infinite scalability with infinite customization. And
35:16 Speaker 02 instead of having a one block size fits all, which is kind of what layer two is, each use case, so DeFi gaming, you know, go on forever of use cases can now customize a blockchain to its own purpose. And we call that a fractal blockchain. And if we want to get really super brandy brandy, we call it a fractal hyperchain. Uh, but it's basically a blockchain. And
35:42 David Hoffman? Hyperchain because is that a reference to like hyper linking in that these blockchains are relating to each other?
35:49 Speaker 02 Yes, that is that it. So Alex, Alex, our co-founder named it that for that exact reason.
35:55 David Hoffman? Okay.
35:56 Speaker 02 And, uh, what makes these things magical is A, you can choose between one of three structures. You can say, I want a pure ZK roll up recursing inside of a ZK roll up base chain.
36:08 David Hoffman? And that's a, that's a layer three on top of the ZK sync layer two.
36:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. So imagine you're creating your layer three fractal hyperchain and the first question says, what type do you want? And you're like, I want type ZK roll up. And that's because you want the most security because in that one, you get to inherit the, the security of Ethereum. But you're going to pay the most for that, too.
36:29 David Hoffman? Right.
36:30 Speaker 02 The, the second option you could have for structure is you could have a ZK porter. Uh, Starkware calls that volition, I believe.
36:39 Speaker 02 And you get to choose, I want some of my data to go to Ethereum, some of it to go off chain. And for example, a use case for that would be like a gaming company where I want all my financial transactions to be on Ethereum. But the fact that my Sword of Elrond is green for my character, that can be done off chain because I'm going to do that super cheap, super high transaction speed. And then the last structural option you could say is no, I want it to be a volition because I want millions of transactions per second. I want to pay super, super deep, cheap fees and security. I want it, but it's not as important as if I was doing banking or something like that. And then, once you create the structure, then there's, there's two other magical things you can do up in layer three.
37:23 Speaker 02 One is you can choose to say, I want to secure my blockchain with my own token. And that is gigantic for the field out there. This is DYDX. This is what they wanted to do. What they couldn't do on Starkware, so they moved to Cosmos. And it'll be a beautiful moment for the Ethereum community. I think if we could bring DYDX back into the pure Ethereum community by letting them to live in layer three. And they can have their own token and decentralize with their own token in layer three. The second thing that you can choose is whether or not your blockchain is private or not. And that's a super hot topic, I'm sure, but we, we see ourselves as just a technology providers.
38:05 Speaker 02 And then the DAP companies can choose whether they want to be private or public. And the beauty of this is that, and this is the big one. And this took me like forever to try to be able to describe in a simple way that was accurate.
38:23 Speaker 02 Regardless of the, the structure or options you choose to customize your fractal hyperchain. All of the fractal hyperchains in layer three are bound by one magical thing. They are all on the same circuit technology. So they are proven by the same prover. And what that allows you to do is normally when you're, you're interacting from one blockchain to another blockchain. That interaction is through a non-native bridge. But in a hyperchain world, that interaction is
39:03 Speaker 02 a native bridge. Whereas when we were on stage, Ben corrected me. He's like, no, it's not a bridge at all. And that's actually kind of an interesting way to think about it is like, if, if this possible future of fractal hyperchains can exist, the internet of fractal hyperchains.
39:20 Speaker 02 Then there are no more bridges. And, and now we're getting into the reason why potentially this one potential future is the endgame for Ethereum. Because then some other magical things can happen. If we can standardize on one prover that does one circuit in one way, then we can invite some very, very interesting futures to exist that maybe didn't exist in people's heads before. I've heard so many times people were like, I think it's a winner take all and all the alt L ones are gonna die. And there will be one L two that rises to the top and all the other alt L twos will, will go away as well.
40:05 Speaker 02 So as ZK sync has the potential in one possible future to be the standard L two prover.
40:16 Speaker 02 Imagine a world in which two things that happen that are kind of mind bending. Imagine all of the L twos adopt our prover technology and we are all on one circuit. And imagine optimism, polygon, scroll. Everyone gets to exist, but what they exist as is as a layer three fractal hyperchain. And imagine all the alt L ones come over and they exist as a layer three fractal hyperchain. And the beauty is that communities that believe in these blockchains, because when you buy into a blockchain, you're buying into more than just the blockchain, you're buying into its belief system.
40:59 Speaker 02 And like optimism has amazing things going for it with its community, with its efforts and governance, with its, its public goods projects. And, you know, to, to belong to the network state of optimism is something that perhaps should be fought for to preserve in some way.
41:20 Speaker 02 And how can we, how can we work with all of the blockchains to preserve what their missions are? And to say, let's bring technology to the table and that we promote that standardization is very, very important. When we, when we finally all standardized on EVM, how much happened when we finally agreed EVM was the standard? Imagine if there is a prover that we say this prover is the standard, let's all adopt it. Then we really grow.
41:47 Ryan Sean Adams? Steve, one quick question for you. Do they lose anything if they select ZK Sync as the prover? An optimism, an alt layer one. What are they, are they losing anything here? Are they losing any sovereignty?
