Panel: Into the ZK Verse

[Music] [Applause] [Music] with that we are ready to move on to our our panel which is also the last uh discussion for for today um i'll just quickly introduce all of our panelists uh this is going to be a discussion around everything that's happened today we're just going to talk about all the new themes and and all the new products and for this panel like chained by uh vitalik buterin mihello paul bobbin brandon jordy uh and a lot of you already here and then this this whole panel will be moderated by anna rose from the zero knowledge podcast so um without further ado let's uh welcome anna and team uh to uh join us on this panel and i'll let and take it from here hello hello hello hi ask everybody turn on video and uh here we go hello everyone again hi so is everyone up let's just give them a second to put their videos on hilo italic and i think paul's here too paul hi and i think we're just waiting for brandon brendan [Music] let's see if he can make it as well we'll just give it one more minute uh there we go do we have everyone i think we're here okay very cool so i guess we should kick off um i feel like you've already all been introduced and actually a little bit i want to share a little bit what the plan is for this panel so we have a pretty big panel um and we have myself and vitalik who just joined so you have heard from a lot of the other panelists before you've heard kind of deep dives into what they're working on but the way i want to structure this is i kind of want to start with talking a little bit about a recent blog post that vitalik wrote called end game then i want to bring in all the other speakers to talk about the different zk solutions they're building to potentially compare and contrast them or see how they're collaborating i want to talk a bit about zk community the tools that are missing and if we have time i want to talk about like the zk future so let's kick off with this uh i want to say like high level deep dive into end game the blog post that you recently wrote vitalik so in it you you outlined multiple paths that would give us a trustless censorship resistant ethereum but it would be scaled and the first sort of block was very much a road map and to me that was like a road map without roll-ups there's four design possibilities for design changes um that would help so do you want to just explain to us a little bit what that road map looks like sure so that um a part of the post was basically actually trying to answer the question of like if you take a walk like a big block watch it or something even much bigger than ethereum right like one of these chains that tries to you know like have very high tps have not like and uh completely sacrifice decentralization and have very few notes right so going much further on that dimension than ethereum ones like how if you start from there how could you turn that into something that like say like i would feel comfortable building an ecosystem um and basically the chat like the challenge with of those blockchains as they are today right i think that i get outlined in a little bit when i wrote the post on uh i think the limits of watching scalability of about half a year ago right right yeah i kind of wrote that little short story of like you know what happens if like seventy percent of the validators actually do communicatively try to force through some change that everyone else said and you know if you don't have a fully validated notes then like they're going to be able to actually like force that change through and users are not going to be able to do anything about it until it's too late um so the idea that i have is basically that you just add in the like elements of a decentralized validation right and decentralized validation is something that we do know how to do um so we like for example we know how to um you know mark put the state into a merkle tree we know how to like put state routes after like every small bundle of transactions we know how to make a fraud proof we know how to make it so that if the blog has even one mistake in it then like you can make a fraud proof that covers just that one mistake um and then broadcast that broad proof and then the rest of the network even if they don't have anywhere close to the computational capacity you needed to actually run a full node they would still be able to verify this broad proof and they would know that you know this what this blockchain is trying to push through something that bridge the rules right so that was one change um and then the alternative to broadcast was to instead use a zero knowledge first sorry again ck stars and just like verify the correctness of the block correctly and then add also if you want an extra layer of protection you can add committees and if to verify the data is available then you know we can add in a data availability sampling which is in itself a big technological rabbit hole but like the goal of it is to basically like have this kind of collaborative decentralized way of checking that the data of the block actually is published right and so you know if after publishing that block the notes disappear then like there's still the data floating around somewhere so that the rest of the network can keep building on top of it and if it does have fraud so the rest of the network can afford through it right so my argument is that if you start with the centralized like chains of today and you just kind of add this extra armor on top then you know you could end up with something that's pretty decent right like you know you you solve the fraud you solve the data availability issues you add like some extra channels for transactions to get in that have to be included so they can't censor and like the result is something where block production is centralized but like all of this kind of extra protocol armor that you're adding prevents them from actually like doing anything really terrible and there in that first model that roadmap you also said oh i'm getting to unstable message just let me know if you can hear me okay okay you actually made a distinction between the block validation and the block production is this like can you kind of go a little deeper like without like law production as a as a separate thing sure um so i think uh original bitcoin philosophy right basically like said block production equals block validation right because you know to produce a block you take a bunch of transactions you run the process of like validating or executing or whatever those transactions um and then you make a block um and you publish the blog and then in order for someone else to verify the block like they have to run like basically the same code right they have to check the signatures in the same way that you check the signatures they have to update the state in the same way that you updated updated the state and they have to um you know check the hashes in the same way that you check for hashes like they basically repeat what you did right and so there's this kind of