Aggregation Day Panel: ZK is the End Game

[Music] so uh we're g to be going into uh this panel called ZK is the endgame we have Mahala uh Justin Mahala from polyon Labs Justin from the ethereum foundation Uma from cin again um tog girl from scroll uh Jordy from polygon Z KVM and bobin from polygon miden slash their awesome G Reaper icon all right so if we can take down the slide I'll pass it over to Mahalo who's going to be moderating this panel Mahala go ahead thanks hson for resurrecting me I promise this is the last time you will see me on this event uh hi everyone again Miko co-founder of polygon and for this panel I'm joined by five gig brains of ZK uh and we're going to discuss why uh ZK is the end game so the title of the panel might be a little bit audacious some people at least might find it that way or a little bit kind of bold or maybe even controversial but we were smart and we invited only people who generally agree with this uh statement so this should be a smooth sale uh hopefully uh yes so I'm joined by um Uma from suin uh Justin Drake from eeral Foundation tog from scroll and bobin and Jordy from polygon and yeah guys can you quickly first introduce yourself and if you can think of a one funny or interesting thing about ZK or your journey in ZK or something that people can find interesting or or funny um yeah I guess ladies first Uma over to you um yeah my name is Zuma I'm one of the co-founders of cinct and we're building core infrastructure to try to make it easier for anyone to use ZK um most recently we launched sp1 which is a ZK VM that lets anyone write rust and then use get appr proof um funny story H oh yeah one day I think when at the beginning of when I was doing ZK I think I spent a week debugging something actually it was with circom which is what Jordy the library Jordy had written um I was debugging something in circom I think at the time circom didn't have print statements and I spent a week debugging something that ended up being like a one line of code change that fixed my problem okay awesome I'm really sorry no no it wasn't your fault it was my fault okay uh Justin do you want to go next sure uh Justin Drake from the airm foundation um I guess funny story like I think SNS got me into into ethereum uh research it was one of the first things that I really wanted to to scratch as an itch uh as as a bitcoiner kind of understand how they work and I emailed Edie benon and he invited me to a conference um where vitalic was there and uh and I remember having this this discussion with Zuko and balic and I I think you know that kind of laid the groundwork for me to uh eventually Jo join the FM Foundation um I'm also uh extreme bullish on A6 for SN proving I guess I was a little too early um maybe half a decade too early talking about them but uh now they're starting to materialize which is lots of fun awesome but you're going to be remembered as a Pioneer on the bright side of A6 I don't know about that okay to over to you yeah yeah hello my name is to girl I'm a contributor at scroll uh I we are ZK VM roll up building on top of etherum funny story about ZK I think the first time I've ever learned about ZK was back in back in University and I wasn't really familiar with cryptography at the time and my first assumption was oh yeah it's some kind of a mathematical structure that doesn't require knowledge to actually use it but then obviously after spending some time in in crypto and in computer science in general I realized that yeah you actually need a lot of knowledge to work with zero knowledge proofs awesome bobin hey everyone um yeah I'm bobin from polygon I'm specifically the polygon M effort um which is you know different uh role but still you know very much part of the ug layer uh the different execution environment so to say um funny story about ZK is that um I remember so like I think maybe almost couple years ago now I I've put together some puzzles for ziki hak and as part of the putting together puzzles you want to put some bugs in there so people can find them uh so I put in a bug uh in like like missing constraint bug for example and then um you know people found the bug but then people also found bugs that I didn't intend to put in there which got in there by mistake so that was pretty funny that people found more buxs than they intentionally wanted to put in there okay awesome and last but not the least Jordie well yeah I'm Jordy Vina and the technical lead at polygon zbm um for the story while I'm as mentioned before I also created circum back in 2017 or something like that actually circum was uh I built the first version of circum in a weekend May mainly to learn how ZK work actually you spend more time trying to understand vitalik's uh paper vitalic blog post by the time that writing circum itself I mean a first version of very sketchy just to learn on that and well after just some iterations on that I remember one one guy and this a funny that a random project that they wanted to build a a mixer using circum I just guys this is just I mean this is was not ready for doing any production ready I mean uh if you are crazy and you want to do it's up to you but even that I get a lot of concern I mean this project was called Tornado cash uh by by the time and I remember that I mean they launch it there was some bus in circum we we they hack themselves they fix and it was a this is how Tado C was and and and was one of the first projects that using using circum right now circum is quite a I would say it's quite a standard in in the space probably the technology is getting a little bit old especially with the new Starks and all these new proving systems uh but yeah that's a little bit how I started uh in the space on on the on the C on the C part very nice thanks everyone I will say my uh interesting funny SL embarrassing story just to make everyone feel better so back in the days and I guess in 2017 is when I was going down the rabbit hole of blockchain infra for quite a while already but ZK uh specifically and I I