Just Prove It: ZK & the Future of Scaling by Ash Schap

thanks guys hi there I'm Ash Chief strategy officer at risk zero and today we are going to talk about ZK and the future of scaling so some of you might have noticed ZK has been a hot ticket these days getting a lot of play a lot of action uh just judging by the number of side events alone this weekend uh this week rather I can tell that the ethereum community is very very excited about the future of this technology and uh that's been really encouraging for us and I have to say they are not alone um this is Tim Sweeney CEO of epic games Epic Games is the maker of fortnite one of the most popular video games on Earth and he says the field of zero knowledge proofs the idea that you can verify that something happened without receiving any private details about it I think that's going to be the backbone of a large part of The Next Century in technology so why does Tim Sweeney the CEO of one of the biggest gaming companies on Earth care about ZK okay well some of you might know that uh epic games and Tim are in the middle of a fairly epic battle uh with Apple's App Store so Apple's app store is charging every single app about a 30 markup or or tax if you will middleman fee on every single dime of Revenue that they earn through the App Store and so Tim Sweeney and the folks at epic games and many other mobile gaming companies app creators and users also stand to really benefit from decentralized Technologies like ethereum open architecture the ability to have free and open source software running on our mobile phones what's the problem right now that that infrastructure doesn't doesn't scale it just doesn't work and that's that's one of the reasons why I joined risk zero about a year ago is to start to work on on this problem so just a little bit about me and my background um I started my career in the traditional Finance World um worked in at JPMorgan and in private equity and uh went down fell down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole around 2013. ultimately went and ended up working at maker Dow which was sort of like the OG D5 company it was a decentralized lending protocol probably a lot of you have heard of it um that really got me excited about you know the potential for kind of the D5 space after that I went to work at uniswap imagine most of you have probably heard of Unison but probably used it at some point I was heading up growth there and yeah I was there from the early days I remember you know launching the launching the protocol day one I think vitalik put in like 50k on the first day and I just remember how nervous we were you know we hope we don't lose the metallics money and and now the industry is just absolutely huge you know D5 is doing billions of dollars in transactions per day we've got you know over a trillion dollars in total transaction volume under our belt not too long ago and and the industry has just really taken off and yeah D5 have put ethereum on the map really I mean for for many years it's been like the kind of killer app for ethereum um and I'm really proud of the work that like this community has done around that you know building really powerful robust open source free Financial infrastructure for everyone is like a really cool goal and something that I've just had so much fun working on over the last few years but increasingly I'm starting to feel that we didn't finish what we started um and you know what I mean by that and I just want to run you guys through some numbers so as much as we all hope our tokens are going up and to the right our gas prices are also going up and to the right and just to give you guys a little bit more context and this was probably a week or two ago when I made these slides but it's like just wallet to wallet transfer is two dollars a unit swap V3 swap so you can see in purple is was running around 12 at the time open c was almost 20 bucks that's just that's just not gonna work I mean for context the 47 of the world's population lives on less than 6.85 cents per day so you know we're asking people to make a trade on Unison you know double what they they normally have is their budget for the day that's just that's just not going to work so it's not enough to say you know we've built this beautiful decentralized protocol and network that anyone can use with an internet connection unless we actually you know put our money where our mouth is and go make it accessible for the rest of the world um so that's that's kind of why I'm interested in ZK I'm really interested in scaling I want to finish what we started I don't want us to be like this industry that just paid ourselves a bunch of money and then didn't actually make open accessible architecture for the rest of the world you know if we if we do it that way then we end up looking like this guy and nobody wants to nobody wants that so it's time to scale um lots of really exciting uh lots of really exciting things have happened in this space basically over the last few years Layer Two technology has come to the Forefront we've got Arbor tournament optimism working on optimistic rollups we've got polygon so there are options increasingly though we're starting to understand the limitations of some of those some of those things and ZK has sort of entered The Fray as I think what most people at this point are sort of agreeing is sort of the most viable option for achieving genuine scale in blockchains so enters UK ZK enables verifiable computation for the purposes of this talk I'm not going to go too deep into like what ZK is I think probably most people have a good understanding if you don't come talk to me afterwards I love to shill you on it but basically you know the idea is that with ZK you can prove that you're correct without having to show your work it offers privacy and scalability oh where did the slides go sorry guys well I guess I'll just keep going here um don't really need the sides but basically what it allows you to do is do really big computations off chain and you can do it in a way where you're able to prove that it was done in a verifiably correct way you're then able to post that stuff onto the chain in a mortalized way and then you can actually use that information use those computations because they were done in a verifiably correct way you can trust it and you can use that information inside of applications so um I guess the next question is what's the best way to sort of harness the magic of ZK and you know there are lots of different teams in the space have different approaches to this um but our team at risk zero has basically the approach of make it easy for any Dev to become a magician and what does that mean that means going to devs where they are that means open architecture that means open languages allowing people to write ckps and interact with ekps from wherever they are whatever language whichever chain Etc and I want to go I want to talk give a little bit more context on kind of like where the rest of the space is right now so at the at this point most of the plays to bring ZK into production um are sort of like what you might call vertically integrated and that means that they're saying to Developers come move to our chain to make use of ZK or they're saying to developers learn a new you know custom programming language that we've developed and come and join our community and and start building you know within our Tech stack they're asking developers to vote with their feet basically and that's that's sort of like one approach to this and you know as always as we're trying to like build new and Innovative Technologies I think one thing that really helps us to take a look at the past and honestly there are a lot of parallels between things that happened sort of in the early days of the web and and what we're seeing in the blockchain