Polygon zkEVM Launch with Mihailo Bjelic and Jordi Baylina

Ryan talks to Polygon's Mihailo and Jordi about the launch of their zkEVM! ------ 📣 Infura | New SDK for NFT APIs For Devs https://bankless.cc/Infura ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://www.bankless.com/dashboard ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 👻 PHANTOM | FRIENDLY MULTICHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:58 Polygon zkEVM 10:40 What Polygon zkEVM Unlocks? 16:40 Polygon zkEVM vs. PoS 18:20 Polygon PoS Chain 22:24 Cost Per Transaction 24:30 Optimistic Rollup vs. zkEVM 29:37 Polygon Ecosystem 38:06 Polygon zkEVM Value Proposition 46:00 Risks of New Tech 54:15 $MATIC 56:20 Closing, Resources, & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Mihailo https://twitter.com/MihailoBjelic Jordi https://twitter.com/jbaylina Polygon Labs Launches zkEVM Layer 2 https://www.theblock.co/post/222950/polygon-labs-unveils-zkevm-layer-2-scaling-solution https://wiki.polygon.technology/docs/zkEVM/develop/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. We're talking today about scaling Ethereum with the Polygon ZK EVM that was just announced today. David couldn't make it for this episode, so I am solo with Mihailo and Jordi from the Polygon ZK EVM project. Really excited to dive into this conversation, a few things we're talking about. Of course, as we said before, this is ZK EVM season. We had ZK Sync on Friday. Today, the Polygon ZK EVM is now out, so we talk about it. As we get into this episode, we're about to discuss what just dropped today, so what you can use today. And we discuss ZK rollups versus optimistic rollups. Which ones are better and for what purposes? We also discuss what happens to the Polygon proof-of-stake chain.

• 0:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  We discuss the new frontiers and opportunities that this unlocks. And of course, we talk about the future of the Matic token. One disclosure before we get in, I am an advisor with Polygon Project, been supportive of this project for a long time and excited to see what they're doing here. Okay, guys, we're gonna get right to the episode with Polygon, but before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Kraken, Bankless's number one recommended crypto exchange for 2023.

• 1:14David Hoffman?

  Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years. Dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto, Kraken puts an emphasis on security, transparency, and client support, which is why over 9 million clients have come to love Kraken's products. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the Kraken UX is simple, intuitive, and frictionless, making the Kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto. For those with experience, the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs, integrating key trading features into one seamless interface. Kraken has a 24/7 365 client support team that is globally recognized. Kraken support is available wherever, whenever you need them, by phone, chat, or email.

• 1:57David Hoffman?

  And for all of you NFT-ers out there, the brand-new Kraken NFT beta platform gives you the best NFT trading experience possible. Rarity rankings, no gas fees, and the ability to buy an NFT straight with cash. Does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Kraken does? And if not, sign up with Kraken at kraken.com/bankless. How many total airdrops have you gotten? This last bull market had a ton of them. Did you get them all? Maybe you missed one. So here's what you should do. Go to Earnify and plug in your Ethereum wallet, and Earnify will tell you if you have any unclaimed airdrops that you can get. And it also does PoApps and mintable NFTs, any kind of money that your wallet can claim. Earnify will tell you about it. And you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire. And if you sign up for Earnify, they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again. You can also upgrade to Earnify Premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets. And for just under $21 a month, it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop. So plug in your wallets at Earnify and see what you get. That's E-A-R-N-I dot F-I. And make sure you never lose another airdrop. The Phantom Wallet is coming to Ethereum. The number one wallet on Solana is bringing its millions of users and beloved UX to Ethereum and Polygon. If you haven't used Phantom before, you've been missing out. Phantom was one of the first wallets to pioneer Solana staking inside the wallet and will be offering similar staking features for Ethereum and Polygon. But that's just staking. Phantom is also the best home for your NFTs.

• 3:24David Hoffman?

  Phantom has a complete set of features to optimize your NFT experience. Pin your favorites, hide your uglies, burn the spam, and also manage your NFT sale listings from inside the wallet. Phantom is, of course, a multi-chain wallet, but it makes chain management easy, displaying your transactions in a human-readable format 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.

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, I'm super excited to introduce you yet again to Mihailo, who is the co-founder of Polygon, and also Jordi, who is the technical lead for Polygon Hermes, otherwise known as the Polygon ZK EVM. Jordi, Mihailo, how are you guys doing today?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Hey, Ryan. Very good, very good.

