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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If we want to build a truly limitless internet of value, internet of rollups, 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 hyperscalability.

• 0:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 0:31David Hoffman?

  We are talking about ZK Sync era. The mainnet is live. As of right now, so we got the two people from the ZK Sync team. We got Alex Gluchowski, who's been with ZK Sync since forever, co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind ZK Sync. 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 ZK Sync is saying, along with their ZK Sync 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 Ethereum is.

• 1:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, this is the frontier of the frontiers, and that's where we're headed today. Hey, David, before we get in, gotta 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 Infura team. David, what do they want folks to know?

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  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 NFT, buying NFT, minting NFT, all of this SDK from Infura 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 Infura.

• 2:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's really cool. And Fira, 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/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're on the podcast today because they built something. They launched something really big. David, what should folks pay attention to going to this episode?

• 2:54David Hoffman?

  This is truly a new frontier. We all know what a rollup is. We have experienced these rollups with Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. These are a different kind of rollup. This is a new unlock. And so, simply put, ZK EVMs, ZK rollups have more scale. But if you just think that they are optimistic rollups with more scale, you're going to miss the forest for the trees. And that is a conversation that we have in this episode. There are specific and unique new use cases that the ZK rollups, the ZK EVMs unlock that are not unlocked by optimistic rollups. 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 rollups, even though we love them as much as we do,

• 3:38David Hoffman?

  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.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 to 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, Kraken. Go create an account. Go check them out. There's a link in the show notes.

• 4:48David Hoffman?

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• 5:31David Hoffman?

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• 6:17David Hoffman?

  Familiar and fully EVM compatible. On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitrum Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first DApp. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Learning about crypto is hard, until now. Introducing MetaMask Learn, an open educational platform about crypto, Web3, self-custody, wallet management, and all the other topics needed to onboard people into this crazy world of crypto. MetaMask Learn is an interactive platform with each lesson offering a simulation for

• 7:01David Hoffman?

  the task at hand, giving you actual, practical experience for navigating Web3. The purpose of MetaMask Learn is to teach people the basics of self-custody and wallet security in a safe environment. And while MetaMask Learn always takes the time to define Web3-specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon-free experience for the crypto-curious user. Friendly, not scary. MetaMask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience. So, are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? Go to learn.meta mask.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 Sync.

• 7:43David Hoffman?

  We got Alex Gluchowski, the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. He has been on the podcast before. Alex, welcome back to the show.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Hi David, hi Ryan, hello everyone. Pleasure to be here.

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  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. I am very happy to be here.

• 8:16David Hoffman?

  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. Can you guys walk us through the announcement of what you guys are dropping today? What is the big news?

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Well, the ZK Sync 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 a new journey.

• 8:47David Hoffman?

  And that's that. All right, we're wrapped. The network is live. It's here.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  It's finally here.

• 8:53David Hoffman?

  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 ZK Sync? And why is this significant for Ethereum at large?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  I genuinely think it's significant for Ethereum at large because ZKVMs 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 path into the future.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  And that has multiple reasons.

• 9:53David Hoffman?

  And there's also a new name for this network. Can you walk us through this new brand for ZK Sync?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  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 ZK Sync four years ago with the,

• 10:16Speaker 00

  from day one, there was a mission there. We want to 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,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  transact with anyone in the world without barriers, without asking for permission, without banks, without any kind of intermediaries. And it was

• 10:43Speaker 00

  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 of view of technologies that we had four years ago. And when I stumbled upon the idea of ZK proofs, a succincter knowledge proofs,

• 11:28Speaker 00

  or better call them proofs of computational integrity, or SNARKs, it was this aha moment where like, 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 cellphone, or a full node, or your Raspberry Pi. And there is no limit. You can, 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 the blockchain dilemma. You're not introducing new trust assumptions. You don't have to trust anyone.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  You still verify everything, but in a trustless way.

• 12:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 can't Cannot verify transactions. We don't know if the dollars in our account are actually backed or what they're backed by.

• 13:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 gotta 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.

• 13:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And this is hugely, it's a monumental event that we have a ZK EVM in production on mainnet. 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 2s previously on Bankless. Our listeners will be familiar with 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?