space now so I just want to touch on one example here um so in the early days of cloud computing basically if you were an internet company in like the 90s and early 2000s you were vertically integrated that means you owned your own Hardware you ran your own servers and you use those you use that compute power to do whatever Services it was you were trying to offer nine times out of ten you weren't using all of the compute power that you had available with the hardware and servers that you had installed in your offices so the idea of being able to rent out that server space became like you know what we're now calling cloud computing basically and the race to become like the Top Dog in cloud computing was on um and Microsoft made a really big play to basically take over that space they started building data centers they you know they built out um Microsoft IIs which is their web server software they built out my msql which is their database software and they started trying to license this software sort of really broadly in the industry taking it to every single data center Creator all of the Silicon Valley companies that were trying to rent out their Cloud space and they wanted everybody to be a Microsoft customer this was basically like them just adding a middleman a middleman fee sort of in the middle of this kind of like cloud computing industry this nascent cloud computing industry so people started experimenting and really started to get behind using Linux Linux is free and open source software it was a little harder to implement at first because Microsoft was sort of designed to be like out of the box user friendly to start setting up your own servers but because Linux was had this great open source Community the user experience improved super super quickly security improved super super quickly and because it was free it was just like an easy choice for anyone that was looking to enter the cloud computing space and it became the de facto standard once that happened there was sort of this like Cambrian explosion in the amount of actual compute power that was available and that basically was sort of like the Advent of the modern web that we have today so if you want to just quickly look at this chart you can kind of see some some parallels in the stories between like early web and and early crypto you know early web each website had its own physical servers in their offices early crypto each dap had its own blockchain Bitcoin Litecoin name coin if anyone remembers that one it's a throwback um and then with the modern web website start to run on Virtual machines that share physical machines and in modern crypto we're starting to see increasingly adapts that run on app specific chains that share security again consensus and they also Outsource computation and data availability so what lessons can we take from the early web as we look look to you know get get things going in the in the crypto world and get things scaling the best way to support the adoption of broad technological paradigms is to make them open source and accessible I think that this you know the ethereum community has been always really committed to those ideals risio is very very committed to that as well and we're excited to see what happens there build horizontally meet developers where they are so we're building on risk 5 instruction set which means that people can use zkp's uh with risk zero writing from Russ go C plus plus We'll add support for for Python and Java of course we'll add support for solidity we want to go where the developers are already building and we want to we want to spread out that technology really broadly don't come to us we'll come to you that's kind of like our motto we want to go to where the developers are and make it easy for them to onboard into this stuff and start using these scaling tools so with that I want to introduce Bonsai our team launched this product a couple of days ago we're really proud of it it's an ER it's a very very early version of what we will be building in the future um you know tagline is boundless generic computation on any chain we want to be able we want to allow people to run really powerful programs from wherever they are um and and have that verifiably correct data on chain so I think in the interest of time I'm not going to go too much into the into the details of how all this works I'll just say simply anyone could submit a request for proving Services the thing gets proved it then gets rolled up and realized to all of the chains that the that risk zero supports and then application developers can cheaply prove any execution Trace by referencing the on-chain roll up and providing a Merkel path to the root so I want to just talk quickly about a couple of cool use cases so everything optimistic that we're currently doing optimistically like optimistic Roll-Ups Etc will soon be done in ZK basically when you do an optimistic roll up you just trust that everything was executed correctly and then there's the seven day dispute window where anyone can check your work and basically call you out and you get punished if you lied or if you said something that was incorrect using the UK you can actually verify at execution the programs will run collect correctly in less than 15 seconds so you can reduce that seven day dispute window to like 15 seconds and you know getting faster every day we're hoping to get it to sub 10 here pretty soon the Second Use case I want to talk about is proof of location um this is like I was talking about this one in our booth yesterday and it really like blew my mind um but foam is working on a new primitive on chain proof of location so the way that their system works is they've got a network of zones and each Zone you can think of a zone is like a like a node basically each Zone has four radios each the radios represent like X Y and Z axis in Space the fourth one represents time um the nodes are able to sign in ZK which means that they can prove that they correctly calculated the exact location using the inputs provided which means that they can provide like a level of certainty basically to any applications that might want to use this so you know you can imagine in the future using something like this you would be able to get a Pro app when you walk in the room right and you would be able to have that done also in a private way so you're not actually sharing your uh your information yep and there's lots of other cool applications military industrial proof of Brittany I want to prove that I went to every Britney Spears concert ever you know you can do it that way so why should I care why should you care most of you are probably application developers aspiring application developers web3 Pioneers um as I was talking about earlier I've had the opportunity to work on some of the biggest kind of coolest applications in the blockchain space and I'm super proud of that but it sucks that half the world can't use the stuff that I've spent all this time building and so I want to encourage developers to make your scaling decisions early don't just rely on your chains to think about scaling if you want to build something that's going to change the world you need to be having that conversation in your teams early on and we have solutions that we're ready to bring to you second thing I want to encourage everybody to do is commit to accessibility for users you know we didn't build D5 so that like jump in Winter mute can trade against each other on Jane all day we built it so that there can be like really badass robust tools for everyone to use sort of all around the world um let's finish what we started and yeah thank you guys if you're interested in learning more sign up for our Bonsai beta you can find it at bonsai.xyz you can also check out our website my Twitter wrist zeros Twitter and yeah thank you [Applause]