• 4:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys just dropped something big. We got some news. Let's start there. What just happened? The Polygon ZK EVM, what just hit us?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  I'm going to hand it over to Jordi first because he's the one who created this amazing technology. So let him start, and maybe I can add something.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Well, many is, it's a milestone. So this is a milestone for scaling Ethereum. That's what's happening. So if we go two years ago,

• 4:49Speaker 03

  scaling Ethereum was, I mean, nobody, so nobody knew how to do it. Actually, it was two years ago, after a blog from Vitalik, that people started to realize how to do that. And then we started with rollups and start talking about optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, especially in the ZK. Then we started to build, I mean, only payments rollups. But the, the, the big challenge here was to do a ZK VM, so an Ethereum compatible, so something that works exactly the same that Ethereum, but scales, which is what means a scaling Ethereum. And here is where the challenge started. And well, we started that two years ago, not even two years ago.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  And has been, I mean, a long trip. It's a short trip, maybe in time, but it's a long trip in, in, in, in engineering, in, in, in going deep, in solving problems and in, in figuring out how to do this, how to bring this technology practical. And today is, I mean, it's not the end of the road. It's a milestone, but just putting this, putting this technology, creating the system and making it available in a real system in, in mainnet. This is really, it's really an important, it's really an important achievement. And this is what's happening. I mean, this is what's happening today.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  And this is why we believe this is an important moment for the, for the Ethereum community.

• 6:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  So this is an important moment for Ethereum, because we've been on the quest in crypto to basically scale our trustless technology, to scale Ethereum for the past, what? Eight years? I mean, since the inception, since Ethereum's birthday, it's been a long time. And before that, we were even trying to scale Bitcoin. And now we've come this far. We've got this new technology called ZK Technology. We've built an EVM around it, so we, we can have ZK Layer 2s that are programmable. And what just launched, as I understand it, is the Polygon ZK EVM. And when you guys say launched, do you mean on mainnet? Is this available for users? Mihailo, what just launched this morning? What can people go do right now?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a great question and it's important to state that this is an actual mainnet, right? So we have been running ZKAVM on Testnet for months already with very good results. We learned a lot. We have more than, I believe, 7,000 applications and smart contracts deployed. Thousands of transactions and thousands of users have already tried Testnet with test assets, right? We are now hitting the mainnet. It's the actual mainnet and we are fulfilling, I would say, or ticking all the checkbox that you would normally expect from a full-blown mainnet. So these are real, real, actual assets bridged from Layer 1. The ZKAVM is full-featured. We have multiple external and internal audits.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Prover is running. All code is visible and with the permissive open-source license. So basically, it's a full-featured, complete, full-blown mainnet, I would say. It's important to state, and Jordi can add to that, this is a mainnet beta and this is a very, very complex bleeding-edge technology. For us, it's very important in this moment. We are incredibly excited and incredibly proud that we have been able to ship this bleeding technology. And as you probably know, and many people familiar with the matter know, that estimates for that it's going to take three to five years probably to ship this technology. And even then, it was uncertain whether it's going to be practical, what will be the computational requirements?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Will we need data centers to run these provers? How everything will turn out? We are very, very excited and very happy that we have full-featured mainnet with very, very practical prover. We have been running prover, the whole Testnet basically is running, the prover is running on regular AWS instances that are costing us, I believe, around $2 per hour. So this is really, really practical technology. And we are very happy about all of this. But all that being said, we really want to advise caution to users of the mainnet. This is bleeding edge technology. This has never been shipped. Polygon is the first one to put this into production now.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  We're excited about that, but users should be mindful when bridging especially larger amounts of assets to mainnet. So that's something that is very important for us to communicate. Every code, every complex code needs some time to mature. And this technology will certainly need some months to become, you know, really battle tested and proven.

• 9:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I want to definitely emphasize that, guys. And we'll have a time to discuss sort of security. But when Mahalo says bleeding edge, bleeding means you can get cut, right? And so, you know, be cautious as we enter here. We'll talk about security, the status now and where you want to evolve that to and how it becomes safer in that trajectory. But before we do, let's talk about a user and what they can experience on Polygon ZK EVM right now. And just to refresh people, Mahalo is absolutely right. I, you know, been in the space like couple, we've been talking about the Holy Grail of the ZK EVM for a while. So we have some ZK technology that allows us to do sort of simple transaction-based

• 10:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  kind of back and forth Bitcoin type of things. But we haven't had the technology previously to create a general purpose EVM, which is the programmability that Ethereum brings to the market. And now we have that, and that's ahead of schedule. I want to emphasize that. I mean, two years ago, like the crypto world was saying, I don't know, this is five years away? Can it even be done? Is it 10 years away? And now we're here. So that's why this is so monumental. But let's get back to kind of the users for a second. Our analogy at Bankless for a new layer two that opens is we got a theme park. Everyone's in line at the theme park. The gates open. You can go start to use the rides. Now, right now, they may be dangerous rides. You might have a roller coaster that kind of, you know, is tossing people off, people getting jostled around a little bit.