one-to-one correspondence it's like every unit of effort that you use in producing a block is also a unit of effort that every other node on the network has to individually take in order to validate it and this is one of these uh like big bottlenecks to scalability right um so the now with some of these newer technologies we can actually start to decouple uh production from validation actually even like if you don't take into account like fraud groups and cts dark said any of the fancy stuff um one other technology that lets me do this is a stateless clients right so this is the idea that whoever builds the blog they have to hold the stage so they have to hold everyone's accounts whatever balances hold everyone's public keys and they then like how um admirable proofs right so they add vertical proofs so i can use miracle branches proving all of the individual accounts that were actually touched by the transaction and then they just include those miracle groups as part of the transaction and someone verifying a block does not have to have the state right like you do not need to have like more than you know like a few megabytes of ram basically in order to verify one of these stateless blocks because uh everything you need to verify the block is part of the block right and like the block just tell like the block just has this extra information telling you like hey you know bob did have 75 coins and joe did have 115 points and now joe is going to have 90 coins and you know bob's gonna have a hundred points and here's the miracle proofs that prove um that like the the the numbers are all correct and then they like match up with the route right and so if you do that then you're already like you're making this separation right you're basically saying well in fear of producing a block requires having a big hard drive verifying a block does not require having a big hard drive because that you just verified these markup words instead right and then z snarks they go way further right just with a zika snark you're making production even more expensive to some extent because you're saying if you produce a block then you also have to you know do all this extra polynomial magic with all of its overhead on top um but then when um once you do that and once you create and you add the proof verifying the proof is really easy right so the amount of work needed to create the block goes up but the amount of work needed to verify the block goes way way down um and so this already starts to like bring us closer to this world right where um you know you have these uh more centralized water producers but with these uh like more decentralized forms of verification you can prevent them from doing out like as much um actually mean things because like if they try pushing an invalid block through then like guess what they're not going to be able to make a balance proof i see yeah you know disappeared but i guess um like just to kind of continue through my job my post uh on my own a bit um so like that that's kind of the the principle that enables all of this right i think i might even say like that's the principle that enables kind of blockchain scalability theory in general like i to me blockchain scalability theory is all about like removing this one-to-one correspondence right and making uh verification easier than block production um so then i started talking about roll-ups right and roll ups are this really fascinating layer two scaling uh strategy um where basically you like you do even more separation of uh like basically block production and block verification right um because uh what a rollups it does is it says well so you have the ethereum network and the ethereum network has its layer one state like you know like like alice can have 75 keys bob can have 100 and all of these like you know the summer smart contract came out piece of code all of these things are just like kept track of by all the ethereum nodes and then with a roll-up we say well we have this one smart contract and like we can call it like this gateway contract and that smart contract stores in its storage and we're covered and that merkle root is from the point of view of ethereum just a 32 byte hatch right like whatever it's a 32 byte hash if you're i'll give you any handles 32 byte hashes all the time um but from the point of view of its own protocol it's the merkle root of this whole other universe that ethereum is not even aware of and inside of this universe um you know like you can have lots of people doing their own things like people can have different coins you can have even more smart contracts and the id theory is basically that to update this merkle route you don't actually have to like directly tell ethereum what every single one of the transactions are you just provide a proof okay because if you provide a proof um then like you are doing the proving off chain and you're providing a little bit of data and uh like that little bit of data goes um goes on chain and that's just like a highly compressed record that just says you know ls plus 25 everything looks like you just uh muted you got me you accidentally accidentally muted yourself so like i got a question for you if you want to uh since we're waiting for anna to come back i have a question um i saw a couple of excellent tweets the other day talking about this kind of end state and one of them that i thought was particularly thoughtful was uh in this future is ethereum really for blockchains and end users are going to migrate to the layer twos and and the future for theory is blockchain the blockchain connectivity and our multi-chain future is actually um you know it's all the ethereum ecosystem wondering your sort of thoughts about sort of what is the future of the end user in that ecosystem that's exactly where i'm what i'm what i'm getting at right um because uh what what you have with these roll-ups is when you have these like extra universes that get created where like the ethereum protocol by itself is not aware of that all it does is just verifies a few proofs but then the roll-ups like they do have all these universes and doing things inside of these uh roll-up universes is much much cheaper than doing them on ethereum because of how it doesn't like the entire ethereum what um ecosystem doesn't have to verify all these transactions just to just the people in those roll-ups have to verify those transactions and so what that basically means is that you you have much lower scalability or so you have much higher scalability um and you also have like much more creativity for people to do different things right like you can have a roll-up that runs blossom you can have a roll-up that runs a bitcoin like utxo model you can have a roll-up that runs like a version of the pvm but paralyzed and you know you can get a lot of these really cool benefits of having a multi-chain ecosystem um except with ethereum acting as this common base layer that basically provides what we call shared security right so like instead of you know having like 100 