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Speaker A: Hey, bankless nation. I'm very excited about the episode today. David is out, and this episode gets technical at times. So I have ETH researcher Justin Drake, whom I'm sure many of you know, he's co hosting with me today. Some context as we get into this episode. So we did a previous episode a few weeks ago ... |
Speaker B: Thanks. Glad to be here. |
Speaker A: Also excited to be joined yet again on Bankless by Justin Drake. He's an Ethereum researcher and repeat bankless guest. Justin, how are you doing to. |
Speaker C: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me again. But I guess this time maybe as a host asking some technical questions. Yeah. |
Speaker A: How's it feel? The tables have turned. So, Justin, I'm going to tap you in as my co host today. So David is out and we're going to talk about the next generation zkevms. So I think we're talking to Brian about the world's first maybe ZK evM. That's a type one ZK evM. And I'm not even sure the words that I'm ... |
Speaker C: Right? So, big picture, we're actually going to snockify all of Ethereum. And there's two big components that need to be snarkified. One is the EVM, which is this virtual machine which processes Ethereum transactions. And then the other part is the beacon chain. Now, once we've snugified these two things, we... |
Speaker A: You just described here, Justin, is the Holy Grail. And I still want to spend some more time with you right here, just fleshing this out and making sure that we understand this going to the episode, because it sets the context for the rest of the conversation with, with Brian and risk zero here. So the light... |
Speaker C: That's correct. So anytime you have a human that ends up wanting to interact with Ethereum, they need to interface through a full node. And there's some complications here, because running a full node is not something that you can necessarily easily do on your phone, and it's not something that the average i... |
Speaker A: Does this imply anything for a bandwidth as well? Will this decrease the bandwidth requirements, or will bandwidth become the constraint here now? |
Speaker C: Right, great question. So, consensus kind of solves two problems. One of them is execution, and the other one is data availability. Snarks is kind of this magic technology that removes computation as a bottleneck within the context of consensus. And it turns out we have another magic technology for data avai... |
Speaker A: So data availability sampling as well, that's a core upgrade of what I think people are calling Dank Sharding as well, not proto dank sharding as I recall, but dank sharding, which could occur later in the future. |
Speaker C: Exactly right. So we're looking at technologies two, three, maybe four, five years into the future, which in a way will transform accessibility of Ethereum for users. And in the end game, accessing Ethereum will be just as easy as accessing any other website. And you'll have guarantees, just like on the webs... |
Speaker B: Trust nobody. Also, unlike the current lock, where you actually have to trust the signature verifiers. |
Speaker A: For those signature issues, ZK technology is the thing that makes this all possible. What's very interesting is I know there are people who talk about compute scaling in blockchains via Moore's law, and that's true. But where we really get the massive scalability is more with cryptography breakthroughs. That... |
Speaker C: Fantastic question. So once we've snarkified the evm, we'll be in a position where we can greatly increase the gas limit and potentially even remove the gas limit for computation specifically. And the reason is that the gas limit is an anti denial of service vector, whereby when you receive a block, you want... |
Speaker A: So what does that imply then? So if Ethereum right now supports like 16 transactions per second, and we're scaling that out via rollups, and last time I checked on l two beat, we're about, if you count all of the kind of roll ups combined, in that we're about five x 16 transactions per second, something like... |
Speaker C: Right. So what it means is that there's going to be a partial comeback of the layer one. So I think the spotlight is going to shift to l two s for the next few years, and there's going to be a lot of experimentation, a lot of innovation, and the layer one is really going to be lagging because we're extremely... |
Speaker A: Wow. So this would become kind of ethereum Mainnet, the layer one kind of our multicore moment. Then what's kind of the analog? Is it from 486 to Pentium? I don't know what we're doing here. |
Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a good analogy. We're going multicore. So for a very, very long time we've had these cpu's which were just one core. And then what we did is we ramped up the frequency of the cpu's, so it was like hundreds of megahertz and then 1, then 1.52. And then nowadays we have 3 GHz cpu's and you ... |