• 10:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, so there's some danger. But tell us about the rides. What can people do when they, you know, enter the gates of the theme park today? Do I just go and I set my MetaMask RPC to Polygon ZK EVM and then I can start using apps? What are the apps like? What's the user experience like? Is this just like the Polygon proof of stake network? Can you tell us about that? First, Mihailo.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, very happy to answer that. The great thing about ZKVM and why? Let's just take a little, one step back and explain why ZKVM has been considered the holy grail of scaling. Because it is a technology that simultaneously offers three very, very important features. One is scalability. The second one is security. So we get to increase throughput significantly without sacrificing security. We full-blown leverage the security of Ethereum. And the third very important component or feature is EVM compatibility or equivalence, if you will. The third component actually makes things incredibly easy for developers and users. Ethereum EVM is the standard for web-free programming, right?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  And it's already a mature ecosystem. There are wallets like MetaMask, developer tools like Remix, Hardhat. Solidity is already a pretty mature language and all of that. So there is this whole ecosystem that has been built around EVM. ZKVM, one fantastic thing about it is that it's completely leveraging all these tools and this whole experience. And both developers and users simply continue to use these networks in the same manner like they use Ethereum. So developers just simply take that their existing Solidity contracts, they can deploy them on ZKVM using the same tools like Remix, like Hardhat. There are basically no differences for developers and for end-users.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  End-users simply connect their MetaMask. They submit transactions in the same manner like they would do on Ethereum. It's absolutely the same developer and end-user experience with a comparable level of security and with much lower fees and much higher scalability. So yeah, all in all, we're very, very excited and we believe this is a very important milestone.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Very cool. What would you add to that, Jordi? Yeah, to highlight to that because this is very important. It's not so we are not so we are using exactly the same tooling. That means that we are not maintaining a parallel version of hard hat to work in our system or a parallel version of a metamask or a mad parallel version of solidity compiler. It's so we are using the solidity, the Ethereum solidity compiler. Uh, we are using the hard hat. We are using whatever tooling that uh, that you have and we are using that tool. We are not maintaining any of those tools. Those tools are maintained by the third, third parties. Okay.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  And this is what, what defines the EVM, you know, it's like, because we are uh, executing the EVM, E is Ethereum virtual machine. Okay. And this is the, what's the, the Ethereum. So it's Ethereum virtual machine. Okay. And this is so we are being fully compatible with this uh, with this by code. And this is what allows to uh, uh, use any of this tooling. So any of the systems of Ethereum, smart contract, you don't need to compile again the smart contract. You just take this smart contract and you deploy it there. So it's like an extension of Ethereum. It's not a new thing. It's extension of Ethereum. And this is, I mean, this simplicity, because I remember that you say, the first time that

• 14:38Speaker 03

  I was doing a presentation about the ZK EVM, I feel like, but because I mean, okay, you just, you just connect to remix, you just deploy some smart contracts, everything. I mean, there was nothing new in there. Uh, people know how to deploy smart contracts. So where do you see the difference? But this, this is the magic. Okay. And this is the cool thing of this, uh, of this project is that the users don't notice the difference on deploying uh, on Ethereum or in the ZK EVM, except of course on the price and in the, on the throughput.

• 15:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it accurate? Is it accurate to say, guys, that everything that is available on the Polygon proof of stake network, like all of the smart contracts, all of the apps, all of the things that you can do there, you can fairly easily, or maybe like perfectly easily, uh, port those over to or duplicate those on the Polygon ZK EVM? Is that, is that what we're talking about here?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's most of them are here. There are, I mean, I need to be just to be very clear. There are some, we have mainly, we have some pre-compiled smart contracts that are not implemented yet. We are working on that and we are going to implement in the next version. We are talking about paintings or we are talking about Shadow 56 or some extended. So if your, if your smart contract is not using this, you can't just copy them. I mean, just deploy here, deploy there, same way that you're, you can deploy something in Polygon POS or you can deploy that in mainnet or you can deploy that in worldly or in any other Ethereum network. You can deploy it in ZKVM. Here there is this exceptions of these pre-compiled smart contracts.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  They are not used very much, most of them. So I would say most applications would should not have any problem. But we are working on that and we hope that in few months we can, we can extend that. So that every time we're going to be more, more, more compatible on that.

• 16:37Ryan Sean Adams?

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

• 17:02Speaker 02

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

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Someone might, when we speak about mainnet, people would want to migrate from mainnet to ZKVM because there are, there's higher throughput and there are lower fees without sacrificing security. So yeah, all in all, this is the next generation tech.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  And we are not stopping here. As Jordi said, this is a very monumental, very important milestones, but we have very, very exciting plans for the future as well. This is not still the end game, but it's a very, very important, very big milestone.

• 18:15Ryan Sean Adams?

