Alex Gluchowski and Sreeram Kannan on Their Collaborative Scaling Vision

This episode explores the groundbreaking partnership between ZKsync and EigenLayer, revealing how cryptographic and cryptoeconomic security are converging to build a truly verifiable and scalable blockchain ecosystem.

Post-Denver Reflections and the Verifiable Future

• Sreeram Kannan (EigenLayer) and Alex Gluchowski (ZKsync) kick off by discussing the post-Ethereum Denver atmosphere. Sreeram notes a somber mood among traders but highlights a growing excitement around institutional adoption, driven by increasing regulatory clarity.
• He emphasizes a shift needed beyond purely financial applications, recalling the 2017-2018 era's broader vision of on-chain applications like Uber and social networks.
• Sreeram argues that blockchains were not scalable or expressive enough then, but 2025 presents a different landscape. He stresses that verifiability is becoming the scarce resource in a world of abundant AI-generated intelligence.
• "In the world of abundant intelligence, what is scarce? Verifiability," Sreeram states, highlighting the need for verifiable media, news, and agents.

ZK's Role in Scaling Verifiability

• Alex explains that Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology is crucial for scaling the verification of computations. ZK proofs allow users to verify computations without re-executing everything, avoiding the need to trust centralized entities.
• He believes all the world's value transactions will eventually be on-chain, including non-financial ones.
• Alex highlights the current problem: users delegate verification to trusted (and often extractive) players. ZK eliminates this by enabling fractal scaling, where blockchains produce ZK proofs that are recursively combined into a single proof on a global settlement layer (Ethereum).
• He emphasizes that users often underestimate long-tail risks, citing examples like Mt. Gox and FTX, where convenient but risky products led to significant losses.

Privacy: The Underestimated Imperative

• Sreeram brings up privacy as a critical aspect of verifiability, often overlooked by users but crucial for institutions and businesses.
• He points out that public blockchains create a "panopticon" where all transactions are visible, posing risks for companies like Uber, whose pricing and operational data could be exposed to competitors like Lyft.
• "The whole technology is called ZK, and ZK is really for zero knowledge is for privacy," Sreeram notes, emphasizing that ZK technology's original purpose was privacy, which also enables succinct verifiability.
• He predicts that real-world adoption hinges on privacy, as public ledgers are unacceptable for many real-world transactions.

ZK Valadium and Institutional Adoption

• Alex confirms that real-world users and institutions demand privacy. He mentions ongoing conversations with banks (like Deutsche Bank, MUFG, and UBS) exploring ZK chains.
• ZK Chains: These provide both privacy (control over their own chain, assets, and transactions) and interoperability (connecting with other closed and open systems, including Ethereum and other chains).
• He highlights the recent White House announcement allowing US banks to custody digital assets, signaling a significant regulatory shift towards blockchain adoption.
• Alex views current market adjustments as temporary, emphasizing that bear markets are optimal for building and identifying genuine value creators.

The Privacy-Verifiability Tradeoff and ZK's Solution

• Sreeram expands on the societal privacy-verifiability dilemma, using the TSA security checks as an example. ZK technology, he argues, uniquely solves this tradeoff, enabling verification without compromising privacy.
• He emphasizes the practicality of ZK technology, a significant advancement from just a few years ago when it was considered decades away.
• "ZK solves this [privacy-verifiability tradeoff]. It is a crazy, crazy, crazy thing to even imagine that that's possible," Sreeram remarks, praising the pioneers of the Ethereum community, including Alex.

Beyond ZK: Blockchains, Censorship Resistance, and Oracles

• Sreeram clarifies that while ZK verifies computation, other mechanisms are needed for aspects like censorship resistance and oracle correctness.
• ZK can verify mathematical computations, but not "errors of omission" (e.g., a server excluding certain transactions).
• He broadens the concept of censorship resistance beyond user censorship, highlighting how platforms like Twitter can censor developers by removing API access, effectively denying them "property rights."
• "You are building like a store in a mall that you don't own or don't even have a lease for," Sreeram illustrates, emphasizing the vulnerability of builders on centralized platforms.
• He explains that blockchains provide liveness and censorship resistance through decentralized consensus and slashing mechanisms.
• Oracles, which bring off-chain data (like election results) on-chain, present another challenge. Determining the "social truth" requires mechanisms beyond ZK, addressing the "who watches the watcher" problem.

Cryptoeconomic Security: The Complement to Cryptographic Security

• The speakers emphasize that cryptoeconomic functions, like those provided by EigenLayer's restaking, complement ZK's cryptographic verifiability.
• These mechanisms provide assurances around commitments and contracts, creating a robust system that leverages both cryptographic and cryptoeconomic security.

The ZKsync-EigenLayer Partnership: A Tangible Implementation

• Alex describes ZKsync's vision of an elastic network of ZK-powered rollups (or validiums) built using the ZK Stack framework.
• This network allows for interoperability and customization, enabling chains with unique requirements (private, public, centralized/decentralized sequencing, etc.).
• A shared "ZK router" and a "ZK gateway" component are crucial, underpinned by decentralized governance.
• Alex stresses the importance of resilience and avoiding single points of failure, extending to proof generation. Decentralized sequencing is pointless if proof generation relies on a single data cloud provider.
• This is where the partnership with EigenLayer (and specifically, AVSs like Lagrange and =nil; Foundation) comes in, providing decentralized proof generation networks.

