# The Elastic Network | Alex Gluchowski - Matter Labs

- Speakers: [Alex Gluchowski](https://streameth.org/speakers/alex-gluchowski)
- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 18:02
- Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-InhbpNqocrs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InhbpNqocrs

## Description

ZKsync pioneers a unified elastic network and accelerates cross-chain transfers, empowering seamless native interoperability across both public and private ZK Chains. This talk will unpack and explain the advantages for building within this style of infra and how the networks resolves issues of sale and inoperability.

## Transcript

[Music] the talk uh my name is Alex kovski I am from ZK syn and I want to talk about how zky is scaling ethereum and what zky is today and uh you know at the core of ZK syn is this mission of advancing freedom for the world um we believe that freedom is the the core core thing the key that unlocks Innovation uh that leads to progress which creates prosperity to me this is a very personal mission I uh you know growing up uh I was born in a in Soviet Union which is known as the the prison of Nations um experience very very firsthand the um the consequences of being unfree like with hyperinflation collapse of Institutions even going to school and just wasting 10 years doing things that I now absolutely would not have uh embraced myself and and like it felt like really like like prison and like the my entire life growing up it felt like I'm running uphill bottle to to finally start doing what I want to do and and realize my potential and I think this is how a lot of people feel like this is definitely the reality for most people in the world and even in the in the western world and the blockchains are the want technology that actually increased has increased Freedom by more than anything else in the last decade and despite of all the abuses and all the excesses and and and craziness that that we see and and and the Bad actors I think it's done more good in the world than than the bad and scaling blockchains in a way that preserves these core properties that enable Freedom the cish resistance self- custodial permissionless openness is a hard problem and and this is why Zing started and how you know we jumped on this journey from a simple experimental ZK project towards building the first ZK AVM um and to becoming the um uh what we are today the the elastic Network um the like today zync is not a single chain it's a collection of many chains that are designed to work together in a seamless way like it's it's a rollup cluster you have uh some big names that you might recognize you have abstract you have uh uh exola Lance uh treasure uh Kronos Deutsch Bank UBS like the biggest financial institutions in the world are building on the eiki syn or some of them are already live and um the you know the all these chains are powered by ZK stack uh which is making them Sovereign and configurable which allows you as a builder to customize all aspects of your chain uh and have full control and and sovereignty over what what's happening there you can decide what's happening with a sequencer it can be centralized it can be fully decentralized you can have your own custom token for transaction fees or you can accept uh stable coins or or different kind of tokens you can decide if then the chain is permissioned or permissionless and to what degree um we can offer something very unique to ZK technology which is privacy the chains can be opaque from the outside world and you control who sees the data like basically gives you full sovereignty while preserving something very very important uh namely the um connectivity uh and the ability to grow elastically like expand Without Limits on on throughput and uh uh and growth for each individual chains and for all of the chains combined so the elastic network is a rollup cluster rollup cluster is this new relatively new emerging concept uh that is not just a collection of chains it's something more interesting it's a architecture that is designed to make the change CHS seamlessly interoperable in in like in a similar way how the internet works you know like I I think by now it's obvious that the the like as we are building the internet of value this new um iteration of the internet with that will allow freedom of economic cooperation for all things of all forms of value to go on chain um it cannot run on a single Ser on a single blockchain just like the internet doesn't run on a single server or even on a single data center uh we will have many different chains many run by different communities organizations institutions and even governments but they have to be connected as seamlessly as Internet is today as the web is today because otherwise the uh you're going to lose the you like you it's not going to be internet it's going to be just a collection of disparate services with silo you're like it's going to resemble the finance 1.0 like the banks are talking to each other with very very um High hurdles and it's not seamless it's not uh like there is a lot of impediment in the in the existing Financial system and barriers and and and uh you know like limits on freedom the um what will Define rollup clusters ultimately is the ability for the users to interact with any application across the entire rollup cluster in a uniform way think of it is you have one wallet you can connect to any application doesn't matter what chain the uh the application is you do one click one confirmation and you transact and you do whatever you want you want to do a swap on on this chain you just do a swap you want to put funds into defy protocol you you do that you want to interact with the social network you do that like all with one click very similar ly this is not the chain abstraction Paradigm this is very different from chain abstraction like the idea of chain abstraction is that you don't know which network you're you're own like it's all completely seamless all fible you just see your balance across all chains that is not what's happening here like individual chains can have very different properties and you might want to trust some of these chains you might not want to trust some others so you you you want like just on the internet you can go to Every website in one click and and do whatever you want in one click but the websites are different they are run by different organizations you might trust this web Shop but you don't trust this web shop right um and your assets will in in this case be like on on one chain like or you you actually control where where where the assets where where your account your identity is located and you can decide on this but the interactions must be seamless this is the ultimate vision towards which we're working and I want to explain how Zer knowledge proofs specifically enable this and why you cannot do it without Zer knowledge proofs um what Zer knowledge proofs enable is chains that can't be evil on a large scale so it's you know BL it's it's the core feature that defines blockchains that you can build something that that can be evil you go from this don't be evil to can be evil in Paradigm this is how Bitcoin started this is what ethereum inherited from Bitcoin if you run your your full node and you don't trust everyone else you veryify all transactions then the chain you're participating in cannot be evil but this does not scale because you cannot run the full nodes of thousands of chains individually on your laptop just invisible like you cannot just like you don't run the you know you can't run all the service of of the internet uh and we're going to have much more than thousands of chains like if everything every single thing that touches value goes on web 3 on chain we're going to we're talking about millions of transactions per second I mean the the existing Payment Systems alone process between like 10 100,000 TPS in on on on some Bak days right and if you add social interactions and micro payments and all the different kinds of like we're talking about massive