Matter Labs CEO dismisses Polygon Zero claims of zkSync plagiarism News โธ Polygon โธ Technology
Matter Labs CEO dismisses Polygon Zero claims of zkSync plagiarism
The Polygon Zero team wrote that the copying codes without attribution were against open source ethos and hurts the ecosystem.
2 min read
Updated: Aug. 4, 2023 at 1:20 pm UTC
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Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski described Polygon Zero’s allegation that zkSync copied their code without proper attribution as “unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing,” according to an Aug. 4 post on X, formerly Twitter.
Polygonโs plagiarism accusation
On Aug. 3, Polygon Zero said Matter Labs copied “performance-critical components” of its Plonky2 zero-knowledge system code without proper attribution.
The Polygon team stated that the zkSync team made misleading claims about its latest proving system Boojum being 10x faster than Plonky2. It argued that this was impossible, considering Boojum copied the performance code of Plonky2.
Polygon Zero further strongly criticized these actions, saying they were antithetical to the core principles of the open-source movement. According to the team, such practices could pose a significant threat to smaller development teams, as “better-funded competitors” might exploit their efforts without giving due credit.
Matter Labs denial
In response, Gluchowski said claims that zkSync reused code without attribution could not be further from the truth.
According to Gluchoswki, Plonky2 and Boojum are implementations of the RedShift construction, which the Matter Labs team introduced three years before Polygon Zero released the Plonky2 paper.
Although Polygon referred to RedShift in the paper, Gluchowski said the team did not give any credit to Matter Labs.
He explained that only about 5% of Boojum code is based on Plonky2 code, and the team acknowledged Plonky2 in the README file and the introduction post.
However, he admitted that zkSync could have handled this better and used a more standard approach for attribution, which would be done subsequently. But he criticized the public allegations as against the spirit of Open Source.
“If the Polygon Zero team wanted additional credit, the easiest way would have been to submit a pull request which we would have happily accepted.”
Meanwhile, Gluchowski expressed surprise about complaints regarding benchmarking. He noted that there was no need for the Polygon Zero team to put out its code for benchmarking and endorse it if they were unhappy about the benchmarking function or un-optimizing their implementations.
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