42:02 Speaker 02 I hope not. I think it's a complex topic. I think we're at the very, very, very beginning edges of that topic. So in terms of like, is there consensus that ZK Sync's prover is the end game? Absolutely not. We haven't even launched yet. We haven't proven anything. We need to launch and show the goods and live up to the hype. And part of that is by sharing information, sharing how we do, what we do, and we can talk about that in a minute. And, and proving that we deserve to be the standard. And even once we are the standard, you know, rollups that aren't ZK rollups that have their own token, they have their own economies.
42:46 Speaker 02 That is very complex and we have not figured that out in any way, shape or form, but that's our job. Our job is to go out there and to, as you guys say, to the frontier and like figure that out. Like that's what makes this so exciting. So we, we don't know how this all works out. It's one of many possible futures. But when I sit and think about the possible future where we can bring the alt L2s into the layer three place. And we can bring the alt L1s into layer three and we can survive and thrive in these communities. To me, that is so much better than winner takes all and we destroy blockchains. Cause we, we at Matter Labs want to be creators and we want to be positive and we want to be expressing the values of Ethereum.
43:31 Speaker 02 And I don't think like to destroy your competitors is like what, you know, being in, in the Ethereum community is all about.
43:39 Speaker 02 So I'm constantly reaching out to the other founders of all of the projects and saying, how can we think through this? Because if we get to the other side of this future, and Vitalik said it, I think, on your show the other day, once we solve scaling, we enable all of the many possible futures of Ethereum. And this is just one of them that I described. There are many, many other possible futures, but I'm really excited about this possible future.
44:06 David Hoffman? Sure. They take that other layer twos will actually become proven by the ZK Sync prover as layer threes. And Ryan, of course, asked, do they lose anything by doing that? Do they lose their sovereignty? And I love the philosophy of that answer is no. How can we grow the pie the most by having, producing an inclusive environment where everyone can settle on the same proving standard because that optimizes for bridge risks? But isn't, don't like, doesn't a competitor ZK EVM like Scroll or Polygon, don't they also want that? Like, don't they also want other optimism ZK Sync to settle on their prover? And so like, what do you think they think when they are listening
44:50 David Hoffman? to ZK Sync say, hey, like, they'll come and settle with our prover?
44:55 Speaker 02 I hope that what they think is that we are all after the same thing. And that if I see data that their approach is better than our approach, then I will listen to that data. I am not a religious zealot on the way that we do it. I am very familiar with the way that we do it. And I think we have very principled reasons why we chose the way that we did it. But our job for all of the companies that are trying to find approaches to do a ZK rollup is to say, let's listen to the data. So we are going to be the first ones out there for like a year, and everybody's going to be able to see our data. You know, we are going to be able,
45:35 Speaker 02 we're going to be, you know, at some point submitting our prover to ZPRY, so that everybody can see how it performs. And that's the sort of stuff we all need to do is share how we're doing this so that we can pick the right solution moving forward. And if we, for whatever reasons, decide the method that Scroll has or the method Polygon has is actually better than what we have.
46:01 Speaker 02 Again, I just go right back to what we said at the very, very beginning. Our job is to scale Ethereum. Our job is to have a mission not to have like a token that just solely benefits ourselves. So we can line our pockets. We're here to, you know, somehow find a way to accelerate self-sovereign self-sovereignty. And it has to be a big ego, you know, swallow your ego and just like get, get over to the other side of this thing. And it's, it's tough. It's a struggle because we do want to win. I'm very competitive as a, as a human being. I want to win, but I don't want to win and like stick it to somebody. I want to win because we were actually just right.
46:37 David Hoffman? Right, right. I think this is the big takeaway that I'm getting so far is that it is the prover vector that I think is the focus of competition. And it's like, it's, this is really just a meta game of who's got the best prover. And that's going to be, I think, a big conversation between the ZK EVM teams moving forward. But on that same conversation with the reason why the prover is such a big deal. And we talked about this, but I really want to drill this home. Is it because Steve, you use that term, everything's on the same circuit, right? If optimism comes and settles on ZK sync, they're on the same circuit. And I want to unpack what that means a little bit more. And I think what that means is that if everything is using the same prover, that creates this
47:18 David Hoffman? native bridge ecosystem, which is meaningfully different from the cross layer one bridges that seemingly always get hacked. Side chains that also kind of same deal get hacked. So the bridging problem was clouded and just like tainted this whole entire bull market because we couldn't find cross chain bridges that could stand up. And so now we're getting into this world where we have these new forms of bridges. And these new forms of bridges are specifically enabled because they all settle on the same prover, the same canonical prover that we as an industry, hopefully we can coordinate around. And that enables these things called hyper bridges, which like you mentioned, Ben Jones from optimism saying, well, really, there's actually not a bridge there. It's actually straight cryptography all the way through and through.
48:03 David Hoffman? Can you talk about this vision for the future and why this means that we can support an infinity, infinite number of bridges, which again technically aren't any bridges anymore? And like what that does, why like going to 10 to 100x on security can do the thing that we saw with websites where we went from a thousand websites to 60 billion websites? What does that mean for the blockchain ecosystem? And, and yeah, can you like polish off this part of this conversation?
48:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, so like, there are two, so in terms of like, it's not which layer two blockchain is winner take all or winner take most, it's which prover takes all.
48:47 Speaker 02 The words we should be using is, is what do we choose to standardize and ultimately commoditize? If we, if we all agree to it, it's a, it's like a browser agreeing to use JavaScript and CSS and that there is a JavaScript standards body and there's a CSS standards body and all browsers use it the same, therefore all browsers benefit because of it.
49:11 Speaker 02 There are many areas where there are projects and, and, and technologies that are put forward where one of the L twos is saying, hey, I think this should be a standard and it's more than just provers. So like optimism has Bedrock and they want Bedrock, Bedrock to be adopted as a standard. And imagine, there's an imaginary possible future in which we slot our prover inside of Bedrock. Now, I currently don't understand technically how that would work. To be, it, it, it, it's something that I would have to listen to and understand a lot more about, but I do know that if optimism becomes an L three fractal hyperchain, I know
49:54 Speaker 02 that the circuits work and I know how that works. I don't know much about Bedrock, but that's another example of a potential technology that could become a standard. And just like when the browsers agreed on standards, everything got better, so too will the same exist.
50:12 Speaker 02 For crypto, imagine if we all agreed to common set standards for SDKs and CLI tools and other types of things that made things easier. So you're, you're after one of those 10x moments. So think of 10x speed, 10x reduction of cost, 10x easier, 10x more featureful, 10x more secure. And those are your areas where you're looking for things to agree on with other projects. And when you can, it, it benefits the whole ecosystem.
50:40 Speaker 02 And I always liken it to when the browser, nobody trusted their credit cards on the browser. And we finally agreed on SSL everywhere. And we've got that lock icon up in your browser window. And suddenly people started trusting using their credit cards online. And it changed e-commerce. It created e-commerce, didn't change it. It created the use case of e-commerce.
51:02 David Hoffman? And you think that this is going to be the same thing with this hyperlinking native bridging? Again, which is like actually the elimination of bridges where you have much stronger cryptographic assurances about where your assets are in the blockchain ecosystem. If it is all like, again, what you say, on the same circuit. We can instead of like a little lock icon, that'll be a little new icon that says, you know, secured or secured by Ethereum or is it secured by ZK sync? That's kind of like the metaphor here?
51:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, TCP IP is a protocol we all agree on. HTTPS is a protocol we all agree on. When we get to a point where we are hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, gas fees are minimal. It's as easy to create a blockchain as it is to create a Squarespace site. It is featureful as we want it to be. And we have the features of like Shopify right at our fingertips to create anything. Or Unreal Engine is on the blockchain and that we trust it and it's secure. That's when we see that lock icon change into the Ethereum icon and everything we do in the world is Ethereum.
52:12 David Hoffman? Oh, man.
52:13 Ryan Sean Adams? Steve, what's really interesting to me about this is it kind of reminds me of Cosmos and the interchain model a little bit, right? And like particularly at the top. And so I just want to make sure I'm understanding this like kind of correctly, right? So what we see at the top in this layer three, this fractal area.
52:33 David Hoffman? Hang on, sorry, Ryan. My stream is being weird. I can't see your screen. Can you actually stop sharing screen?
52:39 Ryan Sean Adams? Sure. How about that?
52:41 David Hoffman? Maybe just try it again.
52:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay. Share the screen now. That work?
52:47 David Hoffman? You guys are all missing. I don't know why.
52:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, I'm gonna just keep talking.
52:52 David Hoffman? Just keep going for it, yeah.
52:54 Ryan Sean Adams? So, in kind of the Cosmos like model of the world, there are all of these self-sovereign chains, essentially. And anyone can spin one up. It's very easy with kind of like, you know, tendermint and all of the components that they've built. And there's a certain beauty in that because you get to run all of these experiments in parallel and everyone gets sovereignty of their chain. And yet, the Ethereum criticism of that is it's also a very messy world. And it's also a world that seems highly risky. Because when you port assets from one chain to another, from another chain to another, you have no idea as to the security of that particular asset, because it's backed by validators and,
53:38 Ryan Sean Adams? you know, three or four different chains. And you also have to go through kind of the the bridge piece of it. And then more broadly, if you assume there are worlds outside of Cosmos, which of course there are, Ethereum is much larger than Cosmos at this moment. If you try to port an Ethereum asset onto Cosmos, you lose more security guarantees or Cosmos asset on Ethereum. And so it's kind of this messy world where I don't know if my ETH wrapped on Cosmos, I have no idea how secure it is. It could get hacked any moment with all of these kind of like flaws in the chain. And so what I see in your vision here, Steve, the vision you just laid out with Layer 3 is, we get to still keep that multi-self-sovereign chain.
54:23 Ryan Sean Adams? Anyone can spin up something and experiment, experience. And yet, we don't have the downside because we have the shared security of Ethereum. We also have the bridging security through through hyperbridges, where there aren't even bridges. It's almost like you're operating in kind of like one single virtual chain that, you know, exists as independent organisms. Can you talk a little bit about the Cosmos vision of the world? And how that's different or similar to what you've just laid out?
54:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, very good question. I, I, I think that I, in trying to understand things like this, I always try to find some sort of comparable that makes my brain like click into place and like go, oh yeah, that's what that is. And think, think of it this way, imagine that there's a spectrum of form and function and control. And at one end of the spectrum, you can say like, do whatever you want. And the other end of the spectrum is like this hyper controlled, you must do it this one way. It can only be done in this one size fits all sort of world. And now go back and imagine that spectrum and apply it to the web two space.
55:40 Speaker 02 And so I'm going to say a statement, I'm going to, it's a little spicy and, and I want to send a lot of love to Cosmos because they had a lot of the right ideas. But they're functionally the MySpace of blockchains.
55:53 Speaker 02 It's, it's a great idea. They get social media. They got it like they got so many nuggets of it. But it's, but it's kind of a mess and, and so structure is what's needed. And the idea is, is so, so imagine you, you have this spectrum of structure and like, if you have too little, you get, you get MySpace. If you have too much, you just, you just get this single way of doing things and it's just not featureful. It's not customizable. It's not what you want. And you've got to have that dialed in. And so we are an example of an experiment in providing a, a, a level of, of structure. So we have our three different structures of your hyperchain and everybody must be under the same circuit to have safety and to have security.
56:36 Speaker 02 So we, we brought that dial, we, we took inspiration from Cosmos. We pretty much have their exact color scheme in our brand. It's hilarious. But I, I love reading the Cosmos papers. I love reading the Cosmos visions because there's so much goodness in the vision. But the way the tech is implemented, the way the early shot, you know, take an early shot at this. It's, it, it, it is sort of a little bit MySpacey in that it's just, it's disorganized. There's no. There's no security and structure at the end of the day that I believe that could scale. But that being said, like, I cannot tell you how inspiring Cosmos is to me. I, I, I have read the white papers, and this is true for, for many of the other projects in the ecosystem, but
57:22 Speaker 02 their method of connecting blockchains is an older technology for connecting blockchains and is therefore less secure. Their structure of how you can create your own blockchains is much more wide open and, and can lead to a lot of things that would worry me.
57:41 Speaker 02 So think of us as just, uh, we're not one size fits all. But what we do get to do is, is what will be perceived as infinite customization. But there's actually underlying structure that, that is essential for principled, good engineering that, uh, provides the security necessary to trust the, the, the, the, the the blockchains and, and all of the blockchains interacting with one another.
58:05 Ryan Sean Adams? What would it look like for an alternative layer one to become a layer three in this scheme that, that you just mentioned? And in fact, do you think that's actually like a possibility? I know Plenya has predicted this many times and he's somewhat, people have labeled them a, a layer two roll up maximalist maybe. But could you actually imagine an alternative layer one, like a fairly large market cap layer one migrating to a structure like this? Or how about a DeFi app? I know we already mentioned D Y D X, but there are other DeFi apps, of course. Could they become their own chains and be, be, be part of this fractal on layer three?
58:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that we're at the very beginning of contemplating this and, um.
58:56 Speaker 02 When we first had the concept of Layer 3 and sort of first threw it out there.
59:03 Speaker 02 And had our first tests of this and realized that it worked.
59:10 Speaker 02 I was shocked at how many
59:14 Speaker 02 L1s have come to us.
59:17 Speaker 02 I was shocked at how many DeFi projects have come to us. I would say that
59:23 Speaker 02 it's it's kind of weird. We're launching the L2, which we've been working on for four years. It's the most exciting thing in the planet. And
59:32 Speaker 02 we are, we are having just so many meetings about L3 because that's the star cluster of 10x moments and everybody's kind of getting it. And the way I would say it is that we need help.
59:47 Speaker 02 We, we need to have a project where we have a tier one or many tier one ecosystem projects work with us. And perhaps work with some people that are other people that are the smartest people on the planet. And imagine we're all working in unison towards this, this one possible future, but we're beginning to see the beginnings of a cohesive approach. Where we have a consensus that, oh my God, I think this could be the standard. So be on the lookout for a 10x moment where a, a, a group of tier ones band together to, to study this and to figure this out because we have a long way to go before it becomes a reality.
1:00:33 Speaker 02 But I would say that we have definitively come to the conclusion that it is worth a great deal of study. Could it, because it could provide again, this, this star cluster of 10x moments and be something that is, is a benefit to, to, to every people or, or every project in the ecosystem. So I, I can't, I can't yet make a comment on like announcing stuff, but I would say very much. You know, we talked about what's next. What are the next big moments coming? Be on the lookout for that type of a moment. Cause I'm feeling a ground swell. That has come our way to begin talking seriously about Layer 3.
1:01:14 David Hoffman? Well, Steve, I have thoroughly been enjoying this conversation thus far. There's a few other things that I want to get to. Of course, when token and what does that token do? I mean, we got to ask about that, but also like all of everything that you've been saying. It's like it's a great, it's great on a podcast. It's great with words. What's this actual onboarding strategy look like? Like, how are you going to do it? So I want to ask about that, but also just overall, what's next in the ZK Sync roadmap? With only 31 days left, what are y'all doing inside of those 31 days? And then what's going to be after those 31 days? So all these questions and more are coming right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Juno is bringing crypto-friendly banking straight into your checking account.
