This is epicenter episode 476 with guests at a rose and Kobe gherkin. I don't know, those is the founder of everything, ZK. So ZK, pod, ZK Summit, ZK, validator antique, a hack and Kobe is the head of research at geometry and also works with Anna on DK validated and seek a hack. And that's also cryptography advisor had Sealab. So lots of hats here before we speak with Anna. Anna and Kobe about the state of the ZK. Ecosystem that me tell you about
our sponsors today. Our sponsor is Omni Omni is your new favorite multi-chain, Mobile Wallet, it supports more than 25 protocols, so you can manage all of your assets in one place across all major EVMS, their 20s. So Z casing can start that are coming soon and not need EMS. But what's really special about omni's that you can do are the most important things in web, three directly. The wallet itself want to get yet? Only allows you to get the best year.
It was Zero fees. In three Taps, be taking liquids. Taking lending via our Volkswagen need to exchange your CC, on East to Adam on Cosmos Omni Aggregates. All major Bridges indexes. So you can bridge in swap a cross-eyed support networks in one transaction directly from within your wanted love and FTS Omni also offers an ft support so you can collect and manage your favorite and FTS. The soil chains, one place, and it's a super easy way to use web three.
And most importantly, Omni is fully self custodia. Meaning, you never have to trust anyone with your assets, other than yourself. And if you want, you can even use omni's, legio integration. So all of your funds, stay on your Hardware wallet, join tens of thousands of users in this next Generation while it by downloading it today on iOS Android at Omni dot app. Thank you for coming on shortly before the holiday. Good to be here. Yeah, fun to be on the other side.
It is crazy. Isn't I was I was recently on Sebastian's podcast to talk about knows his chain and it's really funny because it's so different on the other side. Yeah, on my show actually. Yeah, if been on YouTube before like ages ago. So cool.
Fantastic. So we're here to talk about the state of the ZK ecosystem because obviously it's been, there's been a lot of changes over the last year or so and it's been extremely difficult to kind of keep up for me as someone who does not pay attention to this full time, but maybe also for you guys. So maybe kind of definitely, we need your help but before we kind of dive into the ins and It's of this ecosystem. Let's get some background on both of you and I'll start with Ana.
Over 10 years ago, I think are almost 10 years ago. I was the founder of a web to start up and I was, you know, learning. I was working a lot with engineers at the time, but it was very web to is video. I was good, good experience, good education, and then come 2017. I sort of started to enter this like blockchain world and it was really, like, going back to
start, like everything. I had learned in the previous Tech, Says, I sort of had to unlearn and at the same time, like I wanted, I remember like 2017. I wanted to actually do a new project. I wanted like a second Technical startup that I would that I would start. But like right then, at least the people that I was coming into contact.
They were working on like deep client software, like it was like the deepest 10 most technical stuff and it was like yes there were some people pitching these ideas for like you know, Dental coin or like yeah, we'll use blockchain Plus. Us XYZ. But it was so it was so kind of like funny to really get involved, you kind of needed to be like an engineer. You needed to be like deep in it and so I was like, okay I can't really be an engineer. I can't really even do product at this point.
So what can I do? And somebody? So I had joined parody sort of for like a special project just to get a taste for what was going, and Frederick who became my co-host pitched this idea, like, why don't we do a podcast? We're both new in the industry. We have a bit of a technical Background. Why don't we do it? And so that's where the ZK podcast starts and that's where yeah, if I think if anyone's listening, and if they know anything about what I do, so I think that's where my work
probably starts for them. The ZK kind of family kind of proliferated or at least I mean you started with the ZK podcast but now you have the ZK Summit and seek a hack DK. Validate and they're all like, independent, but interrelated kind of project, right? Yeah, you also just, you introduce me just earlier is like the, you know, in charge of all things iike, that is not true. There are so many projects that I have nothing to do.
And actually, I mean, I always loved telling the story of like why did we call it the zero knowledge podcast. Like a lot of people ask me like, oh, did you work in cryptography before? I was like, absolutely not. I was around Engineers a fair bit but we for like and if anyone listens to the early episodes, like I think until episode 11. We just refer to the podcast as like this podcast because we had no name and we like floated some really like crappy crappy names before that.
And then someone kind of came around at some point and said, hey why don't you call this? Like we know about this weird form of zero, like of cryptography over there like this, it's called zero knowledge. You have zero knowledge. Why don't you call your shows your knowledge? It was kind of a joke. We laughed a little, I'm entering. It was like it was a bit of a dick. Nothing about this. My about it. The thing is, we thought, why don't we do it?