remember among other post Justin Drake's post from back in the day medium posts about about ZK maybe you don't even remember them Justin uh anymore but anyways uh I got some kind of um a brave idea or or opinion that I can fully understand snarks and I kind of invested like a week or so uh into that effort and then I just um definitely gave up and said okay this is not for me Starks I can still kind of wrap my head around but yeah I just realized that there are limits to to things that I can understand so that was very humble in experience uh yeah with that being said going back to the topic of the panel why ZK is the end game in my opinion I will put that kind of as a as a intro statement is it's because ZK is the only technology in in our industry that seems to have the potential to solve basically the major challenges of of this industry and major kind of obstacles on the part of becoming or going mainstream and addressing or being utilized for some of the most important use cases like genuinely there's no such no other technology uh like that in the in the industry so I would just name a few few of these challenges and and use cases and maybe we can go uh into them one by one so the obious and the most kind of uh explored one at the moment is scaling then obviously privacy because that's kind of the the the original use case for for zero knowledge cryptography then interoperability decentralization identity and Beyond basically the the list goes on but I would say these are the main kind of um the main topics that that the industry is focused on at the moment so let's start with scaling and I would maybe hand this over to to tog Rule and tog rule if you can give us basically kind of an overview of why ZK is so interesting for for scaling and then others please chime in maybe we can go through this together to Sor compression functions which just allow us to compress many different oh can you hear me now yes so uh what I was saying was I think from the perspective of uh um scaling you can see uh zero knowledge proofs as as a sort of a compression function that allows us to compress different things so in case of validity proofs we compress execution we can also compress data so rups also use zero knowledge proofs to compress data and and that is a lot of different things so for example you can you can use CA on a consensus level to prevent if we have real-time proofs to prevent re execution of of uh transactions of the ordering and basically speed up a lot of things and you can apply ZK in a lot of different facets of distributed systems and just optimize things and make them run faster and consume less resources and basically again we go back to this end game of having a few powerful noes Compu Computing doing a lot of computation and everybody else having these light or status nodes that can just verify things and interact with everybody else without having super computers or even high highend consumer grade Machinery at home okay does anyone else want to add anything or pick up on the topic or we move to the next use case okay I think yeah use of ZK in scaling is very much explored at this point and uh you guys at scroll are doing great job obviously so let's move to to to privacy I I know at least two persons here very passionate about uh the topic so I would hand it over to to bobin first and I I'm sure Jordy also would like to chime in but others also feel free um as well so ZK and privacy yeah I think um I mean it's very difficult to imagine how you would do uh like a very um you know userfriendly and uh uh at the same time private kind of system without ZK I think uh like for simple payments or something like that maybe you can solve it without like hardcore ZK where you can use like algal encryption or something like that but uh as soon as you try to do something more complicated uh uh that is actually maybe useful for the user to maintain their wallet I think um you know without uh having ZK proofs so without actually people being able to generate ZK proofs on the client side that's going to be way like I don't even know how you would do it so without ZK in my mind there is um you know we can get to like you know this uh pseudo anonymity that uh you know let's say Bitcoin started out with uh and maybe you can add a few a few more features but if you want to have like you know a user wallet that is able to execute some Logic on the client side and um you know uh interact with the rest of the chain like in a in a composable way and all that stuff you do need DEC there is like there is no way around it I think uh and uh in general like I think um um um this is a very important uh uh aspect of blockchains that we want to like I know right now A lot of people are focusing mostly on scaling but I think privacy is um very crucial in my mind for the user adoption in the long term because we want to have a situation where people don't reveal you know uh balances of their accounts or it's not easy to track them not that we want to have this the world where um you know it's better than what you can get with a traditional kind of banking system uh and it's not kind of like you have to make tradeoffs where like uh you know yes you can do it in a sens resistent way but then you have to give up a big part of your privacy and all of that stuff so I do think like if we want to bring in billions of users uh into blockchains and crypto you have to have privacy or at least some way of uh addressing the privac the Privacy kind of limitations of what we currently have and um I think um obviously privacy is a very uh kind of like charg Topic in in ways especially around regulation because you know obviously torado cash and others uh it's it's very difficult to kind of please everyone on that front and we need to figure out and hopefully over time there will be more regulary Frameworks around like what is uh um kind of acceptable and where we want to push the boundaries a bit more and we want to but I I don't see how like uh we can stay in the current state without