Speaker A: Okay, well, Brian, you've been sitting here waiting very patiently, as Justin eloquently described the light at the end of the tunnel, this kind of holy grail. And I think that you are working on that now. You're not working on that within the bounds of the Ethereum foundation and applying that to Ethereum M... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear that with all of the advances that we're making in cryptography, as you said, that the capabilities of Ethereum are just going to continue to compound and compound and probably much faster than we would have seen or thought even possible. So I think the future is very bright, ... |
Speaker A: Okay, well, so tell us what you're building then, out on the frontier, which again, looks a little Sci-Fi from our perspective, but seems to be at the same time also happening faster than many would have imagined, at least many years ago. So your company is called risk zero, and you've got, I believe, this p... |
Speaker B: Yeah, so Zeth is an EVM implementation that's actually based on RET, which is like Geth, an implementation of the EVM. However, it's one that's built using rust and a type one Za EVM is simply one that can actually process the full nature of Ethereum and an entire block and prove effectively snarkify, an act... |
Speaker A: So the other Zk evms that we've talked about many times before, the ones that polygon are building, the ones that matter lab is building, the one that scroll is building. You'd differentiate that and you'd say, that's not a type one EVM because it's a little bit different in some way. Is that correct? And ho... |
Speaker B: They're all different in different ways. And they often change exactly how things get merkelized, how states stored, and they generally tend to implement all the opcodes. I don't know, Justin, do you want to expound upon that? |
Speaker C: Yeah. So generally speaking, what will happen is that they will want a solidity developer and solidity code to be reused. That's kind of one of the main goals. And so they're going to re implement every single opcode, but be under the hood, under the bonnet. They're going to be taking some shortcuts to optim... |
Speaker A: At layer one, because of those changes, because of those, I guess, optimizations or differences, these types, type two ZK evms, are not candidates to become an enshrined roll up, at least in their existing form. Is that correct? And this a type one ZKEVM, is closer to a candidate to becoming an enshrined rol... |
Speaker C: Yeah, that's exactly right. But what I'll say is that oftentimes like these are journeys, right? They start somewhere and then they incrementally become more and more compliant with the EVM. I mean, this even happened with optimistic roll ups, right? At first they had these small modifications relative to th... |
Speaker A: Can we make a Drake saw here, please? I want a law. |
Speaker B: It's a Moore's law with another Moore's law on top of it. |
Speaker C: Yeah. |
Speaker A: Okay. Okay. So this is about the limit of my technical proficiency here, and I'm wondering, Justin, if you could sort of. What questions do you have for Brian here actually, about how this works? So we're talking about this type one ZK evM. We've, we've fleshed out the rough contours of what this actually is... |
Speaker C: Perfect. Sounds great. But I guess I do have one non technical question, which is a little bit about context setting, which is that it seems like you guys were in stealth mode for a relatively long amount of time, maybe a year or two. And a few days ago when you made the announcement, Vitalik was messaging m... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, so Risc Zero got started with this idea of building out general purpose ZK capabilities. So the ability to actually prove any computation. So not just the EVM, like an existing game. You could prove doom, you could prove Linux. People are actually using this to prove the execution of Linux. So ... |
Speaker A: And Brian, this is maybe the flash of lightning that Justin is referring to, because Raciro just came across my radar last week as well. And David was like, hey, I'm going to be out. He's that burning man, actually. So I'm going to be out next week. Ryan, you should go talk to these people and see what's goi... |
Speaker B: Yeah, so the type zero thing is definitely a joke that might have brought some people the wrong way, but the idea, like, it's a type one evm, but you didn't have to do zero work to make it work because we just utilized all the hard work of everyone else in the space to create this platform. It's not entirely... |
Speaker C: So if I were to summarize, it sounds like you guys started off very much as a technology company, focused squarely on snarks and snarkifying the world. And you have this really interesting approach, which I guess we should dig into. Very interesting technical approach. But in our pre call yesterday, one of t... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we've been talking to op on and off for a while, because this idea that you can take ZK and sort of create fraud proofs, as soon as you can ZK prove something, you can also ZK prove that something is different than what other people said it is. So you have this kind of ability to automatically ... |