volumes no one can verify it directly unless you you use some magic and this magic is your knowledge proofs because ZK proof 16 ZK proof snarks are essentially compressing computation we can like I can take 1 million operations of like well 1 million transactions with lots of compute in parallel Pro produce proofs of of different parts of it recursively combine them into a single proof can be verified on ethereum and then we can produce the proof of of ethereum blocks uh themselves and verify them on a mobile phone in less than one second so you can turn every single mobile phone in the world in a full node of ethereum that like fully verifies every single thing that happens on all of those thousands of chains uh so like making all of them chains that cannot be evil at least with respect to the promises they make to commitments they make so of course they like you know if they say um this is a permission chain it's not a rollup it's a validium we hold data in in our own servers then of course they can like shut down access to those servers so they can be evil individually towards you so you have to decide whether you trust them or not but they cannot be evil with respect to each other like if they Define some communication protocol some interaction protocol between them where like I pass a message this message is produced by the system contracts the system contracts are uniform they are all the same on all these chains then there is no way for them to fake this message sure they can shut down and disconnect but they cannot fake it and this in turn enables things like shared bridge and this is a very interesting concept so like imagine that you have two different banks and you have gold in each bank and you have customers who want to transact so like customer from bank one wants to send gold to a customer from bank to how do they do this well like they the simple way they they could instruct the bank to send the gold which will be very expensive because you need to transport it over the land you need to pay insurance you need to secure it like it it's quite a heavy operation so an alternative could be you just like make a note that bank one still keeps the gold but they owe this gold to the bank two so if as long as the banks can trust each other you can just do like a single operation on paper and then it would work and this is roughly how it works today with traditional Bridges like you rely maybe there is some third party who both of this Banks trust for keeping these records correct and and they they they just move the records but the gold never leaves the the two storages this introduces this trust assumption as as you scale the system as you add more and more Banks and more customers and more intermediaries the trust does not extend to all of them like you cannot trust all of them and so like you introduce inefficiencies because there is this web of trust that that does not expand so if we only could make Banks like magically trust each other what we could do is take one single storage like like like let's let's call it like a magical Fort nox where all of the gold of all of these Banks is stored in one place and then the banks keep the records and they are kept by I don't know like magic dwars that cannot be evil and never fail to execute consciously the the keeping the records and updating the records then any customer can interact with any other customer at random scale you know you can can add Banks keep adding Banks to the system keep updating records and it's going to be very very cheap because it's like you don't have to transfer physically gold between between those um subsidiaries and this is what's happening with rollup clusters with with this idea of the shared Bridge ZK enables chains that can be evil and chains that cannot be evil to each other enable this AR tecture with the shared bridge and Mer merized commitments of individual chains that can update the records um suly like on each side all of them are ZK proven so like they are not only um computationally honest keep computational Integrity to each other but also to the customers and this enables this infinite fully elastic Network that can grow Without Limits and that can actually absorb like all of the financial or non-financial value transaction of the world uh and this is what what the the elastic network is uh so the um this is a longer term Vision this year we're focusing we have published this road map from metalabs and at the end of the the last year we're going to stick to it um the priorities within the road map are dictated by the needs of individual chains like for us the highest priority for metal lapses is the success of Partners of uh of Builders who are building on the elastic Network so we're talking to them very closely like understanding what what they need to prioritize right now the absolute priority is shipping the evm uh bite code equivalence which is coming very soon to all ZK stch chains um and after that we're going to be increasing the throughput of chains uh the estimate is we can like we think it's realistic to get to 10,000 transactions like you know transfers average rc20 transfer transactions per second at roughly one um like 0.01 Cent computational proving costs for these transactions um getting to stage one for security of the chains potentially even stage two like stage two is realistic this year I don't want to commit to that but stage one is is on the commitment list improving the user experience working towards this Vision where every user can connect to every chain and just interact with one click and doing something very very important for financial institutions in particular and you as I mentioned before we have World some of the world's largest banks like deuts bank and UBS building on experimenting with the elastic network uh specifically because they need privacy like it's inconceivable for the world to get to mass adoption of blockchains if every single transaction every single wallet is completely transparent for the entire world like that that's just not going to work I think it it should be obvious to to everyone by by by this time and then finally making the connectivity between these chains full reality including the private chains like two Banks can be operating their own closed private validium they can still talk to each other seamlessly and send funds without anyone from the outside world seeing what's happening and they they not having to trust each other with fully atomic composable transactions happening on on this private separate networks uh era the first chain in the elastic Network the the the this original first zkm is going to continue play a major role in the uh uh in the elastic Network rup cluster as a hub for liquidity and Integrations with major infrastructure providers um and the uh if you have followed the oops um ZK sync governance has introduced a ZK sync ignite program for boosting the tvl of era and boosting Capital efficiency of defi operations on ERA last year and it's been my major success so far so I encourage you to to to explore this there is a beautiful website where you can see what rewards you can get for with for liquidity incentives and then I also want to introduce two major initiatives that are coming to Z sync very soon one is the new community program kicked off by governance with uh uh 5 million ZK tokens for engagement and support of the community and it's going to be expanded with local teams working in different parts of the world who understand their local geographic regions and and cultures way better than you know you can do from from a single place uh they're all going to be part of this program and I encourage you to join us today and tomorrow at the elastic house which is is a big Community Gathering of ziki sync where you can learn more about these programs ask us any questions about the road map the mission of ziki sync and can get connected to fellow Builders and with that um that's it for my presentation thank you very much happy to the questions if if there are any no questions okay thank you