actually getting to pice and DK is the only way to do it I also do want to say that like uh like one thing about scaling which it's kind of related to privacy is where you can actually generate proofs on the client side this is a very interesting like where it's a stateless uh you of like you can think about stateless worlds where you only put commitments on chain but you actually run your logic of a smart contract or your wallet uh on the client side which both helps the privacy and scalability uh because it naturally offloads what uh you know what the network needs to do on your behalf it just needs to verify proof of your transaction uh and um yeah you get both privacy and scalability that way and in my mind like only ZK can offer it okay awesome J do you want to add something I think you want to add something well yeah I mean it's we leave we leave you know world that uh uh we communicate a lot I mean we're sending in Internet we are sending a lot of information around and uh we prove almost anything about the information that uh we are sending so the Z case actually what helps is okay like so let's give give away just the required information so it's like it's not about hiding it's about sending just what the information that's required and this information be proved we have I mean authenticated the okay it's a valid a trusted it's a trusted information so ZK it's a technology that allows to go in this kind of this kind of world where we are more in control in the communications that we are making and that the communication that we're receiving the information that we're receiving is more trusted is more is verified uh is veried information of course this is very the beginning and this very theorical but the ZK is the tech that allows uh to go uh uh uh in that direction thinking about privacy I mean yeah I know that's little bit controversial but I mean all of us we need privacy I mean we don't want to reveal all the information to everybody I mean it's like we want to control what information we want to give away and uh uh and I mean and we want to also prove that this information is comes from a trusted source and this is I mean ZK helps here and can help some a lot yeah I I would agree with J actually maybe a better name is that ZK allows you to gives you the power to selectively disclose only what you need to disclose rather than uh like having to disclose everything so ZK is the technology that you know privacy is too too broad of a term but selective disclosure may be a better term yeah makes sense anyone else wants to chime in this topic um yeah a small comment from my side I think as Jordi said the Privacy topic is a little bit controversial now given the kind of given all the regulatory scrutiny or unclarity at least but as as bobin said I think it's really important to understand if you if we want to take this industry mainstream we really need to have privacy privacy is a strong requirement both by retail by end users because it's kind of a basic human right right and and that's how traditional Financial system works if I'm using venmo and I'm sending money to other people of course no one will see my transactions that's that's how we already uh um that's how things already work and and on the corporate Enterprise side Enterprises have uh uh business requirements legal requirements to to to not disclose data different type of strategies and all sorts of things so so yeah again long long story short privacy is definitely a strong requirement I would say if you're thinking about uh taking this industry mainstream that's something that really should be understood I guess uh with that being said I think we can go to interoperability um um I would hand this one over to you because you guys are doing great work on the interoperability ZK powered interoperability side and there are already two concrete uh uh uh outputs of your work that we are learning from and we're going to utilize one of this is the ZK consensus that we probably going to use for the egg layer and pluging P chain into it and the other one is your work on the shared uh validity sequencing that pretty much inspired the the whole concept of f layer at least to a certain extent so yeah great work that you guys are doing over there and can you maybe shed some light and share some thoughts on this topic um yeah I think uh at the scnc we've done a bunch of work on ZK bridging um and basically kind of like helping connect all these different chain and all these different ecosystems um utilizing the power of ZK uh I think ZK is really nice because it provides this like simple primitive that you can kind of rely on and then know that for example the validators of some layer one or whatever have signed off on like a certain State and so you can just get this like cryptographic proof or cryptographic cryptographic truth that like some action happened and you don't have to like worry about all these like trust assumptions like multisig or intermediate chains or whatever you can just like go direct kind of to the source and verify claims um in like a very computationally efficient manner um I also think the work yeah polygon is doing with the aggregation layer and ZK is uniquely enabled by ZK because now you can have this like really fast uh interoperability um between all these different rollups and I think for the end users hopefully that's like very simplifying I think if people like try to use l today it is like a very arduous experience because you know the chains don't talk well to each other you have to like use these thir party bridging protocols and hopefully CK can move us to a world where you know you can get like very instant or close to instant bridging um and you don't have to like worry about this like complicated set of infrastructure on top um I think ZK is like very simplifying in that way so I think that's why it's very important for interoperability totally agreed anyone else wants to add something or chime in yeah I'm especially interested in this interrupt at the