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1:04:05 David Hoffman? Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the Wallet icon to get started.
1:04:11 David Hoffman? And we are back with our conversation with Steve Newcomb from ZK Sync. And Steve, I've been loving this conversation. Again, like anytime we talk about fractals in nature and hyperscale ability, hyperchains and the tree of life metaphor for a group of chains, what that sounds like to me is a bunch of surface area. And like I was alluding to earlier in the show, during 2018 to 2019, it was that kindling, that brush that was growing that a lot of us that stuck around during the bear market during that time saw. It's like, yo, this Uniswap thing is really cool. This DeFi thing's great. Once people figure this out, that's going to be awesome. And when I see like change upon change upon change, all I'm seeing is like surface area
1:04:54 David Hoffman? for use cases and platforms and projects and companies to latch on to. And finally, we can push Ethereum into every single corner of the internet. It's a great idea. It's a great vision. But what about the actual onboarding? Because some Layer 2s definitely get their adoption and get their business development better than others. So what's this strategy? Like, how is ZK Sync going to go from the Bankless Podcast, where we're talking about fractals and stuff, to like onboarding actual Web2 commerce, future Web3 ideas? What's the business development and onboarding strategy here?
1:05:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, we will, we will be
1:05:32 Speaker 02 much to many's chagrin, I think, much more like Ethereum than just YOLO-ing on to mainnet and hoping for the best.
1:05:41 Speaker 02 You know, I, I, I think that it's important for people to understand that the onboarding that we're going to be conducting. So in October 28th, we're going to go into mainnet for about, about a month. We're going to be kicking the tires and we are going to be the ones that are the only people using the system for the first month. Because we want to absolutely make sure, even though we've had two security audits. We're going to be doing all sorts of exercises to try to punch holes in it for about a month and kick the tires and make sure it's safe for everybody. After that, we're going to start letting everybody in to begin developing and, and creating their DAPs on ZK sync. However, they'll be gated. So while the DAPs work,
1:06:26 Speaker 02 only the developers will be able to use them. The users won't be allowed to be on-boarded. And then again, we're going through more testing, more security, more testing and more security. And when we're happy with that, all the projects at once will be, the gate will be lifted and everybody will launch at once. So it's, it's not so dissimilar from kind of what we just went through with proof of work to proof of mistake. There's going to be a moment where there's a day where it happens. And people will probably yell at us the entire time we're waiting for that day and we're going to be like, nope. We are taking the absolute most safest, most secure route to that moment.
1:07:06 Speaker 02 If it takes us three months, it takes us three months. If it takes us six months, it takes six months. If it takes nine months, that's okay too. We will never shortcut our testnet activities. You know, when we go through testnet, we took zero shortcuts. When we go through mainnet, from all the way from alpha to, hey, we're wide open and everything's good to go and everybody can just rock and roll on ZK sync, we're going to be very careful the entire way through. So you're going to see projects like probably just like, come on, like, come on, hit that button and let us in. And just like Ethereum, we're going to be like, no, like it is our J O B to be secure. We cannot have a foul up here. In the same way that, I mean, several sort of magnitude more important.
1:07:52 Speaker 02 Proof of work to proof of stake, it needed to go right. I mean, I told everybody like, if that goes down, like I'm, I'm probably looking for, everybody's looking for a new job. Like there's nothing left if that goes down. And we treat our launch onto mainnet the same way. So everybody thinks October 28th, oh my God, the world's going to change. We'll have 14,000 TPS, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not gonna, it's not going to be how it happens. It's going to be slow, quiet, careful, principled rollout in the most careful possible way that expresses the carefulness that Ethereum already expresses.
1:08:26 Ryan Sean Adams? All right. So, so just so we're understanding, the analogy we used before, like a year ago at this time was for Arbitrum was like the, the analogy of a theme park. Okay. And you guys have the theme park ready. It's on mainnet, you have all the infrastructure for the theme park. Step one is the internal employees are going to make sure everything in the theme park is kind of working. And that's going to last a month, maybe a little bit longer. And step two is you're going to allow a bunch of builders in who could start building the rides. You know, this is like roller coaster tycoon or something. Build all the rides. All the while, everyone's going to make sure that these rides are safe, that kids aren't getting flung off the, the roller coaster. Right. That no one's going to die.
1:09:11 Ryan Sean Adams? And those tires are going to be kicked. Uh, and then eventually the gates will open for general use. And anybody can come streaming into the theme park and start to use the rides. But the first step is October 28th, where you're just going to open the park internally. Then the builders, then opening it for all of the theme park attendees. And you don't really have a timeline on when the theme park will be open for the users and the attendees. Other than to say, we're going to make sure it's secure and ready before we open the gates. Is this right?
1:09:49 Speaker 02 That I couldn't have said it better. You said it perfectly. Yeah. We, we will not let our, uh, some sort of hype marketing campaign pick a date for us to say like, we need to launch on this date. We are going to let security tell us when we're able to launch, uh, cause that is paramount for us. But that, that was a very good analogy. Uh, and that is, that is almost just dead on exactly how we're thinking about it.
1:10:12 David Hoffman? So Steve, of course, we've got ZK Sync, we've got the ZK EVM. When ZK token?