Speaker C: Right? So I think what is partially going on is that optimism as a project, which is an optimistic roll up, is thinking down the line of upgrading to a ZK rollup. And they submitted this request for proposal where they're saying, okay, anyone in the world, if you can help us snarkify optimism, we're going to... |
Speaker A: And really quick risk five? What is risk five? We know what risk Zero is a company, right? |
Speaker B: So risk zero's name comes from risk five. And risk five is. It's an open source instruction set architecture for actual microprocessors. So people familiar with like the Apple M two or ARM or X 86 or mips, you know, these are actually instruction sets. So similar to the EVM, they have opcodes that tend to be... |
Speaker C: So, basically, there's two translation steps, or kind of compilation steps that need to happen. And it turns out that the rust programming language, by default today already allows you to compile to various cpu's. So when you have a Rust program, you can compile it to X 86, which is a lot of intel machines r... |
Speaker B: Yeah, so the performance varies based on which kind of hardware, actual hardware target you're running the ZKVM on. So we support CPU's, we support the M two GPU, and we support Nvidia GPU's as well. So getting to this level of performance has been a multistage journey. And honestly, there's a lot of room fo... |
Speaker A: So I'm just in kind of like the intro as we're exploring this throughout the possibility that someday we could run an Ethereum, a snarkified Ethereum validator from our smartwatch. It sounds like there are a lot of performance steps necessary to get there. And I'm curious, like, how close are we? So is what ... |
Speaker B: Well, so proving, I don't think you're going to. When you end up in this sort of enshrined roll up world, you're not going to have the proving be done on the smartwatch. The proving will be done by these machines off in the cloud or in this decentralized network. And then the verification, like, because your... |
Speaker A: So then why does performance matter so much? |
Speaker B: Oh, performance of the proving system. Yeah, I mean, effectively, it gets down to how quickly you can make these sort of EVM blocks. Right. Like right now it takes us, if we use 64 of these off the shelf machines, it takes about 50 minutes. And I think there's probably an easy ten x there. But if you use eve... |
Speaker C: 2 seconds. If the use case specifically is being a validator, then when a new block comes in, you want to know that it's valid a second later. Basically, the latency, the proof latency, the time it takes to generate the proof should be on the order of 1 second. And today we're not there yet. We're maybe 100 ... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I still think even when you get to the ASIC level, you're still going to end up like. And you have a huge decentralized network of provers. Maybe these Asics are even in people's phones, you're still going to end up splitting, proving an entire ETH block, probably up over hundreds or thousands ... |
Speaker C: Okay, so if I were to try and summarize, where does this performance come from? Which is just to recap, it's like a ten minute, roughly speaking, ten minutes to 1 hour. Proof latency comes from three different types of tricks. One is on the proof system itself, where you move to this different type of so cal... |
Speaker B: Very well said. |
Speaker C: Now, I guess the next big topic in my mind as an Ethereum researcher and thinking of type one zka vms, is security. We have traditionally a lot of complexity going on here, and the likelihood for bugs is very, very high. And I have this saying, which is maybe, I guess a little arrogant, but I believe that ev... |
Speaker B: Yeah, obviously a huge topic. Me and my co founders actually know each other. We met 23 years ago in the Seattle, like, infosec scene. So we were all like hackers back in the day. So we have a pretty deep set of sort of experience and knowledge in this space. And that's part of the reason we chose RISC five.... |
Speaker C: Gotcha. If I were to summarize this kind of. This final step, where we go from RISC V to a snark, which is actually fairly digestible, because RISC five is relatively simple. Actually, this reminds me of Cairo from stockware. They have an even more reduced instruction set, which is super simple. What they've... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, people have done this for C, and if you're going to make. If you're going to do formal verification for C, then Rust is probably also within the bounds of what's possible. But these efforts take decades or a really long time. But blockchain accelerates everything to an obscene degree. ZK would ... |
Speaker C: Okay, great. So I guess the final kind of semi technical topic that I have is around licensing. So if we are going to be using a piece of code at layer one, really, for it to be palatable, socially palatable, I guess the licensing needs to be good. And I guess the favorite types of licenses that we have migh... |
Speaker B: Yeah, so the sort of core Risc zero ZkvM. So the RISC V proving engine that's licensed under the Apache two license right now, always has been. And then Z itself will probably be Apache two slash MIT licensed. We might also end up dual licensing everything because that's kind of the standard in the rust comm... |