blockchains those 100 blockchains all talk to each other and then if you have lots of these very interconnected applications if even one of those blockchains get 51 attacks and that might like risk the entire network you just say well no all 100 uh all of these hundred things are roll-ups they all like live on ethereum and uh you know when they and they all derive security from you know the ethereum based layer the ethereum data availability layer um and all these things and so in order to make any single one of them break you basically have to make ethereum break right and like so this kind of like shared root of trust and shared root of bridging like it allows for a cross roll of communication to be really efficient it allows for shared security you have all these um all these nice properties but at the same time right what this means is that like the long-term future of ethereum you know either one rollup wins um in which case that one roll up has to learn how to be really scalable and we actually end up in a world that looks really similar to the world where you start with a not scalable base layer or so you start with a scalable but centralized base layer and then you add this kind of thrust armor we are instead here like you start off with ethereum which is just the trust armor and then you like add this extra roll-up thing that provides a scalability right so if one roll-up wins then we're in that world and then if many roll-ups win then you know we're in the kind of inter-chain world but with shared security so i thought that's like really interesting right like there's a lot of different paths to doing things in the blockchain lanes but a lot of them actually end up leading to very similar places very cool um i'm back i apologize i dropped off at some point but thank you so much for continuing there and actually this is a great point to open the conversation up a little bit um on this topic of multi-chain i mean here we have with us a number of teams that are going to be building very different types of roll-ups um but first before we do that i wanted to actually ask mihael mihailo um polygon has invested in zk and i'm very curious like a lot of the teams have presented very roll up focused concepts do you feel like it's primarily driven by the scaling need right now or do you think that there could actually be new possibilities that are opened up by this you mean by the by the zika rollups in general like these are basically yeah it's like investing into zk for scaling do you think that's purely for scaling or do you think it opens up new possibilities definitely yeah that's a fantastic question yeah thanks so much anna we believe uh zk zq based solutions have have much wider basically area of application than scaling specifically it's only that scaling is now still a pressing need in the ethereum ecosystem so we have started like basically vitalik has started something amazing and like millions of people want to join this this new paradigm this new idea of global internet of value and their free and we really have this pressing need to to welcome these people and allow them to experiment with the uh with ethereum basically so once ideally i foresee maybe in one to two years we will we will have some uh uh some solutions in place that will be scalable much more scalable than those that we have today and that will have security properties of ethereum and that pressing need to scale will be kind of relieved kind of relief then i believe we will see other interesting and amazing applications of zika technology primarily on the side of privacy related to identity for example and many many really other other interesting applications that is at least my opinion or my bet for the future very cool um i want to ask a question to jordy and brendan actually so the two of you have proposed uniquely the zk evms and i've been very curious about kind of how those are similar or different like i know you're working together in a lot of ways but could we explore that a little bit what a z like a zk evm maybe maybe also just define what that actually means and how those two solutions are potentially a little different go ahead jordy yeah i can start it's uh yeah there are i think there are two projects that they are started in different point and probably with different goals and with different environments and we were independent none of us were at quite for polygon when we started the project and we have we come from different places and the well i think we have a good things and things that maybe other teams are better and they have good things and maybe things that we can go better and the the the good thing of of being in this case together in the same umbrella of polygon is that uh we have this collaboration relationship and right now i understand much better what they are doing uh they probably understand much better what we are doing and uh we can collaborate when and and help on each other actually i would like this to be even opener not just to the polygon projects just to wider projects and and because we are solving it's a humanity challenge you know it's not uh it's something that we need to solve if we want to block change to to to scale we need to somehow work together and and and for us you know these are um there is no body that holds like the other knowledge for building this and and as much knowledge we can join together in order to scale this we will do it faster and better and and this is a little bit the spirit of course cooperating teams is is not easy but uh you know it's just we are just starting you know it just uh it's just the beginning but the the the feeling is that we are sharing the same goals we come from different places we have different knowledge but we are sharing the same goals and uh i'm sure that we will work every time closer and and better nice brandon do you have any thoughts on that i mean i think jordan you just shared sort of the similarities i mean the the use of fry or the use of fry-like techniques in both are a similarity there that i noticed from the presentation that brendan did earlier um but brandon yeah maybe do you want to share a little bit about the way you're thinking about it uh yeah sure i i think just to echo what jordy said um it's been really great working with hermes and with madden and um i feel like we've sort of created the foundation for uh something really special moving forward um i think that the way that we see it um i think i i don't want to speak for for jordy but i think what they're working on is is super cool like um sort of simulating uh the evms kind of op code for op code or close to that um in a snark is like an amazing goal um for us like our ambitions might be a little bit more modest um our goal is we we'd like to be able to take existing solidity code and transpile it um into what we call zk byte code um maybe swapping out some things that are really expensive uh in a snark like 3 for more arithmetic friendly um hash functions um and yeah just just trying to to to build