1:10:18 Speaker 02 Here comes the token.
1:10:19 David Hoffman? And what does it do? How would be, what kind of flavor token would it do? Would it be?
1:10:27 Speaker 02 So again, this was an area where like patience is one of our greatest strategies in ZK Sync. It's like we look at what everybody else has done in the market space. And again, a nod to optimism for really moving the ball down the field for how governance can work, how decentralization can happen, how tokenomics can work. I'm very thankful that I think that the Ethereum community now pretty much, I believe, has consensus on a few of the items of how tokenomics should work. And while I really can't comment on our token, on when it will occur or anything of that sort,
1:11:11 Speaker 02 I can say that when we've studied the system and we really do think that when we saw Layer 2s coming out with token splits where it's 50% to the insiders, we just never felt like that was who we were.
1:11:27 Speaker 02 And so we stay committed and are committed and will. When we do have this, we are committed to one-third insiders, two-thirds public. And I think that's essentially just as important of standardizing our prover for everybody in the system. We should standardize things like these things that say these are our belief systems that should also be shared and standardized. And as well, there's another big one, which is gas fees. I remember when, I think you guys probably remember too, when I read that Starkware was charging their own token for gas fees, I was just like, huh? I was like, uh, what? Like, what? Nobody's gonna like that. Like, what?
1:12:12 Speaker 02 And when you, I often say that when you see a company's tokenomics model, it kind of expresses who they are. And we are here to scale Ethereum. So we will be charging our gas fees in ETH.
1:12:28 Speaker 02 And that's all I can really say about our tokenomics is that we will be committed to doing things the right way. And, and, and when people choose a layer two solution, we always remind them that you're not just choosing the prover and the tech and which one is the end game for scaling. You should choose the one that's the end game for ethos. And tokenomics is a very, very strong area to understand where some of these ethos,
1:12:56 Speaker 02 ethos sits. So I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to people, not like financially benefiting from something like this, but from coming up to us and saying, thank you. Thank you for doing it the right way. And, and, and when, when we, you know, when you raise money and stuff like that, you have to negotiate to stick on this sort of stuff. And it's such a, such a devil on your shoulder. Like I can have a huge valuation if I just agree to these horrifying like terms. And I couldn't have been prouder about how we have always stuck to our principles in, in the company. So that's, I think that's all I'm allowed to say about our tokenomics.
1:13:33 David Hoffman? Sure. Yeah. And of course, whenever a token gets released, it's always that pie chart of distribution that is basically the first thing that gets analyzed. It's, did I get the airdrop and what's the distribution? And so the, the two thirds to the public, one third to the private is a, going to be interesting to see how that lands with the community and what they say. How, have you guys thought about how that two thirds distribution actually works? Cause distributing is hard these days. There is an arms race between airdrop farmers and airdroppers. And there's many different ways to distribute a token. And some are better than others. Have you guys thought about the strategy or how you guys are actually going to, push out the token to the people that you want that token to land with versus the people that you don't?
1:14:20 Speaker 02 There unfortunately, I wish there was broad consensus on how to do that so we could just copy somebody, but I think this is a field where we need to innovate because I think it's a little bit broken and it needs some love and it needs some some thought. Somebody I think needs to come in and be a thought leader in this area and really nail it. I guarantee you I will be maybe trying to get some advice from optimism and saying what are their thoughts because I think they are thought leaders in the space. I don't think anybody's got this one yet. I don't think this is figured out. I think we need to work
1:15:03 Speaker 02 on this one. I think that all the things you mentioned are problems. We got to fix them and we expect us to be us and come up with something that nobody expected us to do that everybody as soon as they hear it, just like they hear like one circuit to rule them all and Alt L1 is becoming L3 Validiums and they're like, whoa, whoever thought of that. Expect us to do that sort of thinking and trying your best to be leaders and push the ball down the field and be responsible about it in such a way that we can create a standard around doing this so that we help everybody.
1:15:41 David Hoffman? Well, Steve, I certainly appreciate the intentionality and the foresight and forethought that y'all seem to be putting into this. I just want to ask about open source because this is also a topic of conversation between many of the Layer 2 teams, both on the ZK rollup and Optimistic rollup sides. Can you talk about why is the open source conversation such a big deal and what elements of ZK Sync are open source and what's left to open source and where do you guys stand on this whole front?
1:16:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, and we, since we've had ZK Sync 1.0 out there for so long, we've gone through this open source stuff and
1:16:22 Speaker 02 It's interesting because open source, not in crypto, so like normal open source, is a bit more straightforward.
1:16:30 Speaker 02 I was blessed with the opportunity to be able to fund Node.js and help create it at one of the largest open source projects in the world. And I got to fund and be on the board of directors of jQuery, which is the largest open source project in the world. And in those areas, like those types of open sources, straightforward, it's like you protect three freedoms, the freedom to view the code, the freedom to change the code, and the freedom to fork the code. Boom, you're done. In crypto, we learned some weirdo lessons with ZK Sync 1. Do you guys remember what happened back then? So we open sourced it, all three freedoms, right off the bat, while we were developing it.