L2 layer like once what if you try and bridge between two l1s there's like these fundamental constraints you don't have shed security and you can have one one chain reor but not the other and it becomes a bit messy but if you work at L2 with rollups you can have a a system which is extremely clean um where in some sense you don't need Bridges and I think the near people call it on bridging um and sno is one of two pillars required to to achieve this on bridging uh Vision the other pillar is um is shed shed sequencing so once you have two or more rollups that share a sequencer and you have real time proving um then then you're position where you can do real-time settlement and now you've unlocked synchronous composability across across this uh these rollups um now one of the I guess because we're talking about snars one of the the valid questions is do we have this SN technology today like can we do real time proving on the order of you know tens of milliseconds or maybe 100 milliseconds and even though we don't have it today I think we'll get it uh you know in relatively short order given the progress that uh I see Jord shaking his head and so is um we have Axel already that came up with a a snar Asic and we also have CC and and fabric that are also targeting an Asic for 2024 and uh I think folding is also one of the key ingredients to to to get there where you can do like massively paralyzed uh proving and and therefore bring the the latency uh down down to a [Music] minimum yeah makes sense thanks Justin from our side when we started polygon back in 2020 uh we intentionally started as an unopinionated kind of platform and we still were exploring both optimistic or fraud proof based scaling Solutions and Z based scaling Solutions and relatively soon after that within six months or to to a year we developed a strong conviction that ZK really is the the the go to technology and that's when we published our ZK thesis and committed this huge amount of funds from our Treasury and went all in basically on ZK but why am I saying this uh when we made a decision and developed that conviction we mainly were considering uh uh advantages when it comes to scaling specifically so building fraud proof based uh uh l2s and ZK based l2s and they are this these kind of differences are very much explored at this point uh Capital efficiency the fact that you can immediately withdraw funds no need for additional uh party that will submit fraud proofs Etc not to repeat that all those things that have been repeated so so many times but what we another fortunate very fortunate realization that came later was the ADV were the advantages of ZK when it comes to interoperability so seems like in fraud proof based systems in multi- Layer Two fraud proof multi-layer two environment you simply cannot achieve that level of integration that level of unification that ZK allows it seems like it's simply not possible so that was another very important and very fortunate realization that we had after we went all in on ZK uh so yeah just basically from uh from from my side um okay the next topic is decentralization I would like to hand over this one to Justin and yeah Justin you have been exploring uh uh different applications on the core protocol or L1 level like uh light client fast sying with ZK all these things so if you can maybe chime in uh maybe improvements from the consensus side then just basically an overview of how ZKA can help improve the decentralization by being uh uh used on the core protocolar L1 level right um I mean the TDR is that we can stock ify everything and I that's what it's called in balic road map so we can stock ify both the beacon chain and the the evm and so what that means for example is that if you're currently running a GE node or whatever it is a ref node or whatever execution client uh you won't have to in the future and the reason is that um you can just be told what the state route is or whatever piece of State you're interested in and you'll be given a snar proof that it is correct and so the the hardware requirements to to run a Lo go go way down and that's you know relevant for for entities like validators especially if you're a solo validator um and the the vision that I have is that you'll be able to uh validate on your Smartwatch so you're kind of walking around in you know in in your town or Village and you you have your validators on your Smartwatch um but yeah this is not only for validators of course it's for any any application that needs to know what the state of ethereum is and so if you have a decentralized Uber decentral andv or whatever application and you need to know what the state rot is then you can have these like clients um not state with essentially like zero resources uh minimal in terms of of bandwidth minimal in terms of compute uh and and like no dis iio no nothing so um in terms of the the path to get to this endgame I think what we're going to see is permissionless Innovation that happens without any hard Forks so anyone can just try to S ify the beacon chain or try to SN ify DVM and we're actually starting to see that uh in 2024 um and then once we have sufficient confidence in the infrastructure so we have multiple implementations um we have hardened those things uh we've done lots of audits then we can consider in in trining it uh at at layer one um yeah okay awesome anyone else wants to chime in I think one thing that is interesting and this is more about like decentralizing let's say proving a Blog production on layer twos potentially is that um right now we have like a single Pro that like builds the proof uh but in theory we could like and maybe that will require some changes but you could say you know you could and the way that is done you have a bunch of transactions and you roll them up into uh kind of recursively aggreg aggregate them using using uh know ZK proofs um but it would be interesting to see if you can kind of like decentralize this rollup process so that you know like there's a batch of transaction that