something that's that's very performant and um and can scale um so that's that's how i'd sort of characterize um both like it's just great to be able to to work within polygon and to kind of explore uh the whole design space and collaborate i actually want to i want to bring in bob in a little bit on the conversation now because i mean that use you talk about the collaboration and then you're using fry which te like originally came from starks bobbin you're building a stark-based roll-up do you want to tell us a little bit about i don't know maybe we can talk a little bit about the connection or what you're getting from some of this dialogue oh you're muted by the way sorry about that yeah so i think in terms of collaboration there is a lot of like i think there are some similarities with both projects that uh kind of we think about uh in many different technical areas one example that i kind of talked about in the uh in my presentation is that uh because for example uh um starts are very flexible and you know fry allows you to be flexible in terms of choosing the finest field you're in uh maiden is actually using the same finite field as uh polygon zero uh is using so we have abilities to uh kind of like jointly work on different things that might be useful in that specific field and uh use uh you know it will be used in both projects and that's in terms of optimizations and in terms of like developing arithmetizations for specific problems that you know either they come up with and i can use or i come up with and they can use and you know uh that works uh very well and uh you know there are other decision points like in terms of like how do you like overall i think there are three big buckets of choices when you kind of think about these solutions and the first bucket is you know what proving system you use and what are your information you use and then the other bucket is kind of what is the design of your virtual machine for example are you gonna you know which field are you going to choose what is going to be your instruction set is it going to be very close to the edm or as close as possible or is it going to be slightly different and then you're going to transpile and the third design choice that you need to make is what your network architecture is going to look like and you know there are different uh like you know with hermes we might look more into like their network at the architecture of how they're thinking about and try to uh uh have like some uh some of the learnings from there to apply to maidan but uh in the proving system uh aspect we might be more close to what polygon zero is doing and so we might take some learnings from there so there is a lot of different areas to kind of collaborate and uh cross-pollinate knowledge across i feel like your conversations are probably incredibly interesting i hope you document some of this for others because like just thinking and actually yeah what are the plans for how to share information within the org and also outside of it i think one of the things i want to say the conversations that we have is like probably a highlight of my week like i have to wake up a little bit earlier than i usually would like to but uh it is a highlight of my week when we just basically chat for a few hours about like the things that we've done over the last week and what we are planning to do and like what problems everybody's facing and like what solutions uh we have found so it's it's really cool yeah i can only second but what uh what bobby said and it's like really really one of the things of course we are really proud that we have uh all these amazing people and these amazing projects now under the polygon umbrella but what we are really really proud of and what is really exciting is to see actually these teams working together it's like very clear spirit of collaboration not even a mentioning or even thought about you know one team being competitive to each other or something like that and we really are aware that this is like early stage of innovation and it's like really amazing and inspiring to to watch these teams basically uh on these calls uh discussing exchanging knowledge updating each other it's like really amazing and exactly as jordy said we would really like to be we don't want to be a closed source you know zk powerhouse like or something that is not shared with the public we want to include all other relevant projects individual individuals we are still discussing and thinking about ways how we can make this more open to the to the general uh community and to everyone basically that are interested in in scaling interior in this way cool well i like to hear that paul i want to ask you about your solution um so when i heard about nightfall it like this idea of mixing uh optimistic roll-ups with zk rollups yeah tell me a little bit about when that kind of came to fruition what was the like why did you decide to actually add the optimistic to this so i mean we've been working on privacy for what five six years now we actually showed the first version of nightfall in 2018 at devcon in prague and we've been we've been cranking out we cut the gas fees we implemented you know simplified all of the data sources we we ended up with uh batching and you're just in an endless race with how you uh kind of drive down the gas fees and the cost structures that make it affordable so you know there's if you talk to enterprises there's a couple of things that they really care about number one right they really want to have privacy like you know enterprises will not do anything if i'm going to move my inventory or buy stuff from another company that's sensitive business information how many widgets i'm buying who i'm selling them to how much i'm paying for them that is incredibly sensitive they will not do anything without privacy that's like job one and then the other issue is and and this comes up all the time with enterprises and you know i um is they're like i'm worried about the gas peaks are the gas fees gonna be unreliable is it gonna be too high right they they understand that they want some predictability in their cost structure so uh back in the beginning of this year we were looking at sort of where to go next and we realized like optimistic roll-ups give us this excellent combination of um kind of speed uh cost and privacy and so nightfall three became an optimistic roll up and then we're working with polygon we're able to turn it into polygon nightfall and add things like instant withdrawal that we showed earlier today very cool and that focus on privacy i actually kind of like we mentioned this sort of like maybe with the scaling comes privacy but to the other three teams here bobbin jordy and brandon is that very like how close on the road map is privacy for each of you like is that built in or is that kind of coming later i can try to take this i'll go ahead okay i'm just going to say very quickly like we're you know the the level of cooperation that you were talking about inside of polygon