1:17:11 Speaker 02 And I would say that some people with not great intentions forked us and launched with bugs in the system and didn't know how to fix the bugs. And that hurts the Ethereum ecosystem when you do things like that. It makes people not trusted. You can have hacks, you can have all sorts of bad things happen when you have code that really isn't really battle tested. And you have these bad actors that will fork your code and do nasty things with them. And, you know, someday, I think someone will count up all of the nasty forks of ZK Sync 1.0. And, you know, they all die away. It's not like it's a competitive worry.
1:17:53 Speaker 02 What a worry is, is that when that happens, the news will catch hold of it and expand upon it. And then it makes everybody in the Ethereum community look bad. So we're sitting here trying to think this out, and it's another area where like, there's no consensus on this. Everybody does it their own way. Starkware does it their own way. They end up actually not open sourcing after they went into production. Polygon, what they do is they give you source visible, but they copyright it. So then forking and changing the code is not possible. And then they say that they're going to make all three freedoms open when they go live. That that that might work. But what's weird if somebody does fork you in that model?
1:18:35 Speaker 02 And you're using copyright to protect yourself from a bad actor forking you. Then you're using the very nation state to sue that company. That you're trying to undo in the first place. So it's a little bit of a like. Whoa, I'm I'm I don't want to use the nation state to protect me to to. Undo the nation.
1:18:52 David Hoffman? For my chain security. Yeah.
1:18:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like thinking about an unpitted olive for too long. It's like really complex. And. Yeah, that just takes a while.
1:19:06 Speaker 02 And and so we're thinking about our open source strategy meanwhile, and rightfully so. It happens every time I, you know, we we were on a panel with Arbitrum and Steven. He's always hitting us up like, why aren't you open source? Why are you coding in the dark? Why don't you code in the light? And we're like. I know, but it's it's not a perfect world. We just don't want to be forked again. And then people do nasty things and. With ZK sync two being do this, this, this long awaited EVM ZK roll up. We're like, wow, this could be really bad because everybody's after this stuff. And really bad stuff could happen. So. This will definitely be spicy.
1:19:46 Speaker 02 So we're going to announce what we're going to do. It's definitely not perfect. But I hope what people can see is the intent. So here's what we're going to do. When we hit main net. Everything will be.
1:20:02 Speaker 02 Protect open source and protecting all three freedoms. Freedom to view the code, change the code, fork the code. With the exception of one thing. We're gonna, we're gonna hold back. And I actually have my language here to get it exactly right. We're going to hold back the node implementation of our prover. And the method by which we were able to get the prover to work efficient efficiently. On regular old GPUs.
1:20:30 Speaker 02 And that is the secret sauce, basically, of what that is the 10x breakthrough. I would maybe even say that's 100x breakthrough that we did.
1:20:40 Speaker 02 And the reason we are holding that back is because we've, we've, we think we've been able to create. A principled pattern that we can now announce and say, this is what we will always follow. So that no longer does anybody need to ask what's our open source strategy? So. Here's as best, I'm going to try to say it as best I can. When anything that we build touches the hands of the users that it was intended to, we will fully open source it and protect all three freedoms.
1:21:10 Speaker 02 But if we are releasing software and it still is sitting in a centralized state where we are not releasing it to the intended users, meaning we are still kicking its tires, we're still testing it out, we are still making sure it's secure and unhackable, and we are taking on the risk to make sure that it stays secure. In those situations, we will, we will protect that code so that a bad actor can't fork it and then release it to people with mistakes in it. But then, once we do decentralize our approver, and that is when we have the technology in the hands of validators, which are the users of that, when we secure it.
1:21:52 Speaker 02 And at that moment, we, we will be releasing that into open source. And this is a conversation that Alex and I have been going through with our VP of Engineering and other folks on the team. And Alex made the call today. We, this has been a very long discussion in the company. And what's important for Alex and me and the whole company is that we do things based on principled thinking. And so again, it's that thought process of if the technology has been delivered securely, and we believe it's now secured to the intended end user, that is the moment in which we will make it fully open source.
1:22:35 Speaker 02 So for the, for the vast majority of the code, that means mainnet, when we are on mainnet.
1:22:42 Speaker 02 And we think it's really, really important not to let people with bad intentions to be able to try to fork something when it's not fully secured yet, when it's not fully battle tested. Because our, our mission, and we always go back to our mission is we can never damage Ethereum and, and the community within Ethereum and the reputation of Ethereum. So we cannot have a security situation happen ever. And we have a goal and a mission to be seen as a leader in security. And that may mean that we are slower, that we take longer, that, that people have to wait. It may mean, may mean that we have an open source policy that I can, I can hear Steven over
1:23:26 Speaker 02 at Arbitrum right now handing it to me. I, I know he's gonna, he's gonna, and I'm just gonna smile and I'll be like, we did the best we could, man. But the other thing we're doing is like, Steven, rightfully so, said, I want to see your prover. I want to see what its stats are. I want to see it in action. So what we are going to do is we're going to submit it to Z Prize so that everybody can see the measurements of its performance. Because it is a very big deal that we got this working on a GPU. Everybody thought we were working on specialized hardware and was going to cost a mint. Every, every time Steven like hands it to us on an L2 panel, he's always like, your prover is going to be too expensive because you have to have specialized hardware.