• 14:23Speaker 00

  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 were contributing work to, first of all, to all the employees of Matter 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, Bitcoin, like 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 culmination of the work of the entire community. It's not just our team. So to the user experience and what to expect from from the mainnet.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  The staged rollout is here. In fact, it started a long time ago. We launched, we deployed the existing mainnet contract with with the address that that everyone can see now. And if you look carefully at the address, you might notice interesting things about it. Half a year ago. So it was the the first moment where we we touched the mainnet as we we promised at FCC back in summer. We started experimenting with it ourselves internally. We conducted a number of security audits and we we a bunch of stress tests and and a lot of things, a lot of experimentation, a lot of learnings from from operating the mainnet.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  And we opened it to developers about a month ago. So the builders who registered could deploy their applications, bridge their their whatever tokens they wanted ETH or or ERC20 tokens, and start building and start experimenting on the testnet. Oh, sorry, on on the mainnet. The testnet is is live for for over a year. And have has processed, I think, something like eight million transactions by now. So this time, we are opening the gates to everyone. We we actually started onboarding the users also two weeks ago at E10 where we sponsored the food truck experience.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  So all all the people who got the food truck tokens from E10 could use them in a very limited way, not interacting with smart contracts, but just using using them to pay for food trucks, using our account abstraction feature. But now it's it's opening to everyone. So what you can do, you can bridge your assets onto EasyKissing 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 I know it's currently live. And we encourage everyone to do it gradually and.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  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, has never been used in production before until now. So we, we don't want to rush, we want to, uh, you know, like to take the maximum cautious approach to this. So what, what, what it means in practice for the users, um, the, basically there are no limitations, except that withdrawals will be delayed by some small timeframe. So the withdrawals or finalization of the blocks, rather to say, initially is going to happen after 24 hours from the moment of the block

• 17:53Speaker 00

  commitment. Uh, we're, we're soon will reduce this time to several hours and eventually we want to get rid of it. Once we get rid of the word alpha in, in the name of, of the network. Right now it's in alpha. So the, the contracts are upgradable. There is yet not, no security console, like treated as a, is 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.

• 18:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So the theme park is opening, gates of the theme park are opening, users can go in. Uh, there are some rides there. Some of these rides might, 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 around some of these things. Only, only, uh, 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.

• 18:45David Hoffman?

  Let someone else go first.

• 18:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'll let David go first. JK, I'll be there. Uh, so, um, but, but like, what can we actually do there when, when we get there? So you mentioned some projects, uh, 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, on a project or a place to visit once folks have bridged across to ZK Sync era?

• 19:12Speaker 00

  I, I don't want to pick, to pick favorites. You just go to ecosystem dot ZK sync dot A O and you will see the status of the project, who is live, who is not live, and you can just experiment and come from there.

• 19:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Well, well, well said. I guess incredibly neutral approach.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I, I wanted to emphasize like we, we really, we, we are doing, uh, our best to remain fully neutral from all aspects. So we, we have not like, we, we opened the, uh, the mainnet to developers with the wide listed, um,

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Registration, but we have not censored a single application. Like everyone who applied could use the the network. So it was more for us to to get our contacts and to be in touch with those people, but not to prevent anyone from launching. So we're following a strict fair launch approach. We're not going to pick any favorites to like push them, to make them a special case. We want to create an even playing field for everyone. This is really important.

• 20:05David Hoffman?

  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 too?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  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 1. But some of the other things that are exciting are, you know, the projects that are building sort of Layer 2 Native and, you know, thinking through what you can do in an environment with, you know, higher transaction through 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 2? But I feel like maybe I have a very bad imagination. But if I 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 DeFi. I definitely wouldn't have predicted some of the, you know, really interesting use cases for NFTs.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  So, you know, for me, the exciting thing about Layer 2 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 1.

• 21:16David Hoffman?

  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 dropdown menu in MetaMask, for example, when we need to switch to Arbitrum or Optimism. And we expect to see just ZK Sync just added to that network list as soon as you add the RPC endpoint inside of MetaMask. So now, you know, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, ZK Sync, the first ZK EVM to be added in this dropdown menu. I'm excited to see that that logo there. But Anthony, this is different because it's a ZK EVM, not an optimistic rollup. Optimistic rollups Have the benefit of just being able to be basically clones of Ethereum, like microcosms of Ethereum.