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

• 18:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  success and is one of the highest, one of the most used chains in crypto. What happens to it? What's the roadmap for the proof of stake chain? Is it now legacy tech, Mihailo?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great, great, very important question. I would say certainly, and be completely honest, I would say Polygon P H chain is a legacy tech. We always wanted it to be legacy tech and we knew when we started, then, I don't know, three or five years down the line, we have to be embarrassed by that technology. So to say, if you're not embarrassed, that means we haven't done our job well, right? This is, again, very dynamic industry and we constantly want to push this frontier of innovation and shift better technology. That being said, we are, Polygon P H chain is not going away, is not becoming irrelevant. There is, I believe, strongly a clear need for both networks in the market. So there are certain trade-offs that I'm going to just explain very, very

• 19:51Speaker 02

  briefly. DeFi applications might want to definitely deploy to ZK EVM because ZK EVM offers ironclad security. It's fully secured by Ethereum, submits, since it's a rollup, it also submits user transactions to Ethereum, which gets stored there to ensure data availability. of these transactions. However, ZKVM is the throughput is limited by submitting because we're submitting these transactions to Ethereum, right? That's always going to be the bottleneck. So and always going to increase the costs of transactions because you have to pay Ethereum gas to store this transaction data. So ZK rollups will always have a little bit more limited throughput and a little bit higher transaction fees.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  For DeFi applications, for example, that doesn't really matter if you have a lending application for many of the applications. If, for example, a lending market, you take a loan and then you repay a loan six months down the line, right? So for you, security is the priority. There are, there's a lot of economic value here in these applications. So I will say ZKVM is the right choice for me. It's highest possible level of security. And I don't mind that transactions are a little bit more expensive. When you have something on the other side of the spectrum, like Polygon POS Chain, where you have, for example, web three games with in-game assets which are on-chain and they are not really highly valuable.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  But these games have a lot of users and the frequent transactions, they might say POS Chain is still a very good choice for us because it offers much higher throughput, much lower fees, and that's perfectly fine for some of these use cases. So I believe these two sets of trade-offs or features for these two networks will remain relevant for different types of applications. That's how we see it. And just basically because we can maybe just show a little bit of alpha there because you're always inviting us and you're always.

• 21:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have alpha, please, please.

• 21:53Speaker 02

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

• 22:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's very cool. Okay, so just to go on what you said, we have, let's say, maybe if you could give some order of magnitude estimates. I understand, like, these are just estimates, but like, let's say transferring ETH on mainnet cost a dollar. And in a, in a kind of a layer two rollup, like an optimistic rollup, maybe it costs five cents or 10 cents, five to 10, something like this. Okay. And then if we go to Polygon proof of stake chain, that's going to cost like far less than a frac, like a fraction of a fraction of a penny. Right. So very inexpensive. What are we looking at for ZK, Polygon ZK EVM?

• 23:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that going to still be in kind of like the layer two optimistic rollup range as far as cost per transaction? Or is it going to even deliver an order of magnitude of lower cost versus that? I don't know if any of you guys have estimates on, on kind of the numbers here, but this is how users view it. They're like, okay, it's going to cost me, you know, a dollar on mainnet, 10 cents on a layer two. How much is it going to cost me on Polygon ZK EVM?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Currently, currently we are about the same that other rollups. I mean, it's like one tenth of the cost of the Ethereum, I mean, depending on the transactions. Because for example, that availability, we need to pay the full, the full price. Okay. It depends on the transaction, but it's going to be around one, one tenth, one fifth, something between that. So it's one order of magnitude at the beginning. We are, we have plans to, to improve the technology and with the current technology without doing anything. We can increase one order, one, one order of magnitude just by compressing transactions.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  And when EIP4844 happens to Ethereum, this would be at least an order of magnitude. So here is like, we have like three levels and of course, in charting like probably another one. Okay, so that's, that's the, but we, we see that at the level. So if you see how Ethereum it is, we can scale easily two, three orders of magnitude for sure in the coming, in the coming years.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jordi, another question I think are in people's minds is we have some experience with layer twos now. All right, for the last 18 months or so, I think Arbitrum was the first layer two that, that deployed. It's an optimistic roll up, which is different than a ZK roll up. Optimistic roll up versus ZK roll up. What you guys are providing is a ZK roll up, a ZK EVM, fully programmable. What are the benefits? How, like, can you discuss kind of the, the trade offs or the benefits? Why is a ZK, in what ways is a ZK EVM better than an optimistic roll up? If that's even the right question to ask.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  The, the big difference here is the, the withdrawal, the withdrawal time. The withdrawal time in, in, in an optimistic roll up, you need to wait one week, two weeks or three weeks just to, for this challenging game to happen. And in, in, in, in the, in the ZKs, this can go maybe, I don't know, can go maybe to five minutes or just even a few seconds. Okay, so you can, can, can be very, very, very fast. This is, I mean, you may think that this is, okay, if you are there, it's why you need to live there. Okay, and you can think, but there is one thing that's interesting and is the, the, the data connection. When you want to come possibility between these, these different networks.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  So what means when you have a possibility between the different networks is that you need to. Uh, maybe just have different networks and and and and and transfer phones from here to there and from there to here and and and just work in in different days. That means that you are leaving the the the layer two and going to another layer two. So in a ZK rollup, this this you can do that really fast. And and you can transfer and you can connect a lot of networks easily. In a, this is an optimistic, it's it's you cannot do that. I mean, you need to buy this challenging games and and the things get much more complex when you want to uh to play that. This is some one of one of the advantages. The other is, of course, the cost of capital.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  I mean, uh, there is this game and and uh the security is based on the quantity of capital that the the mystery rollups have in there. This, well, this has its costs, of course, in the in the proverb, we have the the proving the proving cost. But this is getting really low right now, so it's like it's becoming very insignificant. So, uh, for the rest, they are very, very much equivalent. At the end, they are rollups and and things. There is, for a lot, there is a lot of things in the compression, in the compression with the zero knowledge. You can, we can, we can, we can compress much more than in an optimistic rollup. So even the prices are gonna go lower uh on on the future.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  So the future, of course, the game rollups, they are coming later because, you know, the this ZK, developing this ZK technology takes its time and and and and needs to work. But at the moment that where we are, that we somehow we solve this technology. When I'm saying solve, I mean, there is a lot of challenges pending, yeah? But it's like, but we have to prove it now. I would say that uh optimistic rollups, for me, makes not much sense. Uh, because at the end, it's the same, but you have this proof that you don't need to wipe too weak. So it's it's and and that's the, that's the thing that this allows you to do many, much, many more, many more things.

