Recently, Matter Labs published a blog post which expanded on recent advances in zero-knowledge proofs, and their vision for ZK Sync, a trustless scaling and privacy solution based on ZK Rollup for Ethereum. The post mentioned how ZK Sync was designed to bring a VISA-scale throughput, enabling thousands of transactions per second while keeping funds secure in the underlying L1 accounts and maintaining ultra-low latency to provide instant economic finality.
On a thread on Reddit, Bitcoin Core developer and former CTO of Blockstream, Gregory Maxwell (/u/nullc), responded to these claims, commenting that the article “leads with a false claim” of the “security being strictly on par with L1.”
According to Maxwell, the security is, at best, on the level of some good behavior bonds. However, it also includes a number of “extremely aggressive new cryptographic assumptions that don’t exist for ordinary transactions.” However, he also noted that those limitations fortunately only apply to participating transactions, as well as users who choose to take them on, adding that many people will probably find it to be an acceptable trade-off.
Maxwell also claimed that this idea had been proposed on the BitcoinTalk Forum back in 2013. However, the underlying technology at the time was too immature to start implementing it. Subsequently, Blockstream’s former CTO added that he fully expects Bitcoin to pick up analogous functionality once the idea has been “proved out.” He also claimed that neither the Ethereum Foundation nor Matter Labs would be able to patent the broad concept, considering it had been published publicly years before their work began.
“Since nothing about it depends on violating Bitcoin’s strong properties (like inflationfreeness or decenteralization), the only reason it wouldn’t also eventually be adopted by Bitcoin is if it didn’t actually provide a good value.”
