The zkWars | zkSync & Scroll

Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to another live edition of State of the Nation. Today, we're gonna talk about the Zero Knowledge EVM, the ZK EVM. David, got us through. This is gonna be formatted a little bit differently in that after the intro, I am actually stepping out. So, who do we have on the show? How are we formatting this? And who is helping us out today?

Oh, we got my good friend Ben Jones from Optimism. Uh, and uh Ben is uh gonna be our technical co-moderator here to help us unpack the ZK EVM. Ryan, you and I, I think we're pretty smart, but uh there's way smarter people in this industry, and there's way more technical things in this industry that we just kind of need some help unpacking. And so we're bringing in some extra help uh from the optimistic roll up world to help us unpack the ZK side of things. Uh so coming in in the second half of the show, once we get once we uh get there, we'll have uh Alex from ZK Sync and Ye from Scroll. Uh and Ben is gonna help us guide us through this conversation to understand a little bit more about the world of the ZKM.

It's a world that's heating up. I think the title of this episode is the ZK EVM Wars. And I think, you know, appropriately, what's like three weeks ago? All three ZK EVMs announced something big the exact same week. So the ZK wars are heating up. David, I'm gonna ask you the question I ask before every state of the nation date.

We have to we before we get there, Ryan, I want to talk about a little bit about just some intro stuff. Uh because we've got Ben here. And so uh before we there's gonna be a bunch of questions that I think we don't actually necessarily have to uh ask every single uh participant here in this uh in this stream. So we're gonna get some beginner questions out of the way. Uh and Ben's gonna help us with that here. So, Ben, I want I want to start with uh this very first question, which is what is the EVM and why is it important? And then we'll get to what does it mean to zero knowledge EVM?

Oh, good question, and thanks for having me on, y'all.

Okay, what is the EVM?

EVM is the EVM.

What the heck does that mean? Okay, basically, it is a way to interpret Ethereum programs or Ethereum smart contracts. So basically, a virtual machine is this notion that you map a bunch of basically numbers, right? Everything in a computer is expresses a number, and you map certain numbers to certain instructions.

Instruction like add or like divide or like call when you want to go and call another smart contract.

This is the basis for how you construct smart contracts on Ethereum

here in virtual world.

Write some Solidity code, what happens behind the scenes is that's taken from text,

on to goes through something called the compiler that turns it into a bunch of numbers, which is all the instructions that implement the program that you wrote.

That's the EVM.

Very important. I would say I would say crucially important.

It is one of the things that makes Ethereum Ethereum.

Okay, and so we have that. That's what the Ethereum layer one is. Uh what does it mean for to have a ZK EVM? Why are so many people hyped on a ZK EVM?

Mmm, yes. So I think they're hyped for scalability. It's very interesting because ZK EVM, right? What is the ZK there? It's zero knowledge, right? And interestingly, um, it does use these things called zero knowledge proofs. Arguably, ZK isn't the most important part of the zero knowledge proof, right? So when you think of a ZK snark, right? Might be this

zero knowledge, succinct, non interactive argument of knowledge. A really key

letter in that acronym is the S, is the succinct.

Because the point of these proofs is that you can basically prove something in a very short manner.

So a ZK EVM is about taking the EVM and converting it or running it inside a zero-knowledge environment that lets you prove things to synchronously.

So what does that mean? Basically, it means you can take the EVM

and you can write a proof that says the result of these 10 transactions is

state X, state Y, right? You prove the results of the Ethereum virtual machine.

But what's interesting about this is you could

make that not 10 transactions, but 100 or 1,000, and still the proof size stays the same.

So you can see why this might be a very compelling.

Can I can I just uh bake this down into kind of layman's language here? So the EVM thing, that's the thing that turns Ethereum from a calculator into a computer. And the EVM thing is the thing that Bitcoin does not have, and the reason it functions more like a calculator. You can't run programs on top of it, right?

And then the ZK part makes the EVM thing,

the computer part of Ethereum, much more scalable, because it compresses it into this very tiny size.

Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. There's a little more nuance in terms of like, you know, for example, if you're posting 10 transactions versus a thousand transactions and you're still rolling those up, right? If we're talking about a

roll up, right, then there's still some costs there that fundamentally can't be compressed in quite the same way. You compress quite a bit, but it doesn't like disappear.

Um there's more nuance, but that's absolutely the case.

What would you say? What why are people so stoked on a ZK EVM? Why why is this such a

important thing to like fight over and

Why there are so many teams like racing to get main net.

Right. Yeah. I mean, so there's a few reasons. The core of it, though, is that the EVM is what powers Ethereum and it's what has all the network.

Okay, so I'm work at I'm a co-founder of Optimism, which is optimistic rollup protocol. We spent a lot of time making the optimistic rollups work with the EVM. Why did we do that? It's because that's where all the applications and all the developers live, right? So to build a good scaling solution, we want to do that. And it's definitely been a limitation of ZK scaling solutions so far that they can't go ahead and take advantage of this.

I think people are excited because there's potential with a ZK VM

build on that network.

One last question before we get to

panelists.

Ben, what are you hoping to get out of this conversation?

What should listeners pay attention to when listening to this?

What are you also hoping to

learn here?

Good question. So

it depends on who the listener is, right? I think that one of the things obvious.

Listeners would be like a user of these protocols, right? So I think you want to listen to what are the security properties like that you're interacting with? What is the roadmap of this thing that you're

interacting with?

I think if you're a developer, then really what you want to be thinking about is what does it actually mean in practice for

an application?

Um

there's different ways that you can go about implementing, there's different levels of support for different and aspects of

stack that you'll have access to.

And so I think that's two bits of framing. As for what I want personally, oh man, everything under the sun, really, I feel like, but uh including those questions. Um

I'm secretly most excited to hear how we can integrate it into

that's a whole nother conversation.

Can you guys um also go over? So I'm gonna be grabbing the popcorn here and just and just watching as a bystander, but just throwing throwing my one question in is can you guys talk a little bit about bridges? I know that's not um typically like exclusive to ZK, but it's it's kind of like a roll-up type technology. And I'm um I think a lot of people listening are probably increasingly concerned about the security of bridges from one chain to another or from the mainnet to roll up from a mainnet to an alt L1. So I'd love to hear a bit more about that. And guys, we're going to get right to the episode. We're talking all about ZK EVMs, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.