Matter Labs developers accused of plagiarizing zkSync

A division of the Polygon project, Polygon Zero, has accused Matter Labs of copying source code from its Plonky2 library.

“There is a temptation to use someone else's work without attribution, to make misleading claims about that work for marketing purposes, and to appropriate someone else's ideas. In this mode, open source development is a zero-sum game, and open source projects are the resources to use,” Polygon said.

The supposedly copied code was found in zkSync, a competing layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. However, Matter Labs refutes these claims.

Polygon Zero said that Matter Labs recently released a Boojum system with a large amount of code copied from components of its recursive SNARK Plonky2. In the opinion of Polygon Labs, the code was included without the original copyright or explicit attribution to the original authors. The project team also notes that Boojum is very similar to the Plonky2 library.

“The same strategy of parallel repetition is used to improve reliability in a small area,” the report says.

In addition, Polygon noted that Matter Labs positions Boojum 10 times faster than Plonky2.

“I wonder how this is possible, given that the performance-critical field arithmetic code is directly copied from Plonky2?” asked Polygon.

In conclusion, the authors of the appeal reminded that they are approaching the release of Plonky3, a new library that radically improves the performance of Plonky2 and Starky. However, taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own is not Ethereum ethic. The Ethereum community deserves better, Polygon concluded.

Matter Labs opened the zkSync Era to users at the end of March, a few days before the launch of the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) with Polygon's zero-knowledge technology. The project team spent almost $ 4 million on testing and auditing. At the same time, the head of the project, Alex Glukhovsky, said that "the technology is completely new, and people should understand this."