is being proven uh in one place kind of like block building and there's another batch that is being built by another actor and then the final block producer just takes a b like you know the final few batches and puts them together into a block and like the actual proving is decentralized the cross Network as well it's it's an interesting thing I haven't like fully thought it through but it's something that I'm very curious if we can make it work I think that intersects with what Justin is interested in at the moment quite a lot sorry yes but there is a bit of a trade-off here which is that if you want synchronous composability with one shed uh sequencer then you actually have to do the proving in real time um so imagine that you have some sort of super transaction that wants to go in and out of rollup a but also in and out of roller B well now you need to have the proofs in real time and so as as soon as you start decentralizing the proving then you lose this real time aspect so I think that is a real kind of tradeoff uh of shed sequencing is that it's not as friendly uh to to decentralize proving but the way that I think of decentralized proving is as a fallback in case the primary sequencer whatever it is uh stops working uh so in particular you can you can use these decentralized provs to build uh L2 blocks that get included in inclusion lists so for example if there censorship that's fine you know you have a slightly higher latency system that uh brings uh brings these transactions on chain via the inclusion list and I think like the real time proving is not too far off it may be um it's probably not this year and maybe not next year but it's certainly in my mind within like two threeyear time frame uh where we can get to you know very close to real time proving yeah I mean even our latest release of ZK evm is it has already per transaction proofs right we are still not talking about real time proving but it's relatively close depends on basically what is your uh um reference but uh yeah um agreed with bobin and also one thing do we need real-time proving for all the transactions or we can we only need them for cross-chain transactions right so we still can prove bches in some regular intervals only these cross-chain transactions that need to have some priority when it comes to proving that's that can also work right and that will present much uh lower overall load on the entire ecosystem I would say yeah that that's a fantastic point so what you can imagine for example is the top of block or top of blobs have like two or three like super high value transactions which are synchronous and then everything else the 99% of the block is just like asynchronous stuff which is super cheap for which the proving can be delayed to the next block exactly like like in a traditional banking system or financial system you can pay a little bit more if you want your transaction to go through immediately like this priority transaction you pay a little bit higher fee and your transaction goes immediately otherwise you wait for the settlement and in this case settlement will be in 20 minutes or 15 or whatever otherwise it will happen immediately yeah um okay cool that was a nice discussion let's move in the interest of time let's move forward to Identity uh I would like to pick your brain wory here I know you're focused on zkm mainly now and that's your only focus but you you are familiar with the concept of of course decentralized ZK powered identity and if you can just basically shed some light um on the use case yes I mean identity we were been talking a little bit before but the I mean identity is uh what you what you know about the others and what the others knows about you okay this what Define this Identity or this information we can call them claims okay or they can piece information that actually you know about so at the end in identity is well when you want to share this information when you want to prove something about your information this is where the ZK uh makes a lot of sense at the end is you are asking somebody about some information the other the other person is providing you to that information and it's proving to you that information and here I mean issuers can be individuals but can be governments can be uh companies can be any uh Authority uh there Authority and the recipients of these claims can be individuals but I mean individual can can have different identities or even a vot or or even an object can have a can be their own identity okay so at the end is having a for me identity is at the end is a system it's a huge database of claims where each individual holds part of this information and then you are doing queries on this database uh this decentralized database making queries and proving that these queries are are valid I mean this is this is the base uh for uh I understand as an identity as an identity system and of course here zero knowledge is in the core uh uh of of the technology I mean uh the system without zero knowledge uh I'm not even sure if it's I mean it's possible but then you lose this privacy you lose this control of which part of your information you are giving away yeah absolutely agreed and again that privacy as bomin explained previously and and you JY also is um in lack of a better word compliant privacy even though some people might don't like this word but really the properties of ZK allow full uh uh um privacy towards the the the entire world pretty much and you still can comply with anything you you want to comply with you can uh disclose any portion of the of the data that is kind of hidden by by zero knowledge cryptography Etc so it's still uh um still possible to to have um I would say realistic uh uh Mass adoption uh uh because I I think that kind of Cypher Punk full-blown privacy uh um for all is utopian one I I would say maybe some people will disagree and and I think it's probably for the better to to be honest but this is some philosophical debate now anyways um long story short ZK as a technology allows uh