I mean, literally at the time, the only people who were listening, we're like the people in the room with us, so it really didn't matter. Well, we called it, there was very low stakes, but yeah, so we picked that name and then around that time, I wanted to do an event in Berlin.
Actually about something like, with some of the people I was meeting in the ecosystem, so I just wanted to throw a All blockchain event, but because the name of our show was Zero knowledge, I called this event, the zero-knowledge summit, and then I shared that event with a bunch of people. It was like, people could apply to talk and I shared it as far
as and why does I could? And it reached the ear of, or the desk of Howard, woo over in California, and he got that, like, oh, there's a zero knowledge Summit. This is awesome and then he applied. With like, eight of his friends and I at the same time, had contacted Zuko and I did get strad from the ECC now to come
over. And so even though it really just started as like this podcast Summit, but called zero-knowledge Summit. It became by the time we actually had that event, the first zero knowledge Summit and I actually do get to claim first because there was an event called ZK. Proofs just a month later. But we were, I think I'm pretty sure the first and then from, then on, like I was doing this twice a year.
So like the ZK Summit. Also, just introduced me to new ZK, topics, new, ZK, people and that Community grew. And at the same time, the podcast, like it really, I mean, and I really don't recommend anyone listens to the early ones. They really suck but like they really aren't very good but like around episode 21.
That's where we actually first start mentioning zero-knowledge Tech and we do like intro to ZK. But from that point forward, as we were learning more about it. So now we're talking like 2018, right? It's still really early in ZK. There's only, I don't know, maybe 100 people in the world who know what this is really. So it's like it just was kind of Lucky. Yeah, I'm really glad we picked that name. To get validator started in 2019, I met my co-founder will and I had pitched him.
I mean, I actually it was on my show. I think it was the Bison. Trails guys, sort of pitched me on being a validator there. Like you could be a validator to, and I'm like, really. Anyway, I pitched it to him. And then we started and there, we started validated on Cosmos, and then polka dot near extended. And then, yeah, I mean, it was, this is super cool because it gave me like a still think. Like if you go back to that,
Earlier part of the story. Like I have always wanted to be building something in this space, but it's been really hard or was really hard in 2017 to figure out what that was. And this validator role was like a really good way for us to start engaging in actually doing something like participating adding value to what we're what we're talking about and it was a great way to also be introduced into Cosmos and polka dot and
understand deeper. I mean, I kind of already knew polka dot but like these other ecosystems what was happening? Who are the players? It definitely influenced like my thinking about the entire space. It probably changed a little bit like, who I would have on his guess, what? I was curious about well, and then zkv has also developed. So we expanded past just sort of Cosmos and polkadot, and we actually started working with Kobe in 2020 or 2022,
officially. But I know we started talking about it in 2021, you know, like the near the end. Yeah. Yeah. What we hadn't been able to do before because we been really partnering with existing infrastructure providers before
that, right? Like we worked with bison trails and course one and but when we join forces with Kobe, it was like, we could actually start to be early on the networks and actually running the infrastructure ourselves and learn even more what was happening and it's been really, really exciting. So that's the KV.
And this is also a super nice way to actually hand over to Kobe. Kobe tell us about, you know, you're part of, you know, the story what happened so far before you met Anna and, you know, started working on DK validators with her. Yeah. So I'd like about 10 years ago. I think like I kind of have this opportunity in my master's degree to give a lecture about any topic that that I wanted. And, you know, I heard about
Bitcoin fears before that. Like, I heard about it in a podcast, actually, like the Security Now podcast, and how about how he was trying it out and how, how cool it is, and how he was minding, 50 Bitcoins on his personal computer and that was cool. But I never got into it and like that's like when I got into it like back then and got to understand how it works that kind of what captured me. But since then, I left my job back then and started working on
this space. Like I've done some products in Bitcoin, like multisig bullets and things of that sort. But quickly after that, I double down on cryptography because that was my favorite. Topic and like going forward a few years. I also discovered the topic of snarks which I really liked was like looking very deeply into Z cash and how things work there because basically they were the only ones that deployed snarks. Pectin like nobody else know how
to do that. And yes, I was just let the development in startup that was doing snarks for For about two years and afterwards. I joined see Labs leading the cryptography. There we were doing very interesting. Things around light clients with snarks, which are starting to become more common. Now, actually, also we worked with, and I've been there, like, we can share about it later. That's where I kind of got to, to even do more advanced cryptography.