• 21:58David Hoffman?

  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.

• 22:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  I could think of one, David, maybe launching rockets, right?

• 22:12David Hoffman?

  That's a good point. Good touche. So Anthony, like when

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Or maybe head of security, you know, security is another interesting thing.

• 22:20David Hoffman?

  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 twos, 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 on to ZK Sync?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  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. To a 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 ZK Sync.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  So we do think a lot about, you know, a good UX and the good UX 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 possible. You know, 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 Ethereum or for, you know,

• 24:05Speaker 03

  whatever other layer two it happened to be, recompile with the ZK Sync compiler and redeploy. And to a first approximation, this has been, you know, it's a kind of a Good and bad thing for us during the testnet phase because you want lots of feedback, but in cases where things just work, you know, the the experience is sometimes smooth and there's not a lot for 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's the, 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?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  You know, projecting forward six months, 12 months, 24 months and 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 what we can like build and extend towards the future.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  So we've extensively documented areas that I think are unique to ZK Sync 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 abstraction is a good example, you know. Whereas 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, you know, 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 culmination of two years plus of engineering work.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:26David Hoffman?

  And Anthony, really just asking the bare bone, 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?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  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 out and say this is this is a massive step forward. In the fullness of time, I

• 27:44Speaker 03

  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 the this trustless aspect of the system is going to provide, you know, this this future architecture that can support hyperscale where you can have Multiple instances trustlessly able to sort of communicate and move, move data or move value between them.

• 28:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 rollup? 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, we can get to from kind of a user experience perspective?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  This is a great question. I would split it into two separate groups. The first group of like the first answer will cover all ZK EVMs. What are ZK EVMs fundamentally give you over optimistic rollups or any other scaling solutions, or specifically optimistic rollups? Because anything else but rollups doesn't really matter in Ethereum world. And the second group, the 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 rollups basically allow you to bridge faster. Like the, what the users will feel like apart from security

• 29:31Speaker 00

  and trustless guarantees that you get, the tangible result of using ZK over optimistic rollups 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 a training wheel which is going to be removed, can bridge immediately. Now, you probably don't really want to bridge back a lot from, from the rollup to layer one, because rollups 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

• 30:12Speaker 00

  users and most of application will live in a layer two space, but there will be a very important use case of bridging between the rollups. And if you're bridging between optimistic rollups or between a optimistic and ZK rollup, you always will fall back on the longest wait period. In optimistic cases, it's like the seven days.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  And you can't really accelerate that, like you can, you can only accelerate that by using, you know, like external capital, using some other things that, that work in.

• 30:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  You can't accelerate it without taking on additional risk or additional cost of capital.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Capital cost requirements, yes.

• 30:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Understood, okay.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  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 rollups, 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 hyperscalability. 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.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  It only applies if you use ZKVM in a specific way. So you, you might opt to be as close to Ethereum as possible and just emulate optimistic rollups. And this is what we see many ZKVM projects that are currently existing and in development are doing. They, 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 rollups do. Let's publish data availability for every transaction. Let's publish the inputs of transactions, for example, is, is, is one thing. And we, here is where we deviate from all of that, from all these ZKVMs in existence

