Polygon Zero accuses the makers of Matter Labs of plagiarism.
According to Polygon Zero, Matter Labs copied significant code from Plonky2 to zkSync, a rival Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.
According to an announcement made on August 3, Polygon’s zero-knowledge scaling arm, Polygon Zero, accuses Matter Labs developers of copying “a substantial amount of source code” from its Plonky2 library. The allegedly stolen code was discovered on zkSync, a competing layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum based on zero-knowledge technology. Matter Labs, the company behind the zkSync ecosystem, has disputed the allegations. Matter Labs, according to Polygon Zero, just released Boojum, a proving system with a lot of code copied from essential components of its recursive SNARK Plonky2. A recursive SNARK is a cryptographic proof that allows one party (the prover) to show another (the verifier) that a specific assertion is true without giving any further information.
According to Polygon Zero, the code was incorporated without the original copyrights or acknowledgment to the original writers. It was also mentioned that Boojum is very similar to Plonky2’s library. “A parallel repetition strategy boosts soundness in small fields, similar gates are used for efficient arithmetic recursive verification, and Ulrich Haböck’s lookup argument is reused,” the blog post notes. Furthermore, Matter Labs has touted Boojum as being 10 times faster than Plonky2. “Wondering how this is possible, given that the performance-critical field arithmetic code is copied directly from Plonky2?”
“It’s great to be recognized, and we appreciate the acknowledgment for our optimization of the Poseidon parameters.” However, the reader may not realize that Boojum steals far more than the Poseidon constants from Plonky2, and that Boojum’s design is nearly similar to Plonky2’s, right down to copy-pasted code.”
Matter Labs expressed disappointment to Cointelegraph that Polygon’s leadership team was “spreading untrue claims.” “The new Boojum high-performance proof system leverages 5% off from Plonky2, which is prominently attributed in the first line of our module,” according to a spokeswoman. If we wanted it to be more noticeable, we would have put it somewhere else than the very first queue of our library.”
This isn’t the first time plagiarism claims have appeared in cryptocurrency. In March, a Shiba Inu dog died. The $0.000008 community reported that the Shibarium layer-2 beta testnet and Rinia testnet had similar chain IDs, as well as reports that the Shibarium alpha testnet was a replication of Polygon’s Mumbai testnet.
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