across those teams that has also been applied to the relationship with ey and the level of cooperation is astonishing with so many brilliant people like brendan and bobbin and and there's a you know mihailo is coordinating a lot of that so i will say we are we're we're not going to silo the privacy knowledge in one place i wouldn't imagine that it sounds like that would be very off-brand [Laughter] cool okay bobbin yeah you're about to say something about that i do want to say that like even though the scaling is the primary goal and but i do think like for me personally privacy is also almost as important as scaling although we need to prioritize uh scaling right now but i do think like when i think about like the design of the virtual machine is like uh like how can we support privacy design of the network itself uh the role of how can we support privacy in the future and i do make sometimes very conscious design choices which may not be necessarily ideal for uh supporting scaling although it's not going to hurt it too much but they will make uh supporting privacy or privacy preserving smart contracts much easier in the future so it is very much front and center for me cool jordy brandon yeah it's part of course it's part of the roadmap of course it's not like the first priority that we have right now as as as bowen says i think we need to solve right now the first is to scale but uh immediately next is uh immediately next is privacy and and this is of course uh important and yeah maybe brandon can add some value here but i think that the the recursive recursive snarks is a key piece for for privacy uh at some point so maybe random you can add some some points there yeah i think just like you said i i think for us one of the obviously we've been focused on scaling but one of the benefits of having um really fast proverbs as and and sort of focusing on uh commodity hardware for approvers is that for applications that require proofs to be generated on the client side um we can do that like very very quickly and so our proven performance sort of makes transaction creation feel like instantaneous for a private transaction whereas before um if you're creating a proof for a more complicated or like general smart contract um it could take like 30 or 40 seconds um with previous primitives and so that that's something that that we're excited about but like bobbin and jordy said we're sort of focused on scaling for short term cool and paul i have one last question on your project which is like i i know the project zk oprah which is also a zk royal optimistic roll up combined how do you see yourselves as different from that or similar so we looked across when we started out some of our work and thinking about optimistic roles we looked across all the layer twos right there of which we we sort of counted up 12 right four of them are focused on privacy um zakapru is next to ours in terms of snark usage one of the most efficient i think where we see kind of a really important difference beyond the the integration that work with polygon is our license is a creative commons public domain license and there's a very conscious choice behind that there's no gpl there's no anything right so there's no complications there's no friction you don't have to sit there and go through the license terms and think is there a gotcha or a surprise here it is a pure unrestricted contribution to the ethereum ecosystem and and there are there's no surprises there's no monetization model in there um i realize i'm not going to make myself ceo of the year with this speech but uh it really you know we wanted to drive adoption and make a contribution to the community and and this is where we kind of made our stand and in in working with polygon we found people who were like yeah that's a good idea and that made a big difference that actually like the next topic i want to touch on are the tools that are missing and i feel like this kind of open source ethos like let's think of it in that context so very very usable very open source what what are the tools that maybe the polygon teams or polygon affiliated teams or maybe outside teams should be thinking about building in the zk space i know that's pretty general but i'd love to hear from all of you what you're thinking about this sure yeah thanks anna for the question and i think of course the question is very important and there's like several uh ways or several things that we're doing in in that regard so first of all with all the teams are pursuing this ethereum compatibility in one way or another either we're implementing the evm itself or introducing compilers that were support uh solidity etc and that is already building a huge service to ourselves first of all like we're benefiting from everything that has been created in the ethereum ecosystem so all the toolings from wallets to block explorers to all those very important toolings and we are very much aware building polygon and polygon psja an example and plasma before that we are very aware of this big difference once you build a solution that is not ethereum compatible or even compatible like we did with plasma initially and once you have an evm compatible solution it's like a huge difference so you instantly are in a much much but better position because you just simply can inherit i mean simply relatively easily you can inherit all the existing toolings of ethereum that's number one number two we are fortunate that we have now multiple zk based effort or zika roll-ups specifically within the polygon ecosystem and we are already starting an internal effort to to kind of uh introduce some standards because there are a lot of components and tools that will be shared between these solutions so the core i guess engines and or virtual machines so these solutions are quite different i would say but the other components are are relatively similar and there's a lot of overlap there and moreover there's overlap with the existing pos chain there's no overlap with the the stack of our polygon sdk a solution another solution that we have and we are currently establishing these standards and we believe this will significantly uh speed up the development and make the solution at the all the solutions at the same time uh uh more bulletproof in a sense that all of them will use the components so there will be the same component so they will be uh uh much more battle tested and and uh i guess secure uh the third thing that we intend to do is that we as i said uh earlier on the panel we have this one billion which is pretty significant commitment to develop these types of solutions we will be offering uh extensively grants and uh publishing constantly uh missing components or tools that uh are required for the ecosystem in general not only for political of course and these are at least three things that immediately come to mind when it comes to uh building or introducing all the the missing components so yeah i'll leave it to others yeah that question of which tools this has actually come up