ZKPs: Future VS Reality - Edi Sinovcic | Space Shard

hello everybody and thanks for joining me after the coffee break I know it's a hard time now to you know come to the stage again and so on but today I'm going to try to talk a bit about the zkps you know there is a lot of hype about that and so on yesterday we had a panel which was a bit more technical today we want to zoom out give high level overview okay what's kind of the currently here and what kind of the future so talking about ZK bus what this is about and so on the current state of tech and what kind of awaits us in the future but first about you know something about me currently I'm leading space Shard which is ZK Venture Builder what that means is we incubate projects internally and then we spin them out in separate companies like new like film you know new companies and products and so on I was recorded back in the day in ethereum Foundation that was like 2017-18 and so on that's when I kind of first touched upon the ZK tag through something else called Socrates Socrates is this like toolbox for zikas all right and so on but we'll touch base a bit later on on that also I was the CEO of Shard Labs which is mostly focused on D5 related stuff and so on and co-founded basically near Bulk Hub so which I'm also proud that we can incubate kind of teams and help them kind of build inside the blockchain system but yeah in full honesty just your average Legion with you know high score I think only on the decent score but you know this is kind of a thing we like to explore try to like do new stuff and so on so that's kind of the idea of this culture let's start with the blockchain trailemma maybe going before that obviously how many of you know about optimistic rollups how many of you have used optimistic roll ups okay how how you know who used the ZK Roll-Ups any kind of ZK roll-ups okay it's fine so in general like this kind of tag is optimistic cross especially is kind of here for a year year and a half there is a lot of emphasis on that and then now you know ZK roles are maturing and so on the the main issue kind of with the whole blockchain stack is that usually blockchains are really secure and basically you know decentralized but they're not real scalable as we can see on this kind of graph usually in web 2 system in traditionals we have really secure and scalable systems but how do we reach all of three of those well ZK may be the the solution to the blockchain for Lemma and we are going to deep dig deep into that so you know obviously when we look at the past software was found in 2018 so this is like five year old kind of company that was started we had Stark X which is kind of a specific app Roll-Ups for specific use cases how many of you have used so rare or immutable or Diva DX or anything like that okay we have couple of heads so did you feel like the user experience was kind of red too you would go there you wouldn't feel the complexity of blockchains and so on and on the other hand with like metamask and the whole ethereum stack to this day you have to have a PhD to download the wallet save the mnemonic and so on but if you want to reach kind of that grand like a building in adoption basically a billion users on blockchains we need to simplify the ux and Stark X is one of those examples how it can be done with the blockchain magic at the background securing the tank obviously evolution of the app specific chains was into starkinet which is a generalized basically ZK roll up with its own language and so on the important part here is it's not evm compatible which comes with its pros but also its cons which you know we'll figure out through a couple of years if this was a good kind of way to go or not then we have basically matter Labs which also started like building these kind of things I remember there was like a git coin Grand round when I first used this like ZK magic magic back in a day you know ZK sync light I remember we had to bridge the layer two it costs like a lot of basic gas and so on but we were there it kind of worked it was really interesting because the gas prices back in the last bull market were huge so you know this kind of thing ZK in production was kind of you know one of the first times when we felt this obviously now in 2023 we held Suzuki sync era which is a generalized version of this kind of touring complete you can do whatever with that and it's CVM compatible which is really important if we want to build applications that are composable and that build basically like skin stuff Hermes back in the day also we had only only payments now we have a ZK full zkvm that also launched in 2023 so you can see some of the patterns here we had like specialized single use cases and so on and now we have a generalized kind of use cases 2023 and scroll for example also started I think 2021 first POC and they are kind of nearing mainnet also too so we can say that in the past most of this stuff was experimental specific use cases now it came to the maturity of being like completely fully kind of on parity with the optimistic Roll-Ups and other Tech but you know when we look at the numbers well kind of optimistic role of still leadway we can see currently that in this landscape arbit room has 65 percent a whole tvl on the market optimism follows with around 90 percent in the closest contender in kind of ZK space is you can see Cara with only four percent of the market share so we can still see that in terms