The CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs, Alex Gluchowski has responded to allegations from Polygon Zero. In a tweet on his official handle today, the CEO denied “copy-pasting” code from the system of the zero-knowledge scaling firm. Gluchowski said that Matter Labs’ zkSync surfaced through an ethical and transparent process.
More so, the co-founder expressed disappointment at the allegations citing his respect for the Polygon Zero team. In his words, Gluchowski described the allegations as “unfounded and misleading.” Furthermore, the CEO said the “arguments and inaccurate statement” emanated due to the passion of the Polygon Zero team for what they do.
Recall that on August 3, 2023, Polygon Zero in a blog post, alleged that Matter Labs copy-pasted from its Plonky2 without giving due attribution. The team argued that Matter Labs created the Boojum library by using plagiarized codes from Plonky2. In the post, Polygon Zero acknowledged that Plonky2 is open source. Consequently, giving developers the freedom to copy its code but must give due recognition of the source.
Likewise, Polygon Zero said Matter Labs made misleading claims about the performance of Plonky2 relating to Boojum. The team stressed the need to uphold the values of open-source development. According to Polygon Labs, failure to uphold such values will make the industry no different from the web2 space.
How Matter Labs countered the allegations
While responding to the “copy-pasting” allegations, Gluchowski pointed to how both Plonky2 and Boojum are implementations of RedShift construction. As revealed, Matter Labs developed RedShift three years before the release of the Plonky paper. Further, the CEO alleged that the developers of Plonky only noted Redshift in the paper but failed to give due credit.
He added that “Boojum is built leveraging the work of the brightest minds contributing to the field of cryptography.” The CEO recalled how Matter Labs has employed independent developers who took part of Boojum’s code to build faster solutions. Also, the co-founder highlighted how Open Source is all about “genuine cooperation.”
Gluchowski criticized Polygon Zero for making the issue public. While Gluchowski failed to accept any wrongdoing, he opined that Polygon Zero could have handled the issue differently. He said the team could have notified Matter Labs with a pull request if they want proper attribution. Lastly, Gluechowski conceded that his team could have done it better. He then promises that Matter Labs will improve its approach to attribution.