• 28:00Ryan Sean Adams?

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

• 28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  know, as you know, sucks, hence the name bankless. Settlement times, if I want to wire money from one bank to another internationally, it could take three to five days. Like there's a settlement time attached to that. A similar settlement time actually happens with an optimistic rollup because rather than having it settle in kind of like the Fed Now or whatever master central bank settlement engine underlies all of the banking systems, you kind of have to settle this on Ethereum mainnet, right? Optimistic rollups, that takes days right now because there's the fraud proof, there's this crypto economic mechanism. With ZK technology, you're able to just take the shortcut and you can settle on mainnet in minutes. And

• 29:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  then that becomes very important when we talk about chain to chain, layer two to layer two types of interactions. And so that is kind of the network benefit that we're also excited about with ZK EVMs. The other thing I'm kind of excited about is you guys are launching, of course, you know, Polygon's not a new chain. So it's well known, Polygon is well known for its business development. And I'm just reading a list of things that you guys are launching with, Phantom, Trust Wallet, D-Bank, Rainbow, Wallet Connect, Zerion. These are some of the partners that you're launching with, which is also very exciting. Mihailo, maybe you could speak to kind of the ecosystem that Polygon has fostered in general and how much of that will, how much of that business development that Polygon

• 30:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  is so credited for will kind of bleed over and get leveraged by this new Polygon ZK EVM?

• 30:18Speaker 02

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

• 31:01Speaker 02

  The third thing that is important to mention here is that these two networks, especially because of these benefits that Jordi mentioned, of how convenient it is to interconnect these ZK secure chains, we believe very soon you will be able to observe Polygon POS chain community and ZKVM community and ecosystem as one single, very, very interconnected ecosystem, practically like a single ecosystem, and that is very, very important. One specific, to say specifically what I'm talking about is, we have something that we called Internet LX LY Bridge, which is a bridge that enables seamlessly, seamless message

• 31:46Speaker 02

  exchange between two ZK secure networks. And assuming we're able to leverage ZK security for Polygon POS chain with LX LY Bridge, these two networks practically become one network when it comes to moving assets, information, any sort of arbitrary messages, tokens, etc.

• 32:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is that the idea mahalo of a layer three that people have talked about, or is that sort of a, something different?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  What is great about this LXL library implementation, and Jordi maybe can chime a little bit more, because it transforms all these ZK secure chains into a mesh. There is no anymore layer two, layer three, layer four, layer 16. This bridge enables seamless connectivity between any networks that participate, any two networks that participate within this ecosystem. So you can transfer from layer two to layer 16, back to layer one on Ethereum. It doesn't really matter anymore.

• 32:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it basically like layer one? Like, so Ethereum would be a layer one, and then rather than layer two, three, four, five, and six, layer two is just this mesh of all sorts of other layers, and it's all kind of economically secured in the same way. So it's all a mesh of layer two, basically.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, and that's what we need. Ideally, I think we cannot achieve mass adoption if these chains live in some sort of isolation. We need all this mesh of networks to become a single homogeneous execution layer, right? That can support massive adoption.

• 33:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, that is how the internet works. So mesh networks are pretty important. Jordi, what would you add to that?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  I mean, for me, it's funny, people talking about layer three when we don't even have a layer two. So let's build first, let's build first the layer two. I think that with ZK technology, you don't need, with a good ZK technology, you don't need that much the layer three. And you can, I mean, this is what we're talking about. We can build all this mesh of networks and all of that connecting one each other. Of course, you can always build layer threes on top. But it's, for me, it's like, okay, and layer 15. I mean, it's like, let's build a layer two, layer two. Let's put some of these networks, let's connect these networks together. Let's see how we transfer one each other. And let's learn how all these things will work.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  And then we think about layer three. But it's For me, from the technical perspective, it's okay. It's like because layer twos are not good enough because maybe the proof is too expensive or maybe because you have these delay times that it makes. And let's build a layer three so that we can bypass these limitations of the layer two and so on. But we have a very good layer two. Okay, so we have an extremely good layer two. So let's see what we can get. I mean, I don't want to discard layer three because it's perfectly possible, but I think that the industry should focus in layer twos.

