Breaking: Polygon Accuses zkSync of IP Theft

Polygon has accused zero-knowledge rollup zkSync which recently hit significant milestones, of copying its code without attribution and in the process, made some false claims about the original work. 

Polygon Claims Against zkSync

Polygon protocol came up with Plonky2 and Starky, two Zero-Knowledge (zk) proof systems that are known to be very fast. Both Plonky2 and Starky are necessary for any developer interested in building a ZK L2.

Their development started when the company was only a startup known as Mir at the time. At their completion, their libraries were open-sourced under a permissive MIT/Apache license as part of the company’s plan to be net contributors who have also benefited from the works of others. From there, many developers began to work on and modify Plonky2, and the ecosystem grew. 

Recently, it was discovered that Matter Labs, the developers of zkSync, released a proving dubbed Boojum. A significant portion of its code contains source code that is copy-pasted from performance-critical components of the Plonky2 library. The alleged copy-paste was done without referencing the original author or the original work. 

Again, Alex Gluchowski, the founder of Matter Labs made a bold claim that Boojum is more than 10x faster than Plonky2.

Exploiting Open Source Code Without Attribution

This act, according to Polygon, is against the open-source ethos and does more harm to the ecosystem. Software can be developed in the open by leveraging the collaborative efforts of several members of the community, combining their talents and expertise for the development of the ecosystem.

Ordinarily, open source codes can be used, modified or even distributed by anyone in as much as they remember to give credit to the creator of the code. In addition to this, anyone who plans to copy such codes will be required to do so in good faith, not making misleading claims about that work for marketing hype. 

To put it in perspective, Polygon mentioned that “open source development is a zero-sum game and open source projects are resources to be exploited.” 

However, the open-source ecosystem would be more productive when participants are net contributors and not net extractors.