• 32:20Speaker 00

  today. We decided to look at ZK proofs and ask ourselves, like, what is, what, what, what can it give you if you, like, what's the, the, the best way you can use them? And we decided, for example, that we want to, to manage data availability by publishing the state diffs, so like the updates of the, 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. Um, to like you, you don't have to pay for data availability of this. You're only paying zero knowledge proofs.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  And the zero knowledge proof generation is cheap and it's only going to get cheaper. So it's, it's just a fraction of a set. That, that, 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 know, you, you're, you, 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, you signed on your iPhone in a secure enclave. Maybe you want to submit some additional metadata for the um, trading routes and, and limits that you want to take on, on, on, on interacting with smart contracts. All of that will come essentially for free. So that's one big game.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Second big game is data compression. That is, imagine a use case such as Oracle updates. On optimistic rollups and on ZKABMs that use this optimistic approach, optimistic rollup approach to data availability. You would have to pay. Data availability for each individual Oracle update. And remember, data availability is our scariest resource. That's what all rollups share. Like there is a single limited bandwidth of data availability on Ethereum. It doesn't matter how, how scalable your ZK proofs are in circuits. You still have to like share that and, and like all the rollups compete for this limited space.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  So the more transactions we have, they, we will see the same dynamics as the transaction prices will go up. Uh, 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, for a 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 know, you can, you can use a lot of Oracles. Uh, 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 changing data, for that matter.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Within the one single batch and the batch can be very large. For example, uh, trading on, on liquidity pools, like uniswap pools.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  You do a lot of trades, but at the end you only pay for one, or all the users in the virtual pay for one. So that is to data compression. And finally, you can do data extension. There was the architecture we introduced a long time ago called ZK Porter, which is a variation of a Valium 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, it's

• 36:05Speaker 00

  just some one-time voting campaign, or maybe it's a wallet that you only use for some small, you know, like your current account where you put a little money and you don't want to pay huge fees, but you want to do a lot of cheap transactions. You can use ZK Porter for that. And in our architecture, ZK Porter will be seamlessly interoperable with the ZK Rollup, which is not possible again if you're using transaction inputs. So those are things around just one specific aspect.

• 36:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Alex, just kind of from the user perspective, bridging much faster, it can be instant, that can't happen in an optimistic rollup. 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 mainnet transaction costs a dollar on Ethereum, right, and something like an optimistic rollup gets it down to like, you know, 10 cents, or maybe 5 cents, or maybe 1 cent or something, is our ZK rollups 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

• 37:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  is one way users see it. It's like, are my transactions going to be cheaper? Another way I want to ask the same question is like, I remember the early days of Arbitrum deploying, they were like, hey, we're deploying main 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 Ethereum's. And that was easy for for bankless listeners to understand. And then they delivered some efficiency and they were like, now we have three more Ethereum's, right? Can you give us some comparables?

• 37:52David Hoffman?

  For the record, they're at seven now, if the listeners are curious.

• 37:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, there's seven Ethereum's there. How many Ethereum's are we going to get out of ZK Sync? How low can our gas fees go?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  We will get at least as many as optimistic rollups give you. But in addition to that, for it depends on the use case. For some transaction types, it will be comparable to optimistic rollups. 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 abstraction. This is possible because it we support it natively. And the from the economic perspective, for this for this protocol, it will make sense, because they are only subsidizing it once for all the users, because they will be then reusing the same data availability storage.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  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 like, this is why it was important to implement it natively, unfortunately. Things like EAP 40337 would not allow this to the Ethereum. Even if you use this this relayers, if you agree to use this third party relayer, they still cannot do it for externally owned accounts, which are most wallets in a network today. But it's possible

• 39:24David Hoffman?

  So the idea of like, how many Ethereum's 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. I really want to double down on like that. There's this idea of the sum of the parts. I always mess up this phrase.

• 39:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  The whole, yeah.

• 39:45David Hoffman?

  The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Thank you. That's the Kickstarter I needed. And so, yes, 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

• 40:26David Hoffman?

  cases can relate to each other and offer surface area for builders to extract the value out of those interrelations that specifically ZK EVMs 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.

• 41:09David Hoffman?

  And so, like, this is a 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 this.

• 41:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, 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, you know, play. It's just like, it's gonna feel just like fintech. It's gonna feel just like the best fintech platform you've ever used, except now you're not dependent on the banks. And I'm not saying now, I'm not saying day one, I'm not saying like when you guys release. But when we get account abstraction and smart contracts and everything David already said, we develop that app layer, it's just going to feel like a web two app, except it's completely backed by trustless guarantees and crypto economic security, which is the amazing thing. Is that about right? Or are we like overselling it?