recently we're doing a git coin side round just fyi all focused on zk tech and one of the thoughts that we had around that was like how how like what what does the community actually need in terms of zk and how is that communicated outward like i'd love to find ways maybe together with the polygon team to like gather some of those tools and share them to the larger community so that like we can find those teams to potentially build them i kind of want to throw to vitalik again about this like from your perspective maybe maybe it's not exactly tools but what pieces do you feel need to be implemented for some of those futures you outlined earlier in this what kinds of tools needs to be implemented let's see i think um i did like first of all yeah the ethereum layer one um needs to be yet improved obviously like you know we need to actually get um finish up with the proof of stake um we need to execute on the sharding roadmap and i'm going to like actually add more data space um so that roll ups have uh some place where they can put data on like about a week ago i got released to this uh post um it was the the data shorting roadmap where ikea talked about how to like split it up into different stages where like just adding more but reducing the gas cost of call data would be the first step and then you would add like a shard or like a a couple of shards to just add a bit of data space and everyone would still download it but like it would at least get the uh shorting machinery um in place and uh tested a bit and then that just gets expanded over time and then we add data availability sampling over time so the whole thing stays like blind friendly and eventually we would just have this like you know several megabytes a second worth of that data space that rollups could just uh freely use and uh that like that by itself is already enough to just give up you know a huge amount of steel ability for rollups but in order to get there that stuff has to actually build right yeah so that's one piece um and i think uh you know zke evm implementations they've even talked about them a lot but also just like very important in the very general purpose infrastructure i think one other thing also that i think doesn't get talked about with the zika via implementations is that they have two purposes one of them is that they enable fully edm compatible ct roll-ups and the other is that they enable better light clients of the ethereum chain right because um for the ethereum chain itself like you know we'll love to start it we will have to make it so that you don't need like as much of a heavy note in order to be able to process and like verify things that are underneath your engine um so if you know that itself gets us then then that's uh also something that's going to be amazing um sure no no go ahead finish sorry um cross roll-up uh bridging infrastructure i'm just um you know if we're going to have a goal or two world in general like that said you know can't be avoided um like i've written some posts on like how i think some crossbow origin can be done in a fully decentralized way i know there's a whole bunch of projects that are working on like a bunch of different uh versions of ways to do that um so really excited to see that space mature more um [Laughter] well you just mentioned actually bridging and i want to understand like as as we imagine more and more roll-ups coming out all having these different forms you talked about standards but what is like art and maybe it's too early at this point but like are you all thinking about the bridges between your different potential roll-ups and and is this something that you already see on the horizon is this a problem you're going to get to later i'm just curious what the thinking is around that yeah great question and i just might use the word standard the word standards is we're being very cautious with that word it's polygon at this point like we don't want to impose any sort of uh constraints we believe this is a phase really of uh high intensity innovation and experimentation within the ethereum community in general including polygon of course and hence why we do not want to impose any final you know global architecture or ways or standards how these applications or projects will communicate among themselves we really want to want things to happen organically we see a lot of collaboration between these teams and let's see what happens organically so might we might see some of these solutions converge into one maybe they will not continue to exist separately again what is really important for us is that they're all working together towards the same basically goal so we are being really careful not to impose any standard standards when i said standards i meant like help for basically uh reuse using components in a helpful way um but that being said moving forward in the future like vitalik as he mentioned he had a very interesting idea uh how to to bridge these roll-ups in a trustless manner and we are willing to explore we just want to explore and facilitate as much innovation as possible we believe polygon is a very good position uh um now in terms of resources rich network effects and everything and all of that was or pretty much all was enabled by by ethereum basically so we o ethereum community and ethereum uh layer one a lot so i think this is now the perfect time for us to to start giving back actually cool i wanna kind of imagine like i think i think we're at the stage where we can start sort of also like predicting not predicting imagining the future of zk what what could be coming down the line so you know we've talked about this pri the private roll-ups often in the case often it's like private transaction within the roll-up but when you start offering something like private computation i'm kind of curious like what does a theory what did what are things living in a non-private and a private actually like how would they is there any envisionment on how these would interact and i don't know if vitalik if you're thinking about like what a privacy it's it's a roll-up in cosmos you call it a privacy zone but like what kind of thing what what does the fully private roll-up with potentially private computation actually mean yeah i think privacy preserving um smart contracts the infrastructure is uh i mean it's a really building it's it's a really big and exciting field of all on its own um i think like one thing is that there is no magic bullet right i think uh and like there is no battery like and that's more true for privacy than it is for scaling right because like for scaling you can't say that there is a magic bullet you just like try really hard and have a bunch of amazing and really smart people makes you know implementations and then you just copy what you have right but with privacy the problem like the is that um you have to start thinking like much more explicitly about well like who actually gets to have each piece of data right because in order to make an update with a piece of data you need to have a