Effie and like, create products from scratch and deploy them to users. So around this topic of stars but also threshold cryptography, which is a topic that I also really liked and was working with the team Foundation a bit around this and jumping forward again last year about a year and a few months we started geometry with Tom and That's the main thing that they do today but also the zika hack and the KV with Anna and others actually there's four of us on zkv.
Yeah we should mention our co-founders on that which is Philip and we'll so there's four of us who do it. Yeah maybe Kobe. We just you just sort of hinted at this thing this. So the first project we worked on together was The plumo Trusted set up. Yeah. And it was I had been doing sort of a series on the show about trusted set. UPS, like finding out how everyone was doing these things and like everyone had heard sort of the Radiolab version so that's the earliest one that Z cash did.
But there was like advancements by the time we did it and plumo this this ceremony like Kobe was it the first time that we did like that that parallelization or like, the batching was happening. I think so, there were other forms of it that were happening. So Aztec was doing something that was also optimized. By pipelining. So you do that. You start that subsequent contribution start before you verify the fully, the previous
ones. But in diploma, we did do this out of order execution where people could contribute in parallel. But if any of them fails, then this whole batch is like fails and, but if they don't fail, then you get like, 10x times better performance of that was That was cool. I-i'm not sure anyone else is doing that today and especially, because plumes was the huge set up. Like it was more than like a few hours like even more than 10 hours in some computers for
every participation. And I took part in the abstract one that you just referred to basically, you are given a slot and you basically had to be online at that point in case you had to have like your Docker image running. And basically was, it was, I think mine was on Christmas.
And so clearly a few years back. I don't, I don't remember when exactly was but yeah I remember kind of having to be there you know at the right time and kind of getting everything started in took a couple of hours and yeah it was I think ignite that was this, the Aztec one. I think that was 2019 2020. I got a t-shirt. I still wear to bed every now and then so my husband's always particularly excited when he gets to go to bed with, you know, like Sarah.
Moni participant, which is says on the teacher at number participant, you are unfortunately, it's not you, it's the same one but that would be a pretty intensive swag print. Actually if everything's going to be fantastic. So yeah, do you want to talk about geometry a little bit because you said that you found it. Go for it. It. Yeah, we started geometry last year. It's kind of a combination of research house where we do. Many cool cryptography.
Things that we try to show how to use new kind of constructions or protocols in a way that people may not may have not seen before and maybe Inspire building new products around those. And but also it's, we invest in companies. That have this kind of deep research DNA within them. So there is a bunch of cryptography related companies some Bridge related companies and some of them around scaling, some of them touch other tab aspects of cryptography or others.
But, yeah. Basically, we would like to talk about, with all these Founders that have something unique in their approach to How to build work products that utilize interesting research, zika hackers. Like the project that for the last year at least, I've been super excited about Zeke. A podcast is sort of General. The case Summit is very much new research seek a validator, is running validators on various networks.
And then using some of those funds to like, do events and bring more ZK, into the Network's zika hack. And this is something that came from, I guess, a brainstorm with you, Kobe, I'd wanted to do is he can hack a On forever and it is happening, it's still coming, but I've been wanting to do it forever, but it was like late 2021, and it was still too early to really get people together on such large-scale. A lot of teams weren't sure they weren't ready, even like the
tech wasn't quite ready. And so we were talking about this is like I really wanted to do this hackathon. What can we do instead? And Kobe had this idea of doing a like CTF like competition where you break, ZK, protocols, you'd find a bug and you'd exploit it and it And it was it
was like very very challenging. And then around this, we designed this event called zika hack, which is like and we've now done it a couple times but it's usually like a weekly or bi-weekly Workshop Series. So you have like every week Workshop or twice a week workshop and then during the sort of break between these workshops, there's a puzzle competition running and we did the first one in 2021 kind of through ZK, validator actually and it was seven weeks and it
was super intense. Dance. And it was super good. Because what we found out, like, you find out who are the experts in in these different teams like people, you might not really know. They're not necessarily at the events, they're not necessarily presenting the papers. Some of them are but like but then they were hacking and you got to know their work and they, it was really exciting. It introduced. I know both of us to a whole new group of people that we hadn't
met before. Yeah. Definitely. And how often do you have the ZK hacks? Well, so far, we've done three. I think we're going to try to do them twice a year. So we just wrapped one up. We just wrapped up CK hack 3, which we decided to do for weeks this time which was like probably a better more same amount of time to be running these events and we had three puzzles and I think we had almost 30 hackers. So the thing is the puzzles are really hard so they're not like everyone come.
