Evan Shapiro I ZKP’s Past, Present, and Future I Mina Foundation I Pragma Singapore 2024

[Music] all right I want to jump into our last talk before lunch and for this interview I'd like to bring on Evan who is the co-founder of mina protocol and currently leads the Mina Foundation we're going to talk about all things ZK so please give Evan a big round of applause [Applause] all right there's a lot of ZK this year around and it's awesome because we're kind of Seeing Things become more and more practical but you've been in this journey for uh for a long time um we've known each other for seven plus years and uh back then the word ZK was uh the same as zcash and my kind of first question to you is um walk me through kind of what was the very first version of mina that you uh both developed and what was the was that pitch what was kind of the reaction back in the day and how has that change to what kind of we have now I mean it was so different uh than than now uh there were uh we we you know had a list of all the people that knew zero knowledge to to you know a practical degree and it was like 30 or so people um it was like my my co-founder and then the folks that Berkeley and a few others it was the rest of the starware team and then uh zcash employees exctly it was like us zcash starkware and that was that was kind of it like working on actual practical things and so you know you talked about Z people and they would be like oh that's like crazy that that's even possible uh which I I I still think it is this often but uh you know it it was a very different world of the technology being very new yeah is uh what you originally envisioned as Mina being the the same version now and uh if not um kind of what were some of the the iterations from there I I think yeah yes and no I mean the original version of minina that we worked on uh was just this thing called like we called it I think a mini bit it was it was basically just a kind of feature parody with Bitcoin um proof of work etc just compressing the whole history down into something very small um even that was like really hard back in the day because the tooling was just not where it needed to be and we had to work on a lot of tooling and to get it to be to be feasible uh Ju Just for example like the public keys that were supported were on the order of like 800 bits so you know they were like these huge public keys that you would have to use um there were lots of things like that but um no I I I think that even from beginning we were starting to think about um smart contracts ways to make them feasible and they've come like a super long way like I think the original versions we were thinking of building more kind of like ZK CPUs uh that using the technology at the time time but uh it's become more practical it actually builds more real computation systems so in some ways I think we're like farther because we can support so much more computation than before in other ways there's still a lot to get built out and to go yeah nice um yeah remember the The Branding used to be the 20 kilobyte blockchain and you kind of perpetuity and uh and now we're kind of seeing more apps and I want to dig into that too uh maybe kind of just to set the stage it would be helpful to understand how a proof Works in Mina and sort of how your version of it proof might be different than what they may know from a different CK chain um just kind of let's just set that context yeah so um Amina we use something called recursive zero knowledge proofs which lets you make proofs of other zero knowledge proofs and the the thing that we use that for originally and still use it for today is for compressing the entire Mina chain into this very small like around 20 kilobyte proof of the whole history the idea being that uh if you want to fully verify a blockchain you have to replay the history to know that it's valid but if you have a zero knowledge proof that can stand in for that whole uh downloading and checking everything which means you can uh get it onto your phone onto your browser wherever and get this really high level of security um in this very efficient way um so that was what originally we were we were working on with with Mina was building that out and and uh that's what we originally launched uh the thing that's new now is we have uh a development environment on top of that uh where you can uh basically build zero knowledge smart contracts that uh let multiple users interact with them so uh not only can you like construct proofs locally on your device but then you can send it out to Mina and you can have these proofs interact with each other to make things like private voting or other kind of private applications so how do we access State and understand context if we're recursively proving and and generating these proofs so how do you going to think about having a history of information still accessible and um what's kind of the the way to think about these apps now yeah I I think it require like a different kind of model of like what the environment on the chain is I think we think about it sometimes more like your computer hard drive where you can access all the files that are currently being stored but if you delete files then then they're they're kind of gone unless you have like you're tracking all that forever so in Mina like uh as a developer you're you're intended to refer to the current state of the chain and to save things that you need to to to save in the current state of the chain but not necessarily to to look back uh necessarily now you can do that there's lots of block explorers and people that have been like you know intrinsically you know incentivized that they want to store this whole history of transactions so that people can see them but it's not strictly necessary for the protocol and for applications it's um more of a they have the ability to still keep track of it but they don't need it to reverifying devices do uh at least have the capacity to store uh their personal history of transactions which they can then refer to but they don't by default store the history of everybody else's transactions um yeah no that makes sense and and maybe just to clarify is this the the same thing as a ZK app here in terms of kind of the framework that you're referencing or are we kind of just talking about how the the magic kind of happens in the background but the general abstraction of ZK apps is uh more extensible yeah this is more like what's happening kind of in the background like ZK apps are built on top of this um as kind of a model for talking about when accounts can change their state but but it's uh