piece of data and so you can't have a literal black boxes where nobody like sees anything um and you know they have to have data that data has encryption keys and there's some people see each of these at each of these encryption keys and so like you have to think explicitly about like who are the owners of things in a privacy preserving system that you don't have to think about in just like an evm system and so like you you are going to have to work hard on programming languages in a way that you don't if all you're doing is just copying and selecting um you uh have to like actually think hard about like what applications are possible do applications even need to be redesigned like is privacy preserving human swap something that's even possible right like who would even have the important keys to the ammo or you know do you have to design it in a totally different way um so you know it's this big field um and i think uh it is going to take quite a bit of learning um yeah yeah i expect um you know we're gonna start with the simple stuff like you know just being able to move coins around and then people are going to build more and more and also what happens that idea of the private amms and this is a topic i've covered a couple times on the show i wonder if the roll-up builders are the roll-up builders working closely with the amm builders on that front like is that is there a strong connection between those two communities paul i don't know if you have any thoughts on that so i don't know if there's a strong connection but i i do want to there's there is something very there's a couple of very specific things that we are working on that i think are are relevant and you could make a private amm one is uh we're building something called starlight and the idea behind starlight is you know what you can do is you can mark up the logic in a solidity smart contract and we're doing this now in cooperation with polygons markup the logic in the solidity smart contract and uh it will compile it into a zero knowledge circuit now right now we can take a standard erc20 contract we put it into starlight and what we get out is the original version of nightfall basically right so we can do it for a simple erc20 what we want to be able to do is to basically throw any arbitrary business logic on it and then generate a zero knowledge circuit coming out of that so you can have logic that runs on chain and the reason you want logic to run on chain with privacy and not just do it off-chain and post-approve is a lot of business processes between companies there are multiple participants right if you have a network level business problem you can't have an individual participant successfully solve that for all the other network participants behind their firewall in their erp system right now they can see too much confidential information from all the others so uh this is something that's super important and then the other thing is we're working on something called midnight the goal is to make all the transactions look the same right now you can still look at oh he made a deposit she made a withdrawal we want to basically really make things even darker and make it harder to do network traffic analysis on who's doing business with him got it cool jordan b i i have a quick question for you i don't know if like are you have you spoken with a any of the amm builders any of the d5 folks i'm just so curious if there's like if there isn't yet like a crew doing that we should start bringing you together i've been talking with some of them but not uh in the roll up context i've been talking just for uh you know editing smart contracts and you know uh formal verifications and other stuff that are very interesting and they are managing but not in the not in the not not yet no it's not but at the end there are smart contracts so of course if you go to privacy i remember this is like another story but at the end uh actually it's like an example of a smart contract that can be run in a zig abm and and from this point of view is not the only smart contract because we are planning to run any smart contract on there but of course is uh if it's not the first is the second smart contract kind that you are looking at and yeah and yeah that's that's that's important a lot of the traffic right now in the ethereum is happening in in those small contracts so far i know we don't have too much time left but i want to ask a few more things so like so far we've talked really about zero knowledge for scaling zero knowledge for privacy but i know that there's some like moonshot use cases for zk and this is maybe not on exactly what you're working on but i want it since i have like six zk experts here why don't we if you're up for it just sort of share some ideas or some things you've heard in the zk space that could be really really exciting coming down the line that maybe even go past those two use cases this is to anyone and i hope there are some ideas i think um like they do end up having to do with uh scalability and privacy but there are applications that take advantage of the privacy in very different ways um so voting might be one example right like a lot of the voting in these existing taos just ends up happening completely in the clear and i've written many times about like why yeah that style ends up leading to bribes it ends up leading to just all kinds of collusion and there's some kind of like fairly nasty things and you know having more secret ballot elections is something that could really improve uh governance um so that like that and you know the work that's happening with macy and like all of those uh projects i think is something really interesting um another one is zero knowledge proofs for like anti-dos like anti-spam purposes um so the idea of that like you can prove that you have some token um and uh without actually proving like which particular that's something that can be used to like protect decentralized messengers um like status like for example against the dos attacks um it's uh if the token that your zero knowledge is proving is uh a proof of humanity token then um you know you can have like things like ubis and like things like that you know like civil resistance in a way that's friendly to people who don't have lots of money um without like having to actually yeah you know create launching that basis between like transactions and people's literal faces um so i think that's uh you know something that could be huge um yeah i know what you just made me think of as an example that comes more from the financial which is like white listing using zkp's but actually that idea could be used also just for like accessing groups or like knowing that certain tokens are in somewhere without knowing anything more about that that account um or that you you user like it's very i mean there's some really cool id like identity groups group management like yeah i don't know this is an exciting space so what about things yeah as vitalik said i think more or less all of these uh use cases go