It's like only the most hardcore can really do them. It's the most Stubborn. Yeah, but the the workshops I think we had over like two thousand. At least two thousand unique signups this time around for the workshop. So we like these are the workshops are much more focused for people who are either beginner, beginner intermediate who want to use the tools, they want to learn how to like use Noir or you know what exactly some of these architectures look like under the hood.
So yeah, it was really fun. So seeing that there Several weeks long. I assume they're all online. It's like people. Yes, there's a big playlist. Nice. Yeah, I'm going to there's the Whiteboard sessions right? Oh yeah. Yeah, we also started to create content around this so we partnered with polygons to do the ZK whiteboard sessions, which are like it actually. And then we got Dan Bonet to do the first three. So, it's like a mini, ZK course.
And then a whiteboard sessions sort of inspired by the near whiteboard sessions. I always want to give them The shout out because like yeah we were really inside. We were like, that's awesome. Why don't we try doing it for ZK soku? How do people access this? This is all on the Zero knowledge podcast, YouTube channel mastic so they can check that out. We're link to this in the show notes. Are you guys ready to talk about the state of the ecosystem? Let's do it. Fantastic.
So we had our first, your knowledge episode 7 years ago with Eli and obviously Then I mean, and the next couple of years, it wasn't all that difficult to kind of keep up with things that were happening because there weren't all that many, right? So basically and even maybe like a year or a year and a half ago, basically, there were like they were stuck net. There was matter Labs with ZK sink. There was a mess.
That's now part of a polygon with the ZK e VM and then there was maybe at Aztec and tornado but in the realm of kind of like ZK stuff that was more or less. It right there was so into in like fall of 2019. There was this like flurry of papers. So around that time there was like all these new ideas but I think you're right that like the implementations I mean there was there weren't that many of them.
There were maybe just like academic implementations and those companies really came out during the bear Market. Last bear market like and I remember like some of the hackathons like the eith global hackathons. That's for some of those teams actually formed for the first time. Like the they would have like done these little projects that sort of like, tried to take some of this research and put it into practice and those form the
companies that you mentioned. But yeah, there were still only a handful that's wild to think about that. And I think one thing that, you know, made the change or like caused the change, was the fact that the tolling developed Lat you back, then if you wanted to build something, that is best best Enrique you had to take. Let's say Z caches implementation and try to write your own smart or contracted
with verified. And you would have to write your own like JavaScript implementation and compile it webassembly or whatever. It was super complex but around that time. Like, and that's actually came both from The A-Team van, Action with Socrates, but also from the I'd entry team which is now they're messed him, right? And from Geordie, they created this circum environment.
And those two made a big difference in terms of tooling because now you could build something that was end to end and you could have client implementations proud from it and then verify our own aetherium and it unlocked disability for a lot of people to create the UK Solutions. And And think that made a big change and I your knotting, you
agree. What I think a lot of people when they thought of the idea of ZK stuff, they kind of they did leap ahead to the use cases and then as they started to, like, try to do those, they were like, oh wait, there's like none of the stuff you need to do that at all. And so it was like catching up with the dream over the last few years and those toolkits are so key and there's there's new ones too. That have come out since then like yeah, there's many yeah, there's a At.
I mean, if you look at ZK dsls even there's just like we've done entire talks on that because there's a, there's a map of the dsls actually just give it talk about it and like, seek a proof and I had the list, I couldn't cover it all, even like there's so many, so, yeah, it's crazy. The I mean, it's all so it's super exciting and maybe let's talk about the OD OD said we just mentioned where they at now. So give us. Which one do you want us to start on?
Maybe like any one of the layer choose in whichever order you want. So, the casing Stark X, CK e VM, you know, add text to a certain, I mean, I think tornado is the one that we have covered, you know, to a large extent on this podcast before but we both had someone from tornado on before the recent events and afterwards. We had some lawyers on. So I think tornadoes probably we're good on that, but yeah. Let's talk about stock. Net matter Labs zika, evm at stack.
Well, I think we can say that, like, if you look at matter, I mean, they a few years ago, they were like they were building. They were building a DSL. There was like, a lot of the core research so I actually had them on the show a ton then to talk about like circuits and exactly like that part. But then since then I think like as far as I've seen, they've kind of gone heads down to implement and ship.