• 42:03Speaker 00

  That is 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 Ethereum's. In addition to multiplying Ethereum, you also have this almost Ethereum, which is coming very, very close to the security guarantees of Ethereum. Not quite there, but like it's good for a lot of good things. And you can get infinitely many of them. So like 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,

• 42:46Speaker 00

  how many transactions, how many things can run in parallel. This trustlessly is only possible with ZK tech. And if we want it to be on Ethereum, then it's only possible with ZK EVM. So that all the applications can live on all those infinite parallel chains that are like this multiverse world of multi-rollups interconnected, interbridgeable.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Maybe just to echo something you said there, because I think you really captured at least, you know, 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 1 can feel,

• 43:56Speaker 03

  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 a cloud obstruction is like a critically important part of solving that part.

• 44:40David Hoffman?

  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 rollups. We love all of our Layer 2s, 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 a 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 rollups are great for adding, you know, single-digit more Ethereum 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.

• 45:25David Hoffman?

  And it's really going to take what is, you know, more than 10 Ethereum, 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 different categories. Polygon ZK EVM, hot on your guys' heels. We want to talk about how ZK sync's era is different. What are you, what is the era chain optimized for? What have you guys really emphasized here and prioritized? And what is your competitive difference? 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?

• 46:09David Hoffman?

  What are the short-term goals and long-term milestones that we should all be paying attention to as this thing develops? 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 Uniswap web app has a shiny new fiat on-ramp? Now you could go directly from fiat in your bank to tokens in DeFi inside of Uniswap. Not only that, but Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism Layer 2s are supported right out of the gate. But that's just DeFi. Uniswap is also an NFT aggregator, letting you find more listings for the best prices across the NFT world.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

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• 47:18David Hoffman?

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• 48:00David Hoffman?

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• 48:43David Hoffman?

  with automatic warnings for malicious transactions or phishing websites. Phantom has already saved over 20,000 users from getting scammed or hacked. So get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta. There's a link in the show notes, or you can go to phantom.app/waitlist to get access in late February. Bankers Station, we are back with Alex and Anthony of ZK Sync of Matter Labs with a brand-new ZK Sync era mainnet launch. Once again, congratulations, guys. Alex, I've heard over and over and over again that you have this incredible backstory and why trustless cryptography is so important to you. I've been hounding you for a podcast for a while now, and we'll eventually get that one recorded.

• 49:24David Hoffman?

  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 onto 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?

• 49:46Speaker 00

  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 this space get a reach through it. But I think what defines us is these three core priorities. Number one, alignment 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 the mass adoption of crypto,

• 50:30Speaker 00

  or to say it's simpler, to scale freedom. We're in it for freedom, because freedom is the, 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 like, freedom is everything, like the end goal and also the way we operate. The Meta Labs, the company, our team is structured in a way that everyone has

• 51:02Speaker 00

  very broad autonomy, very broad ownership over topics, and they own them and have freedom to operate the way they want. So freedom is number one, and ethos. Number two is, we are,

• 51:18Speaker 00

  we prioritize security. It's really important for us, like, 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 years back, because the trust can be undermined. 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 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.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  And like, this is again, my attempt to convince everyone to take things slower, not rush, experiment, only 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 a fully VM equivalence. It would obviously be easier to just like, go for fully VM equivalence and have all the applications not like, not to have to change a single line of code.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  No one is really doing that, no one can do that. Like, some modifications are required in any rollup, no matter optimistic or ZK. It's just the degree of the specifications that varies. And we're not going to optimize that part. We are optimizing for the future, not for the past. This future orientedness is the third priority. So to recap, values, security and building for the future.

• 53:11David Hoffman?

  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 ZK Sync as builders build on ZK Sync, what are the new concerns? What are the new risks that they might need to be informed about?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Certainly, there are. Let's begin with this. Like, this is a brand new technology. So we have like just basic systematic risks of like, any smart contract that you deploy needs to be tested with time. You know, like recently, we had a bug 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 battle test it. But then, even that is not enough. You want to put in more mechanisms, more mitigations, like layers of security.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Like, if one thing fails, you always want backup things to rely on. But like, things happen, even planes can fall, you know. So like, 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 a 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 a multiple subsystems, they should work through clearly defined interfaces, and you want some guards between those interfaces. But like, really, from the end user perspective, it's hard to say what can go wrong.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  You know, so the basically the the this the only sane approach would be like take things carefully.

• 55:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, my 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, DeFi 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.

• 55:28David Hoffman?

  And we wouldn't rather be anywhere else.