of tvl ZK Tech has been behind but is basically catching up with the rest of the folks here we have basically another example of TPS because with this tag we say that arbitrary optimism skills ethereum 7x which means you can put 7x more transactions at the same time in blocks or in basically in this kind of roll up but with ZK tech there is a promise that we can do this 1000 x 10 000 X but if you look at the number do we see those numbers on the table well not really and that's basically where this thing still has to mature and still has to be there so when we look out at this numbers let's say as you can Sin Cara like the past atps was around eight and with ethereum is still kind of bigger than basically most of this stuff so we can say that you know CK stuff will scale the whole thing but currently Still Not So currently it's still kind of r d still getting out there still being built but there is huge promise around this and a huge potential you know potential for this kind of thing and the last thing but not the least is security of the thing so when we look at this kind of ZK test and so on also like in Roll-Ups in general we have two kind of ways to securing like it does I think so one way is with optimistic rollups we we have a thing called fraud probes what basically that does is every so often in terms of optimistic rollups once a week they post the proof on layer one that anybody can challenge if they think this proof is not valid and then potentially what you have is two week finality well that's all fine and good but what happens if the roll up starts working if there is some issue with that it's relatively simple to kind of attack the system and block the whole system for a mic exiting to layer one to ethereum for two weeks is that acceptable four digits mostly yes but for like normal use cases and scalability down the road probably not that much so basically we come to this kind of idea of okay from Frozen flying for the first version but we need basically State proofs and in general like GK proves as we call them is these terms to pause them on layer one and here we have some interesting examples because arbitrum kind of is there but it's most developed in my opinion from the all the optimistic Stacks basically optimistic Roll-Ups optimism on the other hand doesn't even have a fraud proofs which is really really kind of tricky they have you know one kind of fast exit if you want to do so and so on then we have some like others like Zike sinkera which has ZK proofs and you put kind of you know you put basically this kind of thing on on layer one and the if the sequencer basically fails you can kind of transact using layer 1 which is already pretty good because if there is a catastrophic failure on this layer 2 which is ZK kind of Base well you can still escape to layer one which means that you know kind of you have this escape hatch and so on the issue on all the ZK Solutions is that currently the like proposers and sequencers are centralized to parties basically that told them usually the company is basically that own them which is okay a if we have escape hatch or this kind of like validation mechanism where you can escape to layer one if you don't well it's kind of tricky comparing to the landscape here we have like interesting example drdx so which kind of works on Stark X but has this like four four Escape mechanism that you can kind of jump on layer one if something catastructure happens just to explain to the the bigger audience if you didn't use the idx so basically it's an order book it's mostly off chain you do off-chain matching and so on once basic trade is settled that's posted to their kind of starchex specific up roll up and eventually finalize basically an ethereum and that way you inherent security of ethereum on this kind of layer Twos for the user they don't see the complexity of it and it's really amazing also for example so rare which is kind of this fantasy football tank where you can kind of play with a thing you never see a wallet even when you top up like with with the you know you want to buy something you've top up with a credit card but they kind of do the thing for you in the background build your wallet and so on and these kind of applications are what is going to bring us to billion users and to must market and not you know remember in mnemonics private keys and stuff and you know like writing down to the paper but to come include basically this starknet kind of also has like storage proofs but doesn't have an escape mechanism and does doesn't have kind of a backup option for for the validation failure in in terms basically of kind of how mature is this Tech we are at the point okay it's kind of in production but it's mostly test Nets that are tested in production so we basically testing prod and these kind of things so future obviously we want to we basically can expect maturing of the ZK VM stack a lot there are a lot of contenders there that are trying to build this kind of ZK VM compatible Tech out there the thing is there is some overhead to that the question also is they're like different kind of compatibility with TVM and how do you do that so we'll see we'll see basically you know what will happen like future is clear but obviously it's not so you know we'll see who will win or who will Who will not be there but obviously on the other side we have much more ZK VMS which are not ethereum compatible with validium which is basically