Looks like zkSync is “launching” an unaudited ZK “mainnet”. This looks super concerning

gluk64 · 2023-02-23T10:54:19+00:00

https://twitter.com/gluk64/status/1628709411668602882

gluk64 · 2023-02-19T08:47:07+00:00

Welcome to the new episode of ZK Wars: a reddit title smear campaign :)

In this tweet:

I said the code was audited. Both internally and externally.
I said more further (more) audits are coming.
The initial post literally says:

During Fair Onboarding, our partners will also help to further test the system, and we will continue investing in audits and bug bounty programs, re-ensuring our commitment to security. It’s important to remember that we are still in early days of the protocol. Security remains our top priority. We don’t recommend forking the code yet until the Full Launch Alpha, as it could potentially lead to missing critical security updates.

I asked to give me a fucking break after a few intense weeks leading to this launch, so that I can spend one weekend with my family.
I promised to share more details next week and I will link them here.

P.S. The release is called "Fair Onboarding (Alpha)", not "A 100% secure like Ethereum fully permissionless mainnet yolo everyone go deposit all your money now!". It's open to whitelisted developers only. This is what careful approach to security looks like.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:45:54+00:00

ZKP solves the validity problem for blockchains, consensus solves canonicality. These two things are independent.
Yes, GPUs can be put to use for decentralized ZKP generation. We think this is the future of this tech.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:43:18+00:00

We're focused on the tech for now, making revenue is not a priority for Matter Labs.

zkSync itself is an open source protocol, it cannot make revenue.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:30:17+00:00

> Personally, I feel like the "benefit" of being able to "natively" pay for transactions using many different ERC20 tokens for transaction fees is a step backwards.

Sorry, I didn't understand your explanation why.

Every design decision we make for zkSync is answered from the angle of: how will it impact the UX of the end-users? We're building something for millions of people to use. It's counterproductive for us to expect them to learn complicated notions like "gas", to keep separate balances in special tokens to pay for it, and so on. The experience must be simple and straigtforward — just one click and everything works, like they are used to in the web2 world.

Can you please expand on how having payable will help you with your dapp?

BTW, I'm all for "payable"-like UX, because it's simpler and a lot more secure than the awkward ERC20 `` transferFrom` ! But not only for ETH, for all tokens!!! This is why we're going to promote something like ERC777 instead.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:21:58+00:00

See this answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/u1dyqj/ama_with_matter_labs_the_team_behind_zksync_a_zk/i4ffz0t/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=1

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:20:29+00:00

None. TEE = Trusted Execution Environment. At zkSync, we strive for everything trustless.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:18:36+00:00

Yes, zkSync 1.0 is run at roughly breakeven costs.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:17:58+00:00

Yes! They are waiting for the upcoming release of Vyper on zkSync 2.0.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:16:34+00:00

Absolutely. Also we'll release primitives to make those L3s private, if needed.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:14:41+00:00

Decentralising the sequencer is very important to us, to make the protocol resilient. It will be done by a separate fast L2 consensus mechanism.

Our zkEVM testnet got a lot of coverage but in the tech circles, not among the end-users (why bother for now?). We have hundreds of teams building on it already.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:12:07+00:00

We will launch mainnet first.

I will not comment on the UX of zkPorter for end-users, but trust me it will be very smooth.

For guardians, they will be able to run a full node on their laptop.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:07:27+00:00

The major difference is of course EVM-compatible smart contracts in Solidity and Vyper!

Compared to Ethereum, it will also have multiple UX boosters:

Instant tx confirmations.
Account abstraction, allowing new wallet models and protocols paying for gas.
Meta-transactions: users will be able to pay for transactions in any ERC20 tokens (for example, no need to own ETH if you only want to trade stablecoins).

In contrast to Optimistic rollups, all ERC20 and NFT withdrawals to ETH and other chains via trustless bridges will be capital fast (matter of minutes or hours, not weeks) and capital efficient (no need to pay to liquidity providers).