• 34:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, whatever the marketing folks decide to end up calling these things from a buzzword and narrative perspective, right? The vision we're talking about is a layer two mesh network that is secured by Ethereum, which is super exciting. Guys, we have a few more things to cover, including how this ZK EVM is different from some of the others that have come to market and are coming to market recently, and also the risks. We said we would get back to that. So if you bridge, what are the risks? We need to conclude by talking about the Matic token, of course. But before we have all of those conversations, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 35:20David Hoffman?

  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 twos 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. With Uniswap, you can sweep floors on multiple NFTs, and Uniswap's universal router will optimize your gas fees for you.

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is making it as easy as possible to go from bank account to bankless assets across Ethereum, and we couldn't be more thankful for having them as a sponsor. So go to app.uniswap.org today to buy, sell, or swap tokens and NFTs.

• 36:19David Hoffman?

  Arbitrum One is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum One, producing flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. With the recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social dApps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum One and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, 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,

• 37:04David Hoffman?

  and start building your first app. 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 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.

• 37:49David Hoffman?

  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.metamask.io and add Metamask Learn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3.

• 38:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, we're back. How is the Polygon ZK EVM different than some of the other ZK EVMs that are coming to market recently? Mihailo, what's the competitive advantage here? What is the secret edge? Or how have you approached this problem in the way that other solutions haven't?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, first of all, I just want to say that we are very excited that we see multiple ZK EVM projects in the ecosystem that's very useful for everyone, primarily for Ethereum. And again, we're very excited to see that. We're also very excited and we strongly believe that Jordi's team has found a very good balance between this EVM equivalence and what exactly what do we mean by it and practicalities of the network. So there are different approaches here that maybe even Jordi can cover or I can cover. But the point being is that we were able, I think, to strike the great balance where we are fully really compatible with Ethereum. All the tools are working, both developer tools and end user tools, as we said.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Solidity works out of the box. There are zero, basically, there's zero impact on developer and user experience. And at the same time, we delivered something. It's not like we're one year far. It's not like it's impractical. It's not like you need a data center. You're just creating proofs today on commodity cloud instances, right? So I think it's more about the balance that we were able to strike. And then some great engineering and cryptography breakthroughs that our team has built, has achieved on this, on this part. And it has been really incredibly exciting being part of the process and observing the great energy and all these breakthroughs and, and everything.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  And I think when you just look at the facts, Polygon ZK EVM is the only one that is now on the mainnet with real world assets, full feature, apart from pairings, as Jordi said. It's, the code is fully open source, fully visible, prover is running. Every transaction is being proven and verified on Ethereum Layer 1. So basically, multiple audits, both internal and external of all the components of the ZK EVM, including the prover, including circuits. So I would say all these important checkboxes that you would expect for a full-blown mainnet, Polygon ZK EVM is, is ticking them. So yeah, I think that's just as...

• 40:39Speaker 02

  The state of the matter at the moment. But I can leave to Jordi, maybe if he wants to add some.

• 40:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, Jordi, I'm curious, what do you make of this? Some people have called this the ZK EVM wars that are going to come. Of course, you know, the benefit of these wars is decentralization and Ethereum. Certainly, we all kind of benefit from this. But what do you make of this? What is the Polygon competitive advantage here?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, we are climbing a mountain. I mean, when you are creating a mountain and it's the community that's climbing a mountain. Of course, there is people in the community that maybe are probably in the marketing side and they want to fight. But at the end, we are climbing the mountain together. I mean, it's like we are what this technology becomes available to the society. So it's talking about competition. Here is, I mean, there are different projects. And when there is a challenge like that, even from the engineering perspective, there is different ways to approach the problem. And they are not good or bad a priori.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  You start with something, you see ideas, you imagine how the system is, and then you just go one way. And other engineers going to do a different way. And even the starting points are not the same. I mean, sometimes when we started the project, for example, we had some technology available. We had some technology available, okay? Other projects maybe started before, they started later. And maybe they started without a given technology. Or they are starting later and they have a technology that was not available when we started. So even the starting points were not the same, okay? And we are better in the beginning. So all the projects are trying to do their best to try to solve this problem in different matters. So for me, it's full respect to all the systems.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  But said that, I mean, there is a lot of difference, a lot. It's not one, it's just different approach, different ways, different teams doing a different thing. What I would recommend, and here is maybe for the technical people, you know, if you are just, if you don't care about the technical. But what I would recommend to the technical people is just. Just for example, go to the source code and try to deploy, just try to deploy your one, just go to Gorley or Polygon POS or that's cheap, I mean, I think it's even cheaper than Gorley, I don't know, that, but it's like, but it's, I mean, just go to a network, just try to, I mean, get the, get the prover, get the, no, get the synchronizer, get the database and just