that's like more the back end yeah that makes a lot of sense the kind of the other things I'm kind of curious about is once you kind of start on this path you kind of also have to come up with a lot more abstractions and uh and you kind of had a a fungible standard that you had to uh to release and make that a bit more um I would say just more familiar with the audience because when you have the mean of fungible tokens um what was kind of the the thinking behind that how does that standard work that's one and then I want to kind of add on to the second question which is as you kind of have been thinking about building more apps on on the Chain um has that sort of inspired any changes that you feel like can be made on the layer one itself to support this yeah totally I mean it's just it's a very different um it's it's a very different programming model than than the typical kind of evm world so for example this like munchable token standard is like in some ways our version of like erc20 but in other ways it's uh very different behind the scenes uh so we're working on getting out standards like that so as a developer you can start using those things in a in a clean way but but yeah like uh even since launching like the initial base layer a lot of the development that's happened on top has been um sort of on we call you think them kind of as like native rollups or like like little app app chains or ZK rollups on top of mina so sort of each ZK app is is this is that ZK app kind of is a ZK rollup where uh you are bundling a lot of trans transactions and then because it's recursing down like posting the recursive proof back to mina so we kind of have like this native scaling thing sort of built in right that people are mostly using but uh to do that now we're realizing the L1 probably should change in some ways to better support that model of development because my next question was going to be can the apps talk to each other exactly yeah so they can talk to each other but it's not ideal right now uh one thing that is nice is because uh these apps post like their the Merkel route of their states to Mina uh once an app is posted at State another app can refer to it very easily and and you can kind of this is pre- rollup or pre- recursion or this is post recursion but it's kind of always happening and it's like reasonably fast so it's it's kind of like um every few minutes like these things are posting their their commitments down to subtle on the L1 and then you can refer to them back and forth between the app chains uh so there's stuff that's that needs to get built out on that both on the L2 side uh but also on the L1 side like you want to have a standard for communicating between all these different app chains because there's a few now different like l2s and app chains people that building on top of mina that would be nice if they could all communicate together for example and then there's other change there's there's lots of changes this implies that we're thinking about uh models for example of like being able to reserve block space on the L1 for your app chain so like you're able to consistently post to there versus competing for like asset transfers uh yeah versus competing and like if you have like an app chain that you you really you know want to be able to rely on the settlement of the L1 for the operation of it it might be nice to be able to reserve some block space um for like the next you know day or two or whatever that's a really cool concept which like buying a reserve instance onws and uh just thing I have this spot let me may or may not use it huh exactly yeah so there there's things like that it's implying uh also like we are thinking about like does this imply there should be like some kind of shared sequencing between all these things so that you can communicate faster than one block time between them uh it it also is implying like we probably want to get the latency really low but the throughput is okay to actually delegate to like these these app chains so it's it's implying things there so it's it's uh you know as people are building stuff it is it's implying a lot of lot of the stuff so so how do you going to think about where to uh sort of draw the line hey this is a great change we need to kind of make this be part of the next hard fork or just the next upgrade and this is nice to have but we don't know how to think about prioritizing it because maybe it's a use case now but may not be big in the future um how does the the foundation and the protocol team think about this I mean yeah mostly right now it's it's just like what is blocking like the user experience improving and a lot of the user experience stuff actually like just stuff on like the l2s or stuff that is um part of the framework but not necessarily changes to the all1 so actually like there there's a set of changes that make sense to do before those changes to the all1 even but but mostly it's like focused around like what creates like a really good ux for for users for developers um so that their applications are are are are nice to to build and use nice um I guess on the similar thing what one thing I'm kind of curious about is you've kind of been on this path to get Mina out there and and kind of do the original version of what you talked about but in that same window we kind of saw a lot more ZK experimentations a lot more ZK chains were there any sort of Lessons Learned or or kind of when you think about hey let me compare this to like starware or ZK sync or some other recursive uh proof system we've seen um have there been kind of learnings that you feel like oh this would be actually helpful now if you were to think about a future change or as you're now comparing and making more application World possible what kind of can you feel like is good to steal from or learn from from everybody else's experience uh oh yeah I mean there there's tons of stuff that like retrospectively it would have been nice to have have realized and and known um I I I think I think the one of the main things is um that uh I I think I think there's really a few things like I think for once for for one like there's so many other people that are developing things on top of ZK now in terms of proof systems and terms of developments now it's really a much larger Community I don't know what's my phone is making sounds for no reason sorry very strange sorry this is very bizarre I don't know what's happening with my phone it adds to the value of the panel yeah it stays over there um uh no I think for one like yeah proof systems there's been so many developments on them like so much to