So if there is a shift often like it's it is much more about delivery and it's a little bit less about Experimentation. I mean this is projecting but this is what I was sort of what I what I got from them and I don't know Kobe. You can probably talk more about the Stark net emergence. Yeah, I think that Stark net was what was a nice development? Let's say from Stark where ecosystem.
Like, before we had Stark net, which I think started, like, end of last year, like, August something like this. If I remember correct, I'm not sure. Sure. Before that, if you wanted to use the offering from Stark, where you basically had to partner with them and they would build with you, this custom solution based on Stark X and Stark. Annette was giving this ability to people to participate in a general-purpose roll up. So that was a big change like
that was a really major thing. I think that back that back when starting it started, I didn't understand what it was like. Like I didn't understand it the Commendation but when I tried it I like it clicked, then I got it and the ecosystem, there grew very rapidly. There are a lot of people that are learning Cairo which is the language that is running inside
Stark net. It gives you a lot of flexibility and power and it's still think there's a long way to go like it's still not decentralized like most of the l2's today. Like, there are some failure modes that are not very pleasant, like things can get stuck. That's fine.
Like still early days in some sense but it's a very welcome necessary development to give this power to users that they didn't have before to run things at scale and applications that they couldn't run on L1. So that was really cool. They were really I mean I think they were incredibly influential on the ZK V Mt. I mean the Z KV M teams. There's all these other Z KV M teams now.
And I think even like in the conceptualizing of this like, super fast environment, that's still connected to a blockchain. But you can, like do a lot more. It inspired people to like be like, oh my God, I could do this kind of app for this kind of app and it goes so much further than what you often could do on
blockchain. But yeah, I know that there's a number of different teams like Coaching that problem, usually still using Starks actually or features of starks like they're using some step that Stark like but yeah you have over at polygon of My Den and you have risk 0 which I think kind of Falls in that category as well. What about how mass and the Z KV M does that is that kind of like we're said it.
Well, I mean, so ZK, e VM, we just did a wrap up episode actually over on my show, we talked about like the summer of ZK. E VM announcements. There was this funny week in July, where, like all the teams were like, we're doing. See KVM. But I think, I mean, they all have different approaches. I think they do work together fairly well. I think there's like a friendliness in it. Yeah. I think they're trying to find a way to really scale aetherium. I think that's a very etherium
focused solution. It's like you can your its solidity. Don't have to change the workflow, the style, you can really redeploy things. And I think that we don't know yet. If there's a winner or if they're just like a, they School separate environments that all have their own unique benefits to using. Yeah, I think it's actually Kobe. We were talking about this, like, do we know what phase they're really at. Like, I think you can sort of do something with them, but they're
not necessarily like full-on. Yeah, I think like from like if we go even higher level we have like two major approaches to
Zeke evm today. Like there was the one that you can sink was taking and the one that Stark where I was taking which was called warp there that they say, you know, you don't need full compatibility, you just need to take solidity programs which is what people write and compile them to some Z KV M. So some people also, you know, photo At what the term ZK e VM means like. Is it compelling solidity or is it running Evie?
A road is like there was this I think there is still is this battle around this term and but other kinds of themes like scroll and her meds and pulling on zero there. Take another approach which is actually running the evm byte code directly and Which is, which ensures greater compatibility. So it's not like full compatibility steel because, you know, some things are more expensive when you run it in ZK, like hashes.
So you have to sometimes modify gas costs, but maybe you can carry over some security analysis. Maybe you can carry over a lot of the more special functionality that you've developed. Maybe you've even written some evm assembly code so you can use that, but, yeah. I think that's in the last few months we've seen a bunch of them launching test nuts, which is cool. So, a lot of them are functional like you can use crawl public test, net. You can use her Mass. That's not all of them are.
It's, um, it's an increasing level of compatibility. I think each week, so you can run things, but sometimes not everything is proven like, not all the opcodes are. Stood. So you will get the feeling of how is it to use it. So you, you have the appearance of a proof being created but sometimes not everything is being actually proven. So it's more like, sometimes a simulation of the experience and but it's going, it's like an honest evaluation of the experience.
Like, this is what they aim that basically can use every tool you you have today and it will work as is. But yeah, I think that that's just a Where they are today like they're functional. They're usable not may be fully compatible and nearly not, not at all audited. Like the order audits are going to be very complex. Yeah, I want to talk about audits definitely later just because it seems like such a fraud. Yeah, thing that. Yeah, that could go wrong.