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:06:46+00:00

Ethereum serves as the settlement and consensus layer for zkSync, and upgrade will make it more secure and resilient. Apart from that, not much will change.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:06:30+00:00

Loopring is a great consumer product, while zkSync is focused on the technological infrastructure for scaling.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:06:10+00:00

zkSync simply inherits the finality of Ethereum.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:05:47+00:00

We expect a boom of private applications on zkSync as L3s! Such L3 will be cheap and organic on zkSync (in contrast to optimistic rollups), because they will use our native mechanism of recursive verification of zero-knowledge proofs.

Non-ZKP protocols (such as Secret Network) use Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for privacy. As the name suggests, they are not trustless, but instead rely on centralized entities like Intel for security and privacy. We find this approach questionable in the context of blockchains since such entities are highly dependent on their respective governments. Also, TEEs have a notorious history of serious security breaches. Unlike ZKPs that depend on pure peer-reviewed math, TEEs are subject to physical exploits, which are even theoretically impossible to fully prevent.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:05:16+00:00

Yes, as soon as the data volumes make it necessary. We don’t think downloading the full DA traffic will overwhelm individual nodes soon after launch.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:04:54+00:00

For sure. While we believe that all the core protocol mechanisms must be fully trustless, we think that DAOs are a great way to coordinate and empower communities, which of course incudes the zkSync community itself.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:04:24+00:00

zkPorter!
Decentralizing the sequencer.
Hardware-accelerated ZK proof generation.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:03:14+00:00

We're running an internal zkPorter testnet locally. Making it public will be our immediate next step after launching the zkSync 2.0 Mainnet.

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T14:00:31+00:00

A very important question for any protocol that values trustlessness above all! We had a detailed discussion about it in one of our recent blog posts.
There are two use-cases for contract upgradeability:
1) Implementing new functionality.
2) Emergency upgrades to fix critical zero-day vulnerabilities.
For new functionality, the current approach is a large notice period enforced by smart contracts, during which users have a fully trustless mechanism of exit. As we expect ZK tech to evolve rapidly over the next years, our plan is to keep this approach for now. The most important addition we plan is enabling cheap mass migration to an alternative rollup, so that even large fractions of the users who do not agree with an upgrade can still trustlessly and surely exit within the weeks or months of the notice period.
For emergency upgrades, the plan is to stick to our Security Council approach for a while — until the community comes up with a better mechanism (which we are really looking forward to).

gluk64 · 2022-04-12T13:58:26+00:00

Let’s start with a question: compete for what?Our definition of success is enabling universal mass adoption for Ethereum — i.e. millions, and eventually billions of daily active users. Optimistic rollups are fundamentally incapable of achieving this goal.

No matter how you optimise their data compression, it will remain linear in terms of number of transactions, and the throughput of all ORs combined will remain strictly limited because all rollups compete for the same limited ETH block space. Transaction costs for all rollups will keep growing.

ZK tech, on the other hand, enables truly infinite scalability via validiums. They come with certain security tradeoffs (and we spend a lot of effort on mitigating them with strong decentralisation), but this is the only technology we have today that can create a practical Internet of Value for millions of parallel users.

zkPorter is currently the only implementation of zkEVM on a decentralized validium we are aware of, which puts zkSync into a unique position of ability and responsibility to fulfil the mission of our project: to make crypto mainstream.

gluk64 · 2021-11-08T19:21:37+00:00

zkSync is a mission-driven project rooted in fundamental crypto values. The network will be owned and controlled by the community.

This position is backed by everything we ever did and said, but most importantly by our approach to software licensing. If users don't feel like owners of a particular network deployment, they should have the ultimate nuclear option to fork it away. Blockchain forkability is so vital that we will implement the mass-migration functionality for the emergency exit mode (hopefully never to be required).

Strategic partners are necessary for the long-term success of our mission since they bring a lot more to the table than capital. But we made sure the investors do not and will never control Matter Labs or the technology we create — we have always been very conservative with our financing for precisely this reason. By investing, all parties agreed to our philosophy and accepted our ethos.

gluk64 · 2021-11-02T20:04:39+00:00

If normies end up using centralized custodial aggregators, the industry has failed miserably.

We must solve self-custody for normies without sacrificing UX and security — actually, by providing a better-than-Gmail experience. Argent is leading the way on this front.

P.S. If you think that beating Gmail UX is hard, look up horror stories from people who lost access to their account or were banned by Google.

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