um implementation of identity protocols that are fully private yet allow you to disclose uh any portion or any kind of uh uh information held by your uh identity account or storage to any party that you want so that's very important property I guess um okay and I I would just like to uh ask everyone if you have let's go beyond all these use cases and challenges if you have anything that we haven't mentioned here for example I remember Justin reading those uh medium posts from whatever 2017 when I used to read everything I can I could um get my hands on ZK related you were mentioning some interesting crazy ideas having ethereum with only a single op code with that verifies Z proofs and remove all the other op codes and whatnot so anything guys that you want to maybe bring up that comes to your mind that can be some additional uh use case or or implementation of ZK here probably I would like to mention one of the applications that I think that we will hear a lot in the coming in the coming years and is the multi party computations I mean if you understand ZK as a I mean you have a you are an individual you have some data and you want to process this data and then you prove that this process is valid so here imagine that instead of being a single individual you have like many individuals that they want to do a computation and you want to compute a result but that comes from information that comes from many individuals and you don't want to share this individuals we want to keep the zero knowledge uh preserving there I think this is I mean this is I think this is an amazing idea and an amazing technology ZK is a again is a fundamental piece for all these kinds and this allows uh individuals to to to have this shared knowledge I mean it's just without revealing your information you can uh know something that's like the the agregation of all the data of of of many people here so here a lot of applications will come on on on that and I think this is a really cool technology that we will hear more in the upcoming in the coming the coming years okay thanks Jordy Justin can we have it here you with only one up code yes um and in some sense we are moving towards that that future right um um so you saw it five years well actually I had completely forgotten that I I I I wrote about this uh and you know vitalic is is very interested nowadays in massively simplifying the execution layer down to down to one up codes but um even in terms of things that we have planned is to to snar ify the evm and basically from the point of view of of a validator you just have to verify this once knock but what we can actually go much further which we can create uh a ZK evm verification op code within the evm so that if you want to deploy an evm equivalent rollup um you you can just benefit from this the the this this one up code so instead of building you know some sort of crazy you know multi- multi-pro multi verifier uh zkm you can just use this this this oneup code so that should dramatically lower the barrier to entry to to building a zkm equivalent um roll but it has actually another superpower which is that um it it stays equivalent as eum hard Forks so let's say that eum makes a change to the evm well now if you want to be evm equivalent how do you up you know update your circuit and like the only way that I know for RAB today is to use governance but unfortunately governance if if it has the ability to modify the circuits that's an attack Vector uh because you know someone can take over the all the tokens and then make a vote which will just change the C in such a way that all the funds go to to the attacker um and so with this one op code we can remove the need for for for governance uh on on execution specifically and then another really cool um aspect of this is that if there is a bug in the circuits and there will be bugs for some period of time um then the the layer zero the social layer can can fix it uh so we can up update our clients uh on the other hand again like if you wanna if you wanna if you have a critical bug um you're going to need governance to to go ahead and fix it at the roller player would having that single op code require to enshrine some proving system or can it be done in such a way where there's no enshrinement right um that is a good question so one of the really clever ideas by vitalic is that um the proofs are actually um offchain so they're kind of Gossip at the peer-to-peer lay layer and they only affect the folk Choice rule so let's say that there's five clients uh execution clients for example geff has aover and it has its own kind of GE snar and that gets broadcast and then as a validator I kind of choose what proofs I'm going to listen to uh and if it happens that GE SNS have a bug while I can now update my client and run the the ref SNS and so the the cool thing here is that you can have the client diversity at the fork Choice level without uh enshrining any specific circuit or any specific prover uh for this oneop code this is very cool okay they are warning us that we have only a couple of minutes left so um yeah just to wrap up what we have covered so far even though I was joking in the beginning that the statement is controversial I think at this point there is General General opinion or rough consensus in the in the industry that ZK is the end game and as we have covered on this panel there is indeed no other technology that can solve all these challenges address all these use cases like scaling privacy interoperability decentralization identity Etc so it really is a fascinating and I would say critically important uh technology I would like to hear from you guys two things one why it might not be the end game what can go wrong possibly in your mind and because we don't have time for another uh round after that if you can share any closing thoughts in regards that with regards to that or anything apart from that so yeah these two things um Uma over to you please yeah I think maybe in general like the social layer of ethereum and like