• 43:14Speaker 03

  go to all the different pieces, they are valuable there, you can compile there, there, you can see there, you can see how they work and, and the good thing is that it's, you can use that and at least in our side, our spirit is, is to, to, to, to, to give as much as we can to the, to the community. So we take as much as we can and to give as much as we can. And this is the spirit that we have. And, and the good thing is that doing that, if we do that between different projects, we can learn a lot. I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure that there are things that other projects are doing better than us and we can learn. And I'm sure that we are doing things

• 43:56Speaker 03

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

• 44:36Speaker 03

  the, the proving system of Polygon Zero, or we are using the star, it's the same way that Polygon Maiden is using. We are sharing the technology, we're sharing the, the things, we're sharing the technology without barriers, without any competition. It's just, okay, I, I explain you everything I know about this and you explain everything about, no, about that. And this collaboration, I think is the key of the succeed, of the success of this project, of the Polygon. We should be able to export this model to the field community. Because, and, and I personally believe that

• 45:16Speaker 03

  If we work together, and if we work together means just working together in sharing the knowledge one each other, not competing, but sharing, that's the way that we can go faster.

• 45:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree with that. It's, you know, crypto likes to be so tribal at times, but ultimately, guys, it's, for bankless listeners, it's us against the banks. It's decentralization versus centralization. And the benchmark on whether we're successful or not is how long we have protected decentralized assets and how much has entered the system, right? It's kind of the Lindy effect of like time and also value that we have unlocked in the decentralized ecosystem. And kind of that brings me to the risks, which we talked about earlier. Okay, so security is top of mind. And this is the benchmark ultimately for success for all ZK EVMs. And I know Mihailo said this is bleeding edge tech. No one's, like, people

• 46:15Ryan Sean Adams?

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

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so here is, let's see, first of all, risk zero is not.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  But it's not about, this is not even about Polygon. I mean, it's on any system in the world. Okay, so what you are trying to do, and what we are trying to do, and I think what we, all the projects are trying to do, is, these are serious projects, is

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Spend, invest as much as we can in security. That means just audits, internal audits, backbone these, code reviews between peers. I mean, that's whatever it's, whatever formal, you know, testing, for, so whatever we can and whatever is in our hands, we put there. Okay, but we need to understand also that the security. So if you don't take a risk, certain risk at a given point, the security is not going to evolve. Security is also get evolves when, when you assume some risk. So here measuring, measuring how much risk you want to assume.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  And so what are these probabilities, this risk want to assume in order to grow? This is a little, this is, this is, this is probably the, one of the most difficult things in, in, in the space. Okay, because it's measuring this low risk is, is, is difficult.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  In our case, I can explain you, I can explain you the, the, the, the risk. So who we are think about risk, okay? Okay. So here in, in, in the CVM, we distinguish between four kind of risk. What we call smart contracts risk, what we call correctness risk, what we call soundness risk and what we call stop braver, you know, the braver stops. Okay, smart contracts is like any other smart contract. It's a smart contract and the smart contract can have bugs. Okay, and the cool thing here is that the, the, the community, you know, after the launch of Ethereum, well, still some bugs, but we have a lot of knowledge and, and there is a lot of auditing companies, there are a lot of procedures and it's, I mean,

• 49:05Speaker 03

  it has been audited two times, checked with the right code and the probability, I would say that's relatively low. But again, if there is something wrong in the smart contract. Things can go bad, but like any other, like any other smart contract is not, no, no difference here that any other smart contracts. Okay. The other thing is that completeness. This is probably the most critical part. The completeness means that you are proving something that goes to a wrong state. Okay. Uh, but you, but this is a determining is that is, is right from, so you are, you are, this is in general is that imagine that you put a transaction and this transaction will result of this estate because how you program the state.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Goes that you have more money. Okay, that would be really bad. Okay. For this, I'm.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Again, zero risk doesn't exist, but I here I'm quite confident on this, uh, on this, uh, on this, uh. Mainly, and this is thank you very much to Ethereum and to the Ethereum test suite. We, we not only did the full audit, the full audits, but we are also passing all the Ethereum tests of the, of the Ethereum test suite. So if we are passing, I mean, we can guarantee that we are passing this Ethereum seed. So it should be once, it could be something really weird. Uh, for this, uh, to happen there.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Okay. So all the things together, this give us quite a confidentiality. Here for this risk, we are also, uh. At least at the beginning, we want to disable that at some point, but in this, uh, this beginning training, which here we are running, we will want to run a kill switch. Okay. Uh, well, I mean, uh, what you see with many people kill switch. We should remove that at some point, but if we see some, we are checking some, uh, you know, some balances and we see some, if we have some, some, some checks that if we see something that goes wrong, we can kill switch the network. Okay. On the, on this side. But again, this is, I see here are a relatively low probability. Okay.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Uh. The others are softness. Softness is probably the most, uh, it's the most tricky one because it's the, I mean, it's not that you are doing the things okay, it's that you are checking that all the things are okay. And it's very difficult, it's very easy to forget some of the checks, okay? And, and a softness mistake in the approvers is relatively easy to, to do it. And here we don't have, so the community has not much experience here to auditing and to checking, to check here. Here we did a huge effort again with, uh, audits and, and, and reviews and we correct a lot of these softness, uh, errors, okay? But here, the, the, the, the cool thing is that in, you know, in the system, the idea is that, um,