learn there's so much that uh you know it's a much larger Community now of things that are happening and being developed so I think that's one area yeah I I I think another one is just like uh we've been in kind of this R&D mode for a very long time because you had to do all these things because nothing existed yes yeah yeah ex we had to but um uh I think that it's it's nice to be in this kind of place of shipping now um like and that's like uh a nice place to be at but like uh I I do wonder sometimes there's ways we could get there earlier or sooner um but it's hard too because like a lot of this technology was retrospective fully exist and still developing a lot of it too yeah another thing I'm kind of curious about is and obviously I understand the proof systems are a bit different but did you ever kind of think about especially after ZK VMS came out or or just CK EVMS became more and more possible to sort of just support that world and allow more portability directly on the Chain I think I think yes and no so one thing that is very nice about the way the framework is set up on M right now is when you write your code it directly turns into a circuit uh which is very fast uh which is one of the things that makes it fast enough to run on on phones for example or on browsers um so uh it's it's actually like very nice to to have this you know it still looks very you know you're you're it's in typescript you're just writing code but it it turns into a circuit directly and that makes it super fast um that said like it's not like super priority right now but there are people that are working on like we have a Groth 16 verifier on Mina now there's people working on sp1 right and uh other Starks and other things now on Mina oh as in you get to write a circuit for those as pre-compiled like like verifiers verifiers okay uh that that uh verify Starks and sp1 and Etc on on Mina and this isn't like a primary focus right now but there are people building out talking about building out at least um some people starting to like uh l2s on Mina that will have kind of different environments like zkv Ms and Starks and Etc uh where we want them still all to be able to talk to each other but all these different ones settling down to the to the L one oh that's super cool what's uh where is that in terms of development is that like a idea to being prototyped or you've seen this and yeah it could be coming out soon I I think I think it's I think it's pretty early like there there like some community members that like are like you know they're they're quite like found that it's possible now we just got to make it some of them are are quite quick at some of it but I think they're just kind of starting it and I suspect actually like um there's a you know we step one which is like uh taking these other proof systems and verifying them on Mina and they step two about like actually building out L l2s on Mina that uh actually able to create a good development environment uh for those other systems and then actually have some communication between them and this is not the same as creating a better standard Library support this is on the communication consensus side exactly yeah this would be like you have like some you know some Z KVM uh ZK app chain that is posting things down to the L1 and there's some library in that app chain and in the other app chain so they can communicate with each other that's super cool yeah it's cool I think it's like pretty future but but uh it's people are starting to work on it so it's going to get more and more crazier in the world of ZK wow um now I'm just like on my own world like I got to check this out now okay well I do want to kind of uh do some kind of final concluded questions here um where is the foundation's time going and kind of what are you focused on and kind of what are your priorities now as a as a protocol yeah I think it's a few things I mean I think for one like we we've been in like I kind of mentioning this like research and development mode and we have launched the smart contract stuff so a lot of is just kind of getting the stuff out there now now and like I we like a growing developer Community it like feels like it's like hitting hitting some like good good good like traction and thresholds uh but now it's like about uh what do we need else to build out on like the ux and like the application side to to Really uh to to get all the building blocks ready like we mentioned like this token standard mention like these like app chains we want to have like dex's uh launched on on Mino working on on helping folks do that there's a lot of community projects getting built uh that we want to help get to actually launching and then there's a lot of work beyond that like how can we actually help these projects get users and like um and actually be successful like what can we do as the foundation to support them uh because there's a lot of these things that are like super new uh and both of you are learning what to do next exactly yeah and new new use cases and and stuff as well amazing um well I guess my last question is um what uh what can people do to get involved and uh if there's a wish list of things that you are looking for uh this would be the time to ask everybody and see what uh what's important for how people can get involved in this space yeah I mean I think if you've been curious about ZK like it's definitely worth like uh checking out I mean not just our stuff but a lot of the other stuff too like um and seeing what it's like to build with I think it's like doable now in a lot of ways and you can get access to new functionality so I think it's worth checking out um we have like a grant program where we just like support people that are building things uh it's called like Navigators and uh just monthly grants as long as you're building uh cool things on Mina uh the other thing I'd mention is like uh we're working starting to work a lot on governance like at the L1 level like I think it's something that I wish more folks were were doing in in some ways like thinking about how like we as communities can directly govern like these projects and so if interested in that too we have like a lot of programs where like kind of in beta or testing right now for kind of direct like governance of the protol um so if you're interested in that you can check that out also and that's all on our Discord amazing well Evan I want to thank you for for this amazing conversation and uh I'm personally excited to look more up on on this L2 world so yeah thank you thank you all right please give Evan a big round of applause everybody [Music]