• 55:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is where we want to be. And yet, at the same time, you're explorers and you know, things can happen on the frontier for sure. One, I think, I guess, trade off 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, 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

• 56:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Maybe if you allow me to begin, because I was part of this journey with ZK Sync version one, which we can now call ZK Sync Lite. And I just want to touch a little bit on those.

• 56:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  I would say like, 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 rollup, the ZK-Sync Lite, the ZK rollup specialized in payments. The very first version was completely immutable with a time-locked upgradability, where the team could propose an upgrade, but there was no way for us to accelerate it.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  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 hedge or like the priority queue.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  We then realized that it's not going to, it's not prudent 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. So 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 upgradability for the ZK-Sync era.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  For Lite, 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 an upgrade for an emergency use case." Like 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, bypassing this upgradability time lock.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  And this is the next stage which we will use for error. After we feel that then the the protocol is stable enough and mature enough, we will transition to 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 can basically do anything with the protocol. Even though it's a broad set of people, we it's not what we want the crypto to be. So for 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.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  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 with it with this problem. Is this a real problem or was the Security Council corrupt? If it was a real problem, then the the governance can approve and upgrade path forward. And.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  We can go even further from there. What if the governance, if you know, if we have some broad community. Participating through, I don't know, some means to decentralize it, maybe we have token. Maybe we have like we have, we have to to like the token holders have to vote for it. But what if the majority of the token holders is is again corrupt? Then we would like we we need to save the minority because that that's what crypto is standing for. Full trustlessness, not relying on all its 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 if there is any problem there. So this is my rough thinking.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  I see that Ryan wants to ask something.

• 1:01:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, I was just gonna say, that's really cool. You know, well spelled out and we're 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 then ultimately, it's kind of fork 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?

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I think Alex has summed it 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

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  L2B team regarding sort of risks across the L2 space, phenomenally helpful and a huge amount of work has gone to try and distill a lot of this sort of complexity when 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 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

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  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 will, we'll attempt to distill everything into it to a degree for users.

• 1:03:26David Hoffman?

  By nature of 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 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 ZK Sync. How do builders find out what they need to do in order to start building on ZK Sync? And where's the top of the funnel for this rabbit hole for the builders?

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is 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, you know, 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 focused on things like account abstraction, things like bridges.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  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 ZK Sync era. Beyond that, we have an extremely active and passionate community. The Discord is very, very active. We're growing, you know, DevRel and DevExperience 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, I have this idea. I'm thinking through how I implement this on ZK Sync, 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.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  So both technical support and, you know, lots of interesting community memes and bits and pieces.

• 1:05:40David Hoffman?

  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.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So if anyone wants to see the state of what they can engage with on the system today, it's just ecosystem.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.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Basically, users can find all links from zksync.io. It's the central hub where they will get right through.

• 1:06:16David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. Alex, Anthony, thank you so much for walking us through this announcement. It's extremely exciting. This is new frontiers and we love this frontier metaphor here on Bankless. Not too many people know that 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 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 this 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?

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  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 this trustless future, please check out the jobs that we have open on our website.

• 1:07:16David Hoffman?

  I'm sure there's a lot of milestones and developments ahead of us. When might one of those milestones involve a token?

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:07:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  He had to ask, guys.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  Is really needed.

• 1:07:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  He had to ask.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  So, but we, we, we, we, we are like the, the next things that we're focusing on is really decentralization. So the making the system fully permissionless, removing any points of trust, any points of central control that is to remain. Um, and then also in parallel, improving performance, improving security, implementing new mechanisms, uh, and new features.

• 1:07:57David Hoffman?

  So what I'm hearing from that is that the when token conversation is similar to the when decentralized, decentralized answer, perhaps.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, when, when necessary.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  When necessary.

• 1:08:09David Hoffman?

  When necessary. Anthony, Alex, it's actually one of the most clear answers we've ever gotten from a layer two team so far.

• 1:08:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  When it's necessary. Wow. Just that's it. Well said.

• 1:08:20David Hoffman?

  Alex, Anthony, thank you guys so much for joining us on Bankless today. I appreciate it.

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Thanks, Alex.

• 1:08:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 rollups. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.