1:24:05 Speaker 02 Well, that's just not true. And we'll be able to put that out in the open public. So everybody can see that. In 31 days, right? And I think it's going to happen exactly on the day, but there's some logistics that we only have so many human beings, but the intention is like, that's when it would happen. And I know this is going to get spicy. I know that, you know, that, that, that I'm going to definitely get some comments on this. And I just want everybody to know, like, we know that, that the world isn't perfect on this and that nobody has it yet. Polygon's method is I don't think that solves it quite. But we are trying to move the ball down the field and open up this as a,
1:24:50 Speaker 02 as a open and transparent conversation of, hey, here's the issues we're thinking about. And so yeah, I'm gonna take the punch to the face probably so that I can protect Ethereum and so that we can take the safest and securest route and and we're always happy to do that because we got to live by our principles at the end of the day.
1:25:08 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, that's okay. Nerd fights are my favorite type of. They're the best fights. Competition is good for Ethereum.
1:25:14 Speaker 02 The next L2 panel is gonna be like wild.
1:25:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Look, it's good. You guys should be holding each other accountable. So and the back and forth is appreciated, I think, by the Ethereum community. Steve, this has been great. Thank you so much for walking us through it. Last question for you. I think this thing that you're shipping on October 28th. And I guess you're not waiting till Halloween, huh? Not October 31st, October 28th. I don't want the launch of my Layer 2 run to be spooky. I don't want to classify that as spooky. Just in before Halloween. All right. Fair enough. So this is called ZK Sync 2.0, I think. And there is a ZK Sync 3.0, one might imagine, or maybe some sort of a, you know, smaller point upgrade.
1:26:02 Ryan Sean Adams? What's on the future roadmap? So after you ship this thing, what are you going to be looking at? You don't have to go into all the details because I think we've stuffed people's brains a lot on this podcast with some mind blowing concepts. But just the high level, what would the next step be for ZK Sync?
1:26:18 Speaker 02 Beyond ZK Sync 3?
1:26:20 Ryan Sean Adams? Beyond 2. Tell us about 3.
1:26:23 Speaker 02 Oh, well, ZK Sync 3 is synonymous with Layer 3 and all the things that I spoke about in Layer 3.
1:26:31 Speaker 02 So that is the ability to choose the structure of your fractal hyperchain, whether it be a ZK rollup, a ZK porter, or ZK billydium. It's the ability to have your own token to secure your own hyperchain. The ability to choose whether it's public or private, and then all of this will be mastered with one circuit.
1:26:50 Ryan Sean Adams? And that is not coming on the 28th, right? ZK Sync 2 is coming on the 28th. We'll not have all of those things. But ZK 3, ZK Sync 3 comes later and will have all of those things. It's synonymous with the Layer 3 concept we were talking about.
1:27:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, so and think that it took us four years to get to ZK Sync 2 on October 28th.
1:27:12 Speaker 02 ZK Sync 3 on Testnet is going to happen a whole lot sooner than anyone thinks. It the innovations go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's going to be exciting to have. When Vitalik says he sometimes gets surprised how fast things move. I I think I'll have a little bit of joy when we say like, hey, look at this. And he says, I'm shocked again.
1:27:37 Speaker 02 Uh, it's really, really exciting how fast the innovation is going to happen. And one of the things that's going to happen as an arc over that is we are working very hard and it's going to become a theme and a narrative that's part of who we are. Is we're going to make it a lot easier to build stuff. So think of my background and what I've worked on. If anybody wants to look at my background, you can, you can very much see where I'm going to take this. And that is, we're going to make this thing easy. So look for SDK CLI tools all the way down eventually to the WordPress of crypto. We went at this, I imagine, a world that's low code, no code, click some buttons and you have your own blockchain
1:28:23 Speaker 02 that is doing extremely sophisticated things. I think 10x factor improvement in easy is going to be a very big story. But for the rest of this year and for all of next year, the biggest story I think for us is going to be just porting everybody over so they can try ZK Sync out for themselves and being welcoming to those people and making it easy for those people. We're seeing it anywhere from seven minutes to seven days to port. So it's been really, really easy to do. And it's been really joyous to watch people's light eyes light up and be like, oh, my God, I was so afraid. But that was actually like super duper easy. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's, that's kind of my job on the product side is to make it a, a, a joy
1:29:06 Speaker 02 to be using this technology instead of something that people fear and, and they think it's going to make them feel dumb. I want to make people feel brilliant. Um, so that's what's in store for us coming down the next year or two.
1:29:17 Ryan Sean Adams? That's awesome. David, did you hear that? Zero code, no code chain. So maybe Bankless gets its own chain on layer 3.
1:29:24 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:29:27 Ryan Sean Adams? Thank you so much for joining us. This has been awesome.
1:29:29 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me.
1:29:31 Ryan Sean Adams? Risks and disclaimers, everyone. Of course, I gotta tell you, like I always do. None of this has been financial advice, even though we talked a little bit about tokens. Crypto is risky. So is ETH. So is DeFi. All of it is. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Maybe the new frontier is layer 3. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
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