Decentralized Proof Generation and Cryptoeconomic Guarantees

• Sreeram explains that the elastic network offers chains optionality, with proof generation being a critical component.
• Centralized proof generation creates a liveness vulnerability, especially during critical events like liquidations.
• Decentralized proof networks, secured by cryptoeconomic mechanisms (staking and slashing), mitigate this risk.
• He highlights the complex mechanism design tradeoffs involved, balancing redundancy and performance. Lagrange and =nil; Foundation are building AVSs (Actively Validated Services) to address these challenges.
• "The dominant cost in running a ZK network is the prover cost," Sreeram notes, explaining why cryptoeconomic guarantees are preferable to excessive redundancy.

EigenDA and Data Availability

• Sreeram introduces EigenDA, a data availability (DA) service built on EigenLayer.
• Data Availability: This ensures that the state of a system is synced and accessible, allowing others to continue computations even if the original sequencer stops.
• He contrasts EigenDA's "hyperscale DA" approach (using KCG erasure coding to distribute data chunks across the network) with traditional models where every node downloads all data.
• EigenDA currently operates at 15 megabytes per second on mainnet, significantly exceeding the capacity of Ethereum blobs and other DA solutions. It is designed for horizontal scaling, with no theoretical limit.
• "We've done is just take all those great ideas [from Ethereum research] and just build it," Sreeram states, emphasizing EigenDA's scalability.

ZKsync's Architectural Choice: State Diffs and DA Optionality

• Alex explains ZKsync's deliberate architectural choice to use "state diffs" instead of publishing raw transaction inputs (like optimistic rollups).
• Publishing transaction inputs forces all nodes to re-execute all transactions to reconstruct the state, limiting interoperability and creating a two-tiered system of chains (those publishing on Ethereum and those relying on trusted entities).
• ZKsync's approach allows chains to choose their own DA solution (e.g., EigenDA) without affecting the rest of the network. A failure in one chain's DA only affects that chain, thanks to ZK proofs guaranteeing the validity of cross-chain messages.
• "They [chains] keep the sovereignty, they keep the full control, their own decision-making, but they still benefit from the network effects," Alex emphasizes, highlighting the advantages of joining the elastic network.

The Paradigm Shift: From Hierarchical Layers to ZK Everything

• The discussion highlights a shift from a hierarchical (Layer 1, Layer 2, etc.) view to a "ZK everything" model.
• ZK-proven states "float in the void," connected by interoperability solutions (ZK proofs verifying state transitions between chains).
• This represents a more modular approach, requiring infrastructure components like orchestration (EigenLayer), ZK proving, and slashing.

Slashing: Progress and Challenges

• Sreeram discusses the progress on slashing, a crucial aspect of cryptoeconomic security.
• He explains EigenLayer's three-sided marketplace: stakers, operators, and AVSs (Autonomous Verifiable Services).
• Slashing, where operators lose their stake for malicious behavior, is currently live on testnet and undergoing a major audit competition.
• Sreeram clarifies that building slashing is complex, involving intricate timing considerations and economic questions.
• EigenLayer's initial slashing model posed risk contagion (one AVS could slash the entire stake of an operator across multiple services).

Unique Security: Solving Risk Contagion

• Sreeram introduces "unique security," EigenLayer's new slashing model.
• Stakers/operators allocate specific portions of their stake to different AVSs, preventing risk contagion.
• This model balances the benefits of pooled security with the need to isolate risk.
• "Total stake" provides civil resistance, even if only a small portion is allocated as "unique security" (slashable stake).
• This approach eliminates the need for a "slashing veto committee," aligning with EigenLayer's goal of self-enforcing systems.

Concluding Remarks and Future Outlook

• Alex expresses excitement about the partnership and its potential for ZKsync's growing ecosystem of chains.
• He anticipates widespread adoption of decentralized proof generation services within the elastic network.
• Alex reiterates that ZK is the "end game," representing the logical evolution of blockchain architecture.
• "Super excited for this partnership and super excited to be working specifically with Sreeram on and work towards this bigger vision of actually decentralizing the world," Alex concludes.
• Sreeram emphasizes the broader implications of verifiable technologies, extending beyond finance to address fundamental societal challenges.
• "This is not just a financial technology, this is a technology for upgrading human civilization," he asserts, highlighting the transformative potential of the ZKsync-EigenLayer collaboration.

This partnership signifies a pivotal moment in blockchain's evolution, merging cryptographic and cryptoeconomic security to create a truly scalable and verifiable ecosystem. Crypto AI investors and researchers should closely monitor the development and adoption of decentralized proof generation, data availability solutions, and slashing mechanisms, as these will be critical infrastructure components for the next generation of blockchain applications. The ability to build applications that are both provably correct and economically secure opens up a vast design space, extending far beyond traditional financial use cases.