Anna. Could we didn't and they just, I think Jordi just shipped it off. Off to audit, right? Yeah. So like, I think that they shifted off to others and like, I think Jordi has a very kind of been or like Jordan the team, right? They've been, I think kind of training auditor has in some sense, like, they've been teaching them about what it is
means to audit that code wild. So, yeah, I think things are starting to be audited, but that's polygon her man's, that's the exact you'd asked about Frederick is. So that's, I guess the Stage that that one's at. So if you if you kind of zoom out and kind of look at, you know, the landscape of all these different altitudes, I think kind of the, the high school question, you know, you know, your essay question would be like contrast and compare how
they I mean. So basically, if I'm going to deploy on a ZK layer to, how do I decide, which one to deploy to? How are they different from one another? Think wait question for you, Kobe, but if you're writing solidity code, would it look very different to you to deploy on any of the CK EVMS? Depends. Like if you were talking about like let's say the hair medicine School variance, it would feel very similar like it would feel, I think also similar to how you
do it on your theory. Mm, you just need to change the RPC basically and and you're done. But also basically those just kind of just transliterate like opcode by opcode, right? So basically it's kind of like you just translate like word by word and then basically using the same grammar that you use before you just, you know, put them one after the other, but that's different from say Start net and CK signo. Yeah, exactly. They are, they just transpile solidity into their own VM.
So that becomes very, very different. The security analysis is very different there. You have to audit the compiler from from like this transpiler. That's what you have to focus on and then also their VM, but yeah, it's it's very different. So but let's maybe let's let's not talk about the audits now. So I think we are all happy to agree that you know audits are important and difficult and we
will talk about them later. So say everything is audited and in principle, we know that it works as designed how do these different layer tours differ from each other. Kobe who explained it? Didn't you? It's this idea of are you transpiling or not, right? Yeah. I mean like doing those in general like or just ZK e. Vo, just The zk1. So I mean I totally get that there. Some that kind of transpose them up, code by opcode and some that
don't. But other than that, kind of they arrived at the bytecode differently. Do they have advantages and disadvantages? Yeah, so I think that if you compare the ZK e VM once I think that it remains to be seen, so we don't know yet, basically maybe some teams will go further in the decentralization efforts
and they will do that earlier. Maybe they create some more interesting environments for validators approvers to participate in and maybe some of them will have better performance, although I I think all of these teams are extremely strong and will reach other cat performance and maybe some of them will be more receptive to feedback or will do upgrades faster. All have better bug bounties, so I'll be more confident that things are are more secure there. But I think the statistic is chi
chi VM is really hard today. So it's more about Titania and maybe correct me if I'm wrong here Kobe, but I think that like on the Stark were side, it's all Starks under the hood like full Starks the way that it was kind of originally presented. Whereas on, I know some of the others the kvms they're using like fry, right? Like they're using. Like there's like one step that sort of like Stark, a fine a snark, but it's quite a different thing under the hood.
Yeah, I think that basically every team is taking another a different approach. So like you say, Stark were is doing Starks like pure Starks with some additions. The her mess team, they're taking this kind of layer approach that you mentioned. So basically, they're doing long, but with fry. So, like the use this transparent polynomial, commitment that came from Starks but this is it With Blanc, so that's interesting.
And then they do snarks on top of that to optimize the verification and the scroll, and the same Foundation teams. But they are doing, they're doing long with this kcg commitment, which is, it's a trusted setup, but it's universal one so that you can reuse it. And they're doing a very complex architecture of many circuits that interact with each other and they do. The kind of recursive layer composition until they reach the evm itself, or the layer, 1 itself where they verified.
But just just as a side note, there is a very good right up from a real Gap ISM that describes how you go from air to wraps, which wraps is kind of long. And it shows how similar Starks and along with fry our, ah, which kind of bridges this gap, which, which she chose, how like that basically. Everything is very, very similar. You just let one another thing and then it becomes one with fry instead of Stark so it's really
cool. Okay, if you if you got none of this we will link to the to the paper. It'll be referred to in the show notes I'm sorry. So basically maybe can I can I kind of summarize this with in principle all of these tools do the same thing and which one is best remains to be seen when they're live and operational and some of them have failed or not failed and, you know, gone up in Flames for zucchini, evm. I think that's true.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's Best Buy which by which metric is probably also worth because there is that aspect of it being decentralized or not, like you might actually suffer. Exactly. Might suffer some performance but you'll get like a more secure system in a way. Yeah, exactly. But and all of them currently, I mean, none of them actually have a decentralized sequencer, right? No, not yet. So, all of them have like a centralized choke point. So it doesn't really.
