Matter Labs Denies Allegations of Code Plagiarism During Ongoing Dispute with Polygon

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Matter Labs Denies Allegations of Code Plagiarism During Ongoing Dispute with Polygon

Alex Gluchowski, the CEO of Matter Labs and creator of zkSync, denied accusations of code plagiarism directed at his team by zero-knowledge scaling company Polygon Zero. Gluchowski described the claims as “unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing,” especially coming from a team he “highly respects.”

These remarks were made in response to a detailed blog post from Polygon Zero, which alleged that the developers at Matter Labs had copy-pasted “a substantial amount of source code” from critical components of the Plonky2 library.

Conflict Between Matter Labs and Polygon Zero

Polygon asserted that the recent release from Matter Labs, Boojum, incorporated specific code from Plonky2, a zero-knowledge technology developed by Polygon. Although the Plonky2 platform is open-source, Polygon expressed concerns regarding Matter Labs’ omission of the code in Boojum without proper copyright acknowledgment or clear attribution to the original creators.

In addition to the “directly copied code,” Polygon pointed out that Boojum bears a striking resemblance to Plonky2, noting the application of the same parallel repetition strategy to enhance soundness in a small field, similar custom gates for efficient arithmetic recursive verification, and the identical lookup argument created by Ulrich Haböck, a member of 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.”

Polygon further stated that it is “extremely misleading” to assert that Boojum is 10x faster than Plonky2.

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Gluchowski asserted that the Matter Labs team credited Polygon in the opening line of the Boojum module and elaborated that nearly 5% of the Boojum code is inspired by the Plonky2 codebase. He also highlighted that both Plonky2 and Boojum originate from the RedShift framework, an initiative initiated by Matter Labs three years prior to the release of the Plonky2 paper.

“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.”

Matter Labs indicated that if the Polygon Zero team sought further credit, they could have submitted a pull request, which the former “would have happily accepted.”

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