Matter Labs Denies Code Plagiarism During Polygon War
According to Matter Labs, claims of a total absence of attribution made in public go against the spirit of the open source movement.
Creator of zkSync and CEO of Matter Labs Alex Gluchowski denied accusations of code theft without properly referencing zero-knowledge scaling company Polygon Zero. Gluchowski referred to the allegations as “unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing” coming from a group the executive “highly respects.”
The remarks are in reaction to Polygon Zero’s lengthy blog entry, which accused Matter Labs’ creators of copying and pasting “a significant amount of source code” from functionality-critical parts of the Plonky2 library.
Polygon Zero and Matter Labs’ Conflict
According to Polygon, the most recent product from Matter Labs, Boojum, included some code from Plonky2, a zero-knowledge technique they developed. if Matter Labs’ inclusion of the code in Boojum without original copyrights or explicit acknowledgement to the original creators sparked issues, even if the Plonky2 platform is open-source.
In addition to the “directly copied code,” Polygon asserted that Boojum and Plonky2 are strikingly similar, citing the use of the same parallel repetition strategy to promote soundness in a small field, similar custom gates to effectively perform arithmetic recursive verification, and the same lookup argument created by Ulrich Haböck, a teammate at the scaling firm.
“To add insult to injury, the founder of Matter Labs claimed that Boojum is more than 10x faster than Plonky2. Wondering how this is possible, given that the performance-critical field arithmetic code is directly copied from Plonky2? You should be.”
Further, Polygon stated that the claim that Boojum is 10 times faster than Plonky2 is “extremely misleading.”
Response
In the first line of the Boojum module, the Matter Labs team credited Polygon, according to Gluchowski, who also explained that almost 5% of the Boojum code was influenced by the Plonky2 codebase. He also noted that RedShift, a project launched by Matter Labs three years prior to the publication of the Plonky2 paper, is the source of both Plonky2 and Boojum.
“We could have done it better. The community rightfully pointed out that there is a more standard approach to attributions, which we will wholeheartedly apply from now on.”
The Matter Labs claimed that if the Polygon Zero team desired more credit, they could have submitted a pull request, which the latter “would have happily accepted.”