I mean, if, as long as you have like, one centralized choke point, Doesn't really matter how many more centralized choke points. You add, right? Depends. It really depends because if you have a centralized sequencer, then you can do so much damage
that you can do all the damage. If the L2 is designed correctly, you can still Force the sequencer to take transactions in so they can forcibly sensor you and they can hurt liveness, but they cannot hurt security because the security is guaranteed by the proving process itself. So there's so much damage that this Central chokepoint can do,
which is a really nice feature. That that's what's really compelling about this kind of zikr Roll-Ups because it can limit the damage that the centralized party can do. On the scale of decentralization, where do all of these set very early, all of them, okay? Look, but I think all of them at least have the intentions, the
right intentions. And I think they have this honest, intentions to do the right things but just they need to ship what they have first and move towards the centralization later when things are functional. So yeah. We all know that this is incredibly complex technology. So so we talked a lot about l2's, but mostly zk8 EVMS, exactly via but there is Aztec which we haven't talked about which we might want to. Yeah, if you were on. So, like Aztec, first of all,
just a team that I adore. I think there's such great people. I love hanging out with them when I'm in London and they created, they launched, ZK money, I think, In the last two years they recently have like launch sort of a I don't know if you call it competitor DSL to Sir. Calm. What do you think Kobe? Is it good?
I think the cool I mean if you treat all those Acadia cells like all the languages is competitors in sure but I think it brings something really new to the table so I really like it. And they do talk about private computation but I wouldn't put them in the category of ZK. E VM, no. I think they're, they're very different kind of structure. They're not a zika evm.
They're not even a z, KV M but under the not have this recursive power yet like that would allow private smart contract structures and but that's where this new language that you are the devil. It is aimed to to enable that. So basically would write this the circuits with Noir, which looks like a normal programming language and then you would be
able to deploy it inside. There is a key role up and that's why it's like they call it a ZK, ZK roll up so that you can verify with in the Z key roll up, more, ZK, so that's what they do, that's what you are. Would give them. But basically, before we move on, just to make sure that we give the right picture, there are other tools, right? Like there's Stark net, and there is like, you say, Zeki sink, and all of them are not even evm. Like they're just VMS.
And if you want to choose them, it might be for other reasons, right? Like you would choose them for the reasons that you're willing to learn a new language or a new environment. And you want to enjoy this greater performance. That is give But you suffer from may be other other other reasons, because maybe you need to do new security analysis. Maybe you need to train more developers, you taking a bet on a new VM, maybe it won't be as
expressive as you want. Because in the evm, you know, what you can do and what you cannot maybe here, you will find that you can do more, but maybe you find that you can do less. So there you just have to do some homework and maybe experiment and see whether it even fits your use case. So, how is how is the performance different? If I go to write? I think isn't it still? I think Kobe. Can you answer? That is is there clear metrics on these?
No, I think it's a community. This is one of the things that we need to develop. Like I actually had a chat about this with Tom today. Like, we need to develop some framework for benchmarks for all of these other tools like so it's interesting like to do The Apples to Apples comparisons here. It's not clear. Yeah, absolutely. So basically, if if you know I'm going to build a new app that I want to run on one of those are two is and basically it's going to need a shitload of computer.
It is need lots of data availability, and so on, and basically, kind of having like this click through experience, where basically tells you, you should definitely deploy to Stockton it or something. So, I think that would be Super interesting. Yo, or even some like common use cases and like, create all this. This common use case on all of the different L tools and just evaluate how a performant it is. That would also already be big progress, I think so. We've talked about L2 is for bit.
Now, let's talk about at once. It used to be that secant was the zkl one and everything else is sort of like, building, ZK on top of things. So there's a lot of teams that are like. Also there may be in other ecosystems like penumbra or Manta. That's talk about kind of where the odd ones out and what they usages like and whether their life at all or whether they're kind of in proof of concept stage because basically the Legacy privacy-preserving anyone's to me that would be
easy cash and more narrow. And it's gotten a bit quiet around those, but obviously the ones that you just cited, they've gotten a lot of press recently. So where are they at? Maybe just one thing about the z cap. So mineiro I was never, I've never, really explored very much, but I will say, it's something about the Z Cash, Crew is like in terms of research, they released Halo 2 and it's been adopted, by almost like, like just all over the ecosystem.