Speaker C: Okay, understood. So you've open sourced several key components on the very attractive license Apache 2.0 and you're thinking of dual licensing it maybe with MIT. So you can choose which license you want when you start using the code. And part of the prover is already open source, but maybe some of the final... |
Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. |
Speaker A: So Brian, risk zero seems to have come out of nowhere and it's super incredible how fast all this is coming to bear here. And open source working, it sounds like first to snarkify, our favorite l two s out there, like working with optimism and others. So I imagine that's going to be a bulk of the work at fir... |
Speaker B: Yeah, in this space we're really focused on this Bonsai ZK application development platform. This is something we've been working on for a while. Um, because you can use ZK for all kinds of things. I don't know how if you've talked to like many of the ZK coprocessing teams, but you can use banzai effectively... |
Speaker A: So this theory, Banzai is kind of a platform for ZK snarkifying apps, maybe. |
Speaker B: Let's call it apps and roll ups, anything really. So we expect right now it's a centralized SaaS offering, and we think there's long term value in sort of providing an enterprise sort of open core model there. But we will definitely be building a decentralized network around that as well. Exactly what that l... |
Speaker A: Is this like sort of an AWS for ZK proofs kind of thing? It's just like a marketplace here, and you're looking to try to make it as decentralized as possible. That could be a future here, definitely. |
Speaker B: I mean, this is like when we got into, I mean, Jeremy or scientist is just always into AI and ZK and all of these things, but when we started really thinking about what we're going to do with it, I think that really got me excited. Washington was the potential of this technology to kind of let people who are... |
Speaker A: So, Brian, what do you think happens next in the roadmap? All of this seems to be happening faster than we all thought it would, which is so incredibly exciting. The level of investment in the space and the level of talent in brains now being focused on crypto is just absolutely astounding. We almost ended t... |
Speaker B: Yeah, all of the above. We're definitely working with l two s, l three s roll out frameworks. However you want to think about all of that space. And also we're working with people on DeFi projects, and eventually gaming is going to be a big part of this. The way I see this playing out is just like friend tec... |
Speaker A: Well, this has been great. Justin, do you have any other questions for Brian, or should we start to close this out here? |
Speaker C: I think I have one final question, which is around your alignment with Ethereum. I think we had, during the pre call, it sounded like as an individual, as a person, you were in this space for quite a long time, and you have a certain set of beliefs. I'm curious what those are, but also how this translates in... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, our sort of core, three core values are like integrity, transparency, and agency. And I think if those aren't, like, Ethereum aligned, I'm not really sure what that sort of even means. So coming out of the hacker culture that the founders came from, it just seems like a very natural sort of fit... |
Speaker A: Brian, what first brought you down the crypto rabbit hole? |
Speaker B: You know, buying supplies for Burning man? |
Speaker A: It's funny, as my co host is literally at Burning man right now. Fantastic. |
Speaker B: No, but it's been a crazy journey, and so it's really fun to get more and more into this space. |
Speaker A: Yeah, well, very good. And maybe my last question is kind of the high level to Justin. So this idea of hyperscaling Ethereum using kind of like fractal crypto proof, ZK proofs on top of ZK proofs, I mean, has this always been part of the plan, or is this just happenstance? And I guess when you think of the t... |
Speaker C: Right. So, I mean, if you want to think in terms of endgames and fundamentals, you go back to these fundamental resources, computation, that's just not going to be a problem of consensus. And the way that I think about it is that consensus is this very flexible tool that can solve all sorts of problems. And ... |
Speaker A: Well, it seems like we have entered the snark era for sure, and there's going to be a lot of that applied to crypto in the future. Brian, Justin, thank you so much for guiding us on the tour today. It's been much appreciated. |
Speaker B: Thank you. |
Speaker C: Thank you. |
Speaker A: Bankless nation risk and disclaimers. Gotta let you know, of course, none of this has been financial advice. I don't even think we talked Price in this whole episode, so obviously not crypto is risky, so our compilers, so our new layer twos, you could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the... |
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