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Chapter 1: What is Ethereum's biggest upgrade and why is it significant?
So ZKVM is this fundamental insight that what you can do is you can basically allow nodes to verify that a block followed all the rules without having to re-execute the block. It's a very non-intuitive thing, right? A blockchain by its nature is a very symmetrical thing. Every node basically does the same thing.
Chapter 2: How does the ZK EVM verify blocks without re-executing them?
Of course, you have block producers, but then every node kind of has to download, re-execute. You're duplicating the effort across the network. And now you're jumping to this like... Through this very fancy cryptography, you're jumping into this world where you still have the same effort to build a block, but then verification in a way is effortless. It has this magical compression element to it.
Bankless Nation, I'm here with Ansgar Dietrichs. He's a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. We're going to talk about the ZK EVM today on the show. Ansgar, welcome to Bankless. Hey, great to be here again. Pretty ambitious subject, Ansgar.
Ethereum has had this history of very big forks, hard forks that have upgraded Ethereum from this early primitive proof of concept where it started in 2015 to what it is today. which is fundamental infrastructure, the backbone of internet money and internet finance. We had the Merge, which did proof of work to proof of stake.
We had EIP-1559 that upgraded Ether economics and transaction user experience. There's also 4844, which just enabled Ethereum's roll-up environment to become its best self. With each of these forks, they all represented this rallying cry for the Ethereum community. They were this kind of grand unifying force of attention by the Ethereum community.
Chapter 3: What are the three main constraints of blockchain scaling?
And it allowed Ethereum itself to command attention from the rest of the world. The rest of the world paid attention to Ethereum when Ethereum had these forks, these incoming forks. The Ethereum was just loud. And I think these kind of represent Ethereum, some of Ethereum's best moments.
when Ethereum has these kind of cultural shelling points for technological upgrades to what we consider in the Ethereum community to be critical social infrastructure. Now, I think Ansgar, and I want to suss this out, this topic out with you, that there is another fork on the horizon. It's not soon. It's not this year. It's likely not next year either.
But nonetheless, it is there on the horizon, and I think it deserves attention. I think it deserves the treatment that the Ethereum community has given previous forks.
And I think in addition to all of the valuable things that we got from the three forks that I just mentioned, this one is actually the biggest upgrade that Ethereum will ever experience because it relates to users more than any of the three forks in the past. And that is the fork that introduces the ZK EVM to Ethereum.
Now, Asghar, these are the sentiments that I want to start this podcast off with. Before we get into what is the DK EVM and all the technical details about it, I just wanted to give those sentiments to you and have you reflect upon them before we kind of dive into the technicals.
I personally share your excitement on this topic.
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Chapter 4: Why has Ethereum been 'slow' by design?
I really think that it's one of those changes that are really Ethereum at its best. It's one of those... really ambitious technical projects that I think Ethereum is in a unique position to deliver. It will have a huge impact primarily through scaling, but in many ways, I'm sure we'll talk about all of this. And I really think it's something we can look forward to, we can be proud of.
And yeah, I'm excited to talk about the details. I will say, by the way, you said hard fork. And the interesting thing here is like similar to if you think back at the merge, right?
Chapter 5: What is the rollout plan for transitioning to mandatory proofs?
We had first the launch of the beacon chain, which was one moment in time. And then we later on had the mergers, like two separate moments in time. And I think similarly, maybe even to a larger degree with ZKVM, as we'll discuss, it's It actually, it has this nature of it's an ongoing transition that is basically about to start.
Then we will have the main hard fork and then it will continue after. So it's much more like a ongoing transition. But yeah, let's dive in.
So it is the introduction of an era of Ethereum rather than an acute hard fork. And I think the ZK EVM era will be has the potential to be Ethereum's best era because of what the ZK EVM does for Ethereum. So let's let's stop hyping it up and start to get into the technical details. What do we need to know about what a ZK EVM is? What is it?
And then we can talk about like why what it is that's so significant to Ethereum.
Yeah, so I think, you know, to understand this, like really kind of you have to start from the problem statement, right? So ZKVM really arose in the context of scaling and basically the fundamental point is that a blockchain, if you run a blockchain, you have these three primary constraints.
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Chapter 6: How does the ZK EVM impact client diversity in the Ethereum ecosystem?
You have the data, right? You have to first, like any new block you create, it has to... get to the user, then you have the IO, you have to, like, then go to disk, you have to get all the data you need to actually, like, then verify the block, and then you have the actual verification, the execution, the compute, right?
So those are, like, the three main constraints, the bandwidth, the IO, and the compute. That's any blockchain, no matter the design, those are the main constraints. And so... If you want to scale this, you can just do the thing where you take that and you just scale it up. And we'll talk about this in a bit. That's actually, to some degree, what we're doing in the short term.
Chapter 7: What is the expected timeline for the full implementation of the ZK EVM?
And that's what many other chains have been doing. That's a very natural thing. But you do run into limits. You do run into tight limits. And so ZKVM is this fundamental... It comes from the cryptography side, these snags, these knowledge proofs. And it is this fundamental insight that what you can do is you can basically...
allow nodes to verify that a block followed all the rules without having to re-execute the block. And that's, again, that's something that's a very non-intuitive thing, right? Normally, a blockchain, by its nature, is a very symmetrical thing. Every node basically does the same thing. Of course, you have block producers, but then every node kind of has to download, re-execute.
You're duplicating the effort across the network. And now you're jumping to this, like, through this very fancy cryptography, you're jumping into this world where you still have the same effort to build a block, but then verification in a way is effortless. It has this magical compression element to it. And then specifically, what's so important in the L1 context is the real-time element to it.
So a ZK-AVM just allows for this compression. And for example, many listeners, I think, will already be familiar with the concept of ZK roll-ups, right? So So those have been around for a while, and that actually was a huge first jump in this technology, which just allowed for this compressed ZK verification in the first place. But so far, this is done in an asynchronous way.
So meaning you have your L2 blockchain that, you know, it's its own chain, basically, and it keeps progressing. And then Afterwards, with some, you know, up to several hours of delay, you come and you basically you compute over a long time these proofs and then you bring them to the chain.
And what now is the second huge jump here is to go from this very asynchronous delayed process to a proving, a verification loop from block creation, proving verification that all happens at the same speed of the blockchain. So like within a single Ethereum slot right now, that's 12 seconds. We will bring that even further down.
You have this entire loop, closed loop within that short amount of time. And so basically that's many orders of magnitude of performance improvement. And that really is what unlocks all of these huge gains for the L1.
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Chapter 8: What are the second-order effects of the ZK EVM on the broader blockchain landscape?
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And so when some Bitcoin miner mines a block, but if it finds the correct hash and it proposes that that block, Everyone else in the network doesn't trust that leader. They re-execute all of the same work to verify it for themselves. And that's the way that Bitcoin discovered the way to have a decentralized network is everyone's checking everyone else.
And that re-execute word has just been the status quo for all blockchains. Everyone re-does all of the work. And the way that that impacts blockchains, all blockchains to this day, is that it kind of is hamstrung by the slowest node in the network.
Or at least there is some requirement for computation that every blockchain has that, you know, if you aren't at least this fast, you can't keep up with the network because you can't keep up with executing all the everyone else's work. And now, you know, some blockchains have different opinions as to like how much requirement you have. Bitcoin's is very low.
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