back to either scaling or privacy in one way or another basically but there's like really so many uh interesting or really necessary applications like one recent example it was this constitution dell where people amazingly you know pulled together a capital and almost bought the the us constitution and that's just one example where you really need privacy because if that fooling of capital was private then the opposing side or other leaders wouldn't be able to know how much constitution thou is actually willing to be then they won't be able they wouldn't be able to kind of somewhat trivially outbid them because you just simply know the the the amount of capital that the bidder has at disposal so it just won one out of hundreds of very interesting applications of uh zkp's when it comes to scaling and privacy right private voting is really important and then the other one i i i think is going to be super important is proof of regulatory compliance without having to disclose all of your personal private information right and i i think this is going to be a super interesting one for regulators what's going to happen the first time a company submits a mathematical proof instead of all the documentation i i want to be in the room for that yeah there's going to be a little bit of educating to get there on more on the regulatory side but um what about games i mean zk games there's one obviously great example with dark forest but i've also recently seen a lot more folks kind of come up with game ideas and yeah i'm wondering if you've seen anything in that direction as well that might be exciting anyone anyone we can just leave that there games and zk it's a thing check it out i don't know um i haven't seen anything but i think once uh like building zkp um focused applications and like you know if it's easier to do with virtual machines or which compilers or whatever once it becomes very accessible there is going to be a lot of use cases within gaming where you want to you know prove something to the other person and you know whether it is for exchange purposes as it is already happening using blockchains but maybe even outside of blockchains there could be very interesting use cases uh for using the kps but i think we do need to get to a point where a regular developer can just pick up and start programming something that has a zkpp functionality built in very cool in general actually do you see like the polygon zk fund this pool like this is meant i'm assuming for a lot of tools like scaling solutions libraries but do you think that those like applications that live on top but like really really deeply use zk would also potentially fall under that category absolutely absolutely also funding important research activities and everything that is directly or indirectly related to to building or adoption of zk uh based uh scaling solutions and private privacy focus solutions everything falls under the the scope i guess of of this fund definitely that's why like for us it was really a huge commitment like as i said maybe as i said in the the beginning of the the uh event uh we are fortunate enough that our treasury is very strong now but even like for us this was a huge huge commitment from our side and it just uh basically maybe manifests our our um belief how important this technology really is for for the whole ecosystem for the whole industry and that's why we decided to commit this significant amount and really help again everything that is indirectly or directly related to either research development or adoption of uh this technology that's awesome and i want to mention like just uh to pick you back what mikhail was said is that there are actually we're trying to do a few a couple of like fundamental research type of uh things where we try to uh you know figure out and you know engage researchers even outside of the polygon to figure out how we can for example speed up our station from the hash functions even more once we have like specific constraints of you know we're gonna use this field can we do something much more uh uh kind of performance in that specific field rather than trying to build a high arithmetic friendly hash function in general so uh there are uh a couple of projects that we're trying to do just even in the foundational research type of area fantastic i think we may be at time um kartik yeah are we if there's any closing questions we can we can go with that but uh we're at time okay well yeah if there's any like anything that anyone here wants to mention before we sign off anyone nothing ck is exciting join us maybe yes that i previously said that i'm really personally as a co-founder of polygon i'm incredibly really humbled and proud and grateful that we have all these great people under the the polygon umbrella and such a huge support from the ethereum community including vitalik this is like very huge honor and again a responsibility but we are like fully committed and again grateful for all the support and we are really just starting expect a lot of great things from ourselves very nice cool all right well i guess that wraps us up then good luck everyone and we can't wait to see what happens in the polygam in the polygon zk world thanks a lot everyone thanks anna thanks everyone thank you everyone and uh thank you so much anna for moderating and uh i think we are ready for a close and one thing i just want to say is i want to just thank everybody for tuning in and watching this whole thing because we're talking about what we're doing now is what's going to be the standard a few years from now and that to me is the most exciting piece like you're you're seeing a sneak peek at what the future looks like uh in different pieces and just kind of it's just uh the same quote around the future's already here just not evenly distributed and uh we're just seeing a glimpse of what what's to come so thanks everybody for sharing everything that's that's happening in this entire ecosystem it's not even just polygon but all together ethereum and zero knowledge and snarks and starks and i can't wait to see what comes out of all this that benefits everything sorry and huge thanks to you kartik and and uh your whole team for facilitating this thank you so much we'll be incredibly helpful we're we're honored to uh to vet the opportunity so thank you so much and uh with that um congrats on everybody who uh stayed till the end and uh tuned in to see what's happening in this entire ecosystem this wraps up zika day for uh for us and uh for uh those of you who are wondering and i know that i'm gonna get this question the most uh in the next minute we will be sending the poep tokens to everybody via email directly so don't worry you'll get that email directly into your inbox if you signed in and stay tuned for more things to come from the global site we'll be very soon sharing what 2022 looks like for all of us and uh hope all of you enjoy the weekend and see you all in the next year take care everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] you