Thursday evening, the Polygon Zero teams accused the Matter Labs developers of copying some of their work through zkSync without crediting them. Alex Gluchowski, CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs, has responded publicly to these accusations.
Is part of zkSync’s code copied from Polygon Zero’s code?
In the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it’s common to see projects talk about “an innovation” in their marketing strategy, when in fact it’s an optimization of a competing application. This time, a controversy has arisen between Polygon Zero, which is developing a zkEVM layer 2, and Matter Labs, the company behind the development of zkSync.
Crypto runs on the open source ethos. When projects don’t follow it, the ecosystem suffers.
We were disappointed to see that @zksync copied our code without attribution and made misleading claims about the original work, so we wrote this post.
https://t.co/8VnoYVWgI8– Polygon Zero (@0xPolygonZero) August 3, 2023
The subject of dispute is the code used by zkSync for its Boojum module, which is in fact a copy-paste of Polygon Zero’s Plonky2. As the company explains, this code is open source, which doesn’t prevent competing projects from adapting it in their own way, but the problem here is that no credit has been given for the initial work.
Boojum’s “README” section does indeed mention that elements have been borrowed from Plonky2, but for Polygon Zero, this goes far beyond a few inspirations :
“However, it may not be obvious to the reader that Boojum borrows much more than Poseidon’s constants from Plonky2, and in fact that Boojum’s design is almost identical to Plonky2’s, even to the point of copying and pasting code.”
Alex Gluchowski of Matter Labs responds
Faced with his accusations, Alex Gluchowski, CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs issued a lengthy response on Twitter:
Every decision we make as a team towards building @zksync is driven by our ethos, which is based on integrity and transparency. We have made honest mistakes in the past, but we always did our best to openly acknowledge them and take responsibility. And will always do so in the… https://t.co/4yjpSCHC2d
– Alex G. ∎ (@gluk64) August 4, 2023
For example, he points out that Boojum and Plonky2 are in fact both implementations of RedShift, a technology itself developed by Matter Labs. Incidentally, RedShift was not credited in Plonky2’s documentation, but Matter Labs ignored it, happy for someone to improve on its work.
What’s more, only 5% of Boojum’s code is based on Plonky2. On the other hand, Alex Gluchowski deplored this public attack, as it would have been enough if Polygon Zero’s teams had asked to be given greater prominence :
“Going after us with public accusations of total lack of attribution (even if it were true, which it isn’t here) is anything but the spirit of the open source movement. If you’re not happy about others, including potential competitors, using parts of your code, maybe open source isn’t for you? “
As Ethereum Layers 2 (ETH) become more and more developed, it can be difficult for investors to pinpoint who’s right and who’s wrong in such conflicts. What is certain is that each project is focusing its marketing on positioning itself as the best solution on the market in order to acquire as many users as possible.