So in terms of like output on Research, they're still really top in a way but it's true that like, I think a lot of the other projects are bringing because they're often at least exploring programmability or being able to deploy things on top of them and not just In money transfer, a lot of them are also proof of steak or they've like evolve the consensus to fit a little bit more of The Narrative of today. I think.
So the one that went live, probably the earliest of that batch is Mina. They went live in 2021, I believe. And you had side note, I'm an advisor to them. So just disclosure there. So they used to present this idea of snaps. And this was like ZK apps on like on Mina. But they've And that so it's ZK apps now and as far as I know, like there are there's a cohort of people building things on
test nut now. So like, it's if you want to start really playing with these things, it's there to play with its maybe not yet live on the main net. And I don't know what it's going to take to get there yet, but yeah, that's that's kind of cool. That's part of the reason why I think the ZK hackathon idea can come to fruition this year because there is finally, It's where people can really build stuff without like having studied the stuff for months and months and months in advance.
And going on. I mean, okay, so Elio is I know. They're in like test net 3. I Kobe, I don't know. Have you tried it out? I don't know, actually, how much you can do yet. Well I haven't tried The Testament three itself but I like the bullet with the tool chain that they have like they like Elliot try to develop a whole stack of things so they developed a new language.
They develop this new Block Chain that has programmability in the UK and the language that they have is also very interesting because it combines both the blockchain part and the circuit part in the same syntax, which is really fun to see. And really Fun to work with. And so I've tried that and that
that's really cool. But yeah, it's like it does have like this concept of proof of sufficient work which is an interesting approach to to mining because like the kind of a hybrid I think right now with profits take a fork and like the use this part because the proof of pork itself uses snarks. So the use this part of basically incentive Is creating hardware-accelerated, snark. Provers in some sense. So it's kind of a whole circle and so it's your nice ecosystem.
Yeah, we might want to mention actually. So the Elio team also like, they put together the Z prize this year, which was an attempt to like push and fund Hardware acceleration, which makes sense with their product. And I think the results just came in, we did a little Alex, did a presentation. Ation it seek a hack last week. So yeah, there's like I think and from what I understood like there were actual there was progress made in Hardware like
ZK proving it's pretty cool. That that worked that it happened. It was like industry-wide zkv. So partly sponsored it too. So like yeah, we all got involved to try to push that. Yeah, I think like Hardware acceleration like the results maybe were surprising for some people and you got better than expected, and you actually got some interesting breakthroughs, like, in even in things that we haven't seen progress in like decades.
So, and people now that they see that the market is serious about paying them for Hardware acceleration. They're not looking at this and actually making interesting breakthrough breakthrough. So that's really We'll see. There's also a few teams that have emerged like projects that just work on it. Like, Hardware to, like omers project. Whose name. I always mess up your mama. Jama. There we go. Exactly. Yeah. I should mention ZK.
Validators of is an investor in a few of these projects and I think geometry might be as well. So yeah geometries investment in June when I am I here there's other projects, like other L ones but they live within the other ecosystem. So we have penumbra that's like it's Going to be a privacy decks within the cosmos ecosystem. Like using IBC. You have a Noma, which I feel like sort of is in Cosmo.
Sort of is in polka-dots like, also this like bridged to other ecosystems project and I know they're doing at rest it, set up right now. That's going really well from what I could see. It's like a lot of people wanted to, we both participated. Yeah. We both participated and seek. If he participated, we also have the polka dot side. You have Manta. That is like there's EK environment. And actually, I will say a little Like ZK validator.
We're actually doing a workshop series with them to use xcm with Moonbeam. So it's actually called privacy and Moonbeam, and it's using Manta and Moonbeam. And it's cool because like I think by putting the project out in the world, we sort of pushed the developers on both sides to make sure that we could like, actually make exactly this
combination this. So actually, there will be applications building kind of over that through our workshop at least like experimental applications Yeah, and like beyond the ones that are, let's say. Z key Focus, you also have more and more support in other L ones that are not General is equally focused, but they add ZK
support. So it seems started with that like that that was a big, big leap, but so did that and I think so. So it's done that and Falcon to some extent are using like I think they're also like maybe the biggest snark consumers at this point, maybe by like proving power. So you have this kind of deep ZK integration in a lot of these other elements as well. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.
You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify, YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast, go to epicenter dot TV /, subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen, while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests.
Or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them but thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week. Or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them but thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.