• 52:04Speaker 03

  if a softness error is detected by the smart contract, and that means that if there are two proofs, so if there are two proofs, that, uh, if there are two proofs that within, with, that coming from the same state and with the same transactions, they go to two different states and you're able to prove, uh, two things, this is a softness error. And what we do is we just shut down, we just hold the network and, and, and go, we go, we go centralized. We shut down the network and then an update should be done, okay? And the other protection is that at the beginning, we are going to be the only prover that's running the system, unless we stop doing the proof. So there is a mechanism that if in five days we are not generating a proof,

• 52:45Speaker 03

  anybody will be able to generate a proof. But if we are running the proof and we are not going to prove something wrong, okay? So this is the other mechanism. So that's why softness, even being more probable, uh, to happen in some softness mistakes, which is not good because I mean, that would mean that it's a, the system is centralized. But the risk is that the system is centralized, not that, not that the user will lose money. I mean, the system is centralized, we'll fix.

• 53:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I get it, Jordi. And there are fallbacks for some of these cases, of course. And I think you've done a great job outlining kind of the risks of not just the Polygon ZK EVM, but all EVM technology, and to some extent, all layer 2s. Well, one thing I'll say to you listeners is, I remember there was a time when people said a programmable blockchain would never work, okay? Because it would have bugs, smart contracts would never work. And then what happened? There was a DAO event, there was a re-entrancy type bug. And everyone was saying, "Ha ha, we were right. Smart contract blockchains, programmable blockchains will never work." And now look at us, okay? They do work. We've got strong Lindy effects.

• 53:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  The issues have been dealt with, and we get stronger and stronger over time. I expect a similar trajectory. Not that there won't be bumps in the road. There could be bumps in the road, but we're talking about the long game here. And look, cryptography, programmable blockchains can scale. We've already seen that proven. Guys, we've got to be quick on the last question here. But I want to know about the Matic token. How is Matic involved in the Polygon ZK EVM? What's its role? Do you pay gas fees in Matic? What's the relationship between Matic and Ethereum and something like Polygon ZK EVM?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a great question, and great to close the interview with that. So first of all, when it comes to gas fees, we're using Ether for gas fees. That's what community prefers. It makes user experience even better. And we are using Ether as the gas fee token in ZK EVM itself. That being said, Polygon's native token, Matic, will have a critical role in the whole Polygon ecosystem that we're establishing right now. So currently, we're starting with a centralized sequencer. Delivering ZK EVM itself was the grand goal. We just wanted to prove that it's possible. And we're starting with a centralized sequencer improver, like all other rollups in the Ethereum ecosystem. This network needs to be decentralized,

• 55:14Speaker 02

  and Matic token will play a critical role in that decentralization of the network, as well as in tying the whole Polygon ecosystem. We already touched in this interview on this multitude of chains, right? We even have this concept of dedicated chains, which are supernets, Polygon POS chain, ZK EVM. All these networks will... Coexist in a very interconnected way and Matic will play a critical role in facilitating and securing that whole ecosystem. We will be sharing, I believe, very exciting news in the next couple of months and our views and proposals, how everything will fit together, because that's what community is now wondering. One question you already mentioned, how Polygon

• 55:54Speaker 02

  POS chain is relevant now after ZKVM, what about supernets, how these all components that you're working on, how they all come together. And the token itself will play a critical role in our mind in connecting all these things together. I mean, we're very excited to share with you and with the community in the following months, everything that's been happening behind the scenes, kind of.

• 56:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we will stay tuned for that. Guys, I just want to say, congrats on the launch. This is a huge milestone, big accomplishment. Cheering you on. I mean, as advocates for decentralization in bankless money systems, this technology is pivotal in our ability to scale it. So, well done on the launch, fantastic news, very exciting. Can we end with this then? Before I let you go, what can listeners do to get started on Polygon ZK EVM? Is there a website they should go to? How do I bridge across from Ethereum to the ZK EVM if I feel so inclined?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Jordi, I'll leave it to you.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, just looking for the link, but you just go to the bridge. I probably, if you go to, just one moment.

• 57:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about this, Jordi? We will make sure to include it in the show notes, for sure. I know you're busy building and doing other things, but we'll have it in the show notes for you, bankless listeners.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, just go. So just go to the bridge.zkvm-rpc.com/login and there you can start the bridge and just connect your MetaMask and you're there. Just go to Remix, deploy your smart contracts, just do some transfers. I mean, just work as a normal network and it's really easy. I mean.

• 57:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  New Bankless Frontiers opening up for you as we speak. This is now available. Jordi, mahalo. Thank you so much for coming on Bankless and telling us more about it.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Ryan. Always a pleasure.

• 57:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got to end with this, of course. None of this has been financial advice. Eth is risky, so is ZK Technology. All of DeFi is, really. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.