the ecosystem needs to emphasize more that like security actually matters and things like that I think one thing that could be really bad is if one day there's this like catastrophic something bad happens and there's like catastrophic failure of like systems that aren't secure and then everyone realizes oh in hindsight we should have been using ZK but we weren't um and I think it's like important to kind of preempt that and encourage people to like have security um like you know pay for security and you know go through a little bit of extra work um before we have something that like makes it really really obvious um and yeah I think the ZK Tech my closing thoughts are just the ZK Tech is I feel like pretty ready like inexpensive and rapidly getting cheaper today so hopefully we see that future sooner rather than later fully agreed excited for that to do you want to go next uh yeah I I I actually wanted to follow up on what Uma said I I I think the the Z Tech is almost there and we are at a point where we can use uh use things that were difficult to imagine a few years ago I remember having a conversation in early 2021 with someone whom I really respect and uh there were just rumors going around that Jordy is building an EDM compatible EV and zvm and that person said that Jord is insane it would be it would never be possible to do that and here we are just three years later and there are multiple ZK VMS on Main net that are almost or entirely eval and and it's just uh and the technology just keeps improving so there are still things that we can improve that will uh that will allow what Justin describes in terms of synchron composability Etc but but yeah but but it's been a it's been an insane few years to be involved in in terms of how much the technology improved and for sure Justin want to go next yeah I'm also excited by the commod commoditization of SNS uh because it means that they can be used as a primordial building block in the rest of cryptography so St are very useful in MPCs and FH um and they're also useful for example if we want to do postquantum signatures right like one very easy way to do a postquantum signature is to have a a stock uh of U of of of knowledge of of of some sort of uh of of of a hash image um and you can also use uh SNS for for aggregation of signatures and that's that's one of the big problems that uh we're faced uh right now at at L1 is you know how can we very very quickly aggregate a million signatures and I think SNS can can provide an answer there um and and also SNS um are used for like this crazy futuristic um you know cryptography like witness encryption and IO and one shot signatures it's it's always a building block in in these constructions and uh I'm hoping that they become as moded as as hash functions which are also used everywhere okay awesome uh bobin you want to go next yeah so um I think why ZK might not be the end game like I can think of a couple of reasons but none of them are the reasons like which put us in a world where probably would be pleasant to live in uh like one is maybe there's like some fundamental flaw that is found in cryptography that affects like all ZK proving systems and in that case I think we have much much bigger problem uh and it's not just DK related uh that U and probably a very unrealistic scenario and then again if that happens it's like not going to be a fun world to live in and the other way is like more on the social side where for whatever reason um you know similar how like encryption was considered to be too uh like sensitive to be handled by mere humans like maybe governments will decide to ban use of ZK for some uh like because you can do various things and maybe it will get caliz or something like that and again this would not be the world that I want to live in uh if that happens uh but like aside from like this extreme unlikely scenarios I can't imagine like why ZK would not be the end game for at least for blockchains and probably many other applications as well okay awesome and Jordy why it might not be the end game and what are your closing thoughts well yeah I just want to express a little bit a concern that that that they have I mean it's besides security or even extend a little bit beond security I mean I remember at the beginning of the blockchain when somebody just sent a a smart contract to ethereum there was at least 10 15 persons or 20 persons that verify that a smart contract that check that read a smart contract and that verifies that actually this smart contract was doing what actually they were claiming to do um this does not I mean I don't see this spirit anymore and even the ZK uh in the ZK I mean this systems become more complex and verifying all these becomes even much more difficult but if we build a system that's a trustless systems okay that means that uh we don't need to trust uh we should and and in order to trust you need to to check you need to verify what's uh what's what's in there and little bit is just Express the concern that if we are not verifying the systems if you if you are not understanding if we don't have people that just checking what's behind uh uh this can be problematic here I mean a huge shut up for example to the to to you must work on all these systems I think this can help a lot because at the end they're simplifying a lot the the the the source code of the actual Pro itself I think this is a good direction to go that but even that I mean verification is important verifying that uh what you are doing is correct and this is responsibility we don't have a central Authority that's going to do that I mean there this is responsibility of all the all the all the peers uh in the centralizes uh in the centralite systems to verify that uh what we're running actually is is is is is is correct makes sense okay guys we have to wrap up this one thanks a lot I have really enjoyed this conversation and thanks uh Master Hudson for not kicking us out earlier and allowing us a few extra minutes yeah that's all thanks everyone [Music] w