The project of Polygon that oversees zero-knowledge innovations, Polygon Zero shared a blog alleging zkSync for copying Polygon’s open-source code without providing attributions.
“Crypto runs on the open source ethos. When projects don’t follow it, the ecosystem suffers,” said Polygon Zero in the tweet.
zkSync is a zero-knowledge scaling project developed by Matter Labs, which also uses similar technology in its L2. In the blogpost, Polygon Zero shares several screenshots of code files that it accuses to be copied by Matter Labs.
“We are the team that built Plonky2 and Starky,” says Polygon Zero, adding, “Matter Labs, developers of zkSync, recently released a proving system called Boojum that includes a substantial amount of source code that is copy-pasted from performance-critical components of the Plonky2 library.”
Developers share their code publicly under open-source licenses that other developers can read, refer or even use in their projects. However, it’s required to acknowledge the source or developer entity if a third-party uses code for any purpose.
“There are norms in open source development designed to protect against this,” said Polygon in the blog. “Anyone can use, modify, or distribute open source code, but they must give credit to its authors and operate in good faith.”
Following the allegations, the co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, Alex Gluchowski said that the accusations are ‘unfounded, misleading, and extremely disappointing.’ He clarifies that only ~5% of Boojum’s code is based on Plonky2 and a clear attribution is provided in module’s first line.