non-private ZK Tech we have Stark next Stark X polygon maiden and some others there's a lot of privacy solutions kind of arising like us take RS 0 and some others because this is one of the most interesting parts of the stack and what basically can be built here there's also something gaming stuff that happening this is like one of the one of the interesting examples basically is this Madara which is a substrate based sequester so what guys took is kind of they took this substrate palette build a sequencer into it and now you have a fully working layer tree so we are not any no more talking about layer twos we are talking about layer trees layer Force layer files down in the future when you think about this we'll you know when we talk about okay which layer do we use do we even care for the user it's important that these apps worked and that basically applications they use are kind of there and that they work and not what kind of Stack that we use but for us in this infrastructure phase where this is still not a mature attack we'll talk about some of the infra stuff probably for the next year or two hopefully you know be shorter than that obviously we mentioned some of the challenges like escape hatch you know you can takes it to layer one if something like like happens like catastrophically the whole like system stops and so on decentralization of sequencers so one of the big issues with sequencers is we have trusted sequencers on the side of the companies who are running them so we're kind of back to AWS you know you go to to Amazon you ask them for to run a full node for you but how do you know this is kind of run properly how do you know they are like adding your kind of transaction into it why do we trust them well we'll have to decentralize that part of a stack if we want this to be trustless system and not trust also like parallelization of proving so we mentioned something that's called State proof so basically what we do we have a layer two and then we zip that thing and pause is just basically a state proof on layer one which means that if I for example in case of Stark 30k is saying interact with the same app for 10 times in a period of let's say 12 hours only difference between the first and the last transaction the state difference will be posted on layer one and that basically adds as a as a compression mechanism and we can store much less stuff on layer one inherently giving a cheaper gas cost on their two also obviously they're kind of one of the things is if we kind of transact on Layer Two there is this thing called volition which is of chain data availability basically so you don't store stayed on chain on the ZK roll up but you store it like off chain in a data availability commit and this can reduce the gas cost for the user additionally because usually the gas cost only one that this kind of Roll-Ups pay more not more than 90 percent of those costs is kind of in this you know state that you post on layer one so when we think in terms of gas constant ethereum currently let's say you have Smart contract interaction that costs fifty dollars you get the reaction of 10x if you use like zika roll up you get additional reduction in cost of 100x on top of that if you use this potential Evolution and stuff obviously it's not a clear kind of solution for everything for security stuff where you need state of on-chain and so on like D5 and so on this won't help a lot but maybe for gaming and some other stuff it will we'll see like new use cases maybe cloud computing 2.0 or some others are also potential basically huge for this so you know we'll see what will happen anyways on top of that there is also a possibility I think you know a lot of you here know about the old ethereum like roadmap of fully sharding both execution and state well that's kind of been migrated and outsourced to r d basically those kind of things to this kind of Roll-Ups and currently ethereum is roll-off Centric roadmap basically we have all these things that will make cheaper kind of gas cost for storing roll up State on on layer one so the issue there is let's say we have ethereum then we have zigasin we have Stark net we have scroll and so on so what kind of basically happens between those roll ups how do we communicate we go through ethereum do we build bridges in between them so basically we are back at square one issue with compatibility especially for D5 use cases where you need a lot of composibilities kind of missing are we going to solve that some say there is an IBC cable system bridging like arbitrary message passing and so on so there is a lot of potential for Solutions State proves one of the most interesting thing called Herodotus is building this but all this stuff is still not instant and there are some trust assumptions but obviously it's a huge opportunity to build something here because the whole thing is kind of open we can explore and build it and so on anyways to conclude I think you know ZK summer could start soon we'll see with the macro and stuff like that but we've seen that starting has announced the token probably some others basically will do the same with their ZK VMS non-zkavms and so on so if the macro kind of stays gets a bit better than currently it is maybe in 2024 we'll see ZK summer what do you guys think probably about thanks a lot for this [Applause] do we have any questions I don't see anything so if you see somebody okay all good then thanks a lot for this [Applause]