Key points
- Matter Labs have denied allegations that it copied “performance-critical components” from Polygon Zero’s “Plonky2.”
- Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski says the allegations against them are unfounded, misleading, and disappointing
Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski has responded to an August 3rd report from Polygon Zero that claims they copy-pasted their code when building Boojum. Polygon Zero claims that Plonky2’s code was seen on the latest product by Matter Labs dubbed “Boojum,” which did not attribute to the original code’s author.
Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski denies Polygon Zero plagiarism claims
Expressing disappointment Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski has denied Polygon Zero’s allegations in a Twitter post, saying that their decisions on building zkSync were based on integrity and transparency.
Polygon Zero posted a blog post on August 3rd claiming that Matter Labs copied its code without proper author attributions. It said such behavior harms the developer ecosystem and could hurt smaller development teams across the industry as better-funded companies take advantage of their work.
While Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski debunked the claims, he did not completely assert that Boojum did not use Plonky’s code. He said that they only based 5% of their code on Plonky2. He also added that they had some reused code that they worked with and gave clear attribution.
“Only ~5% of the Boojum code is based on the code of Plonky2. For the reused code, a clear attribution is provided in line #1 of the main file of the module,” he said.
He also said that he was very “disappointed” in the Polygon Zero team since it had also committed a similar mistake, and Matter Labs did not take it as a major issue. In his argument, Matter Labs CEO Alex Glochowski said that Plonky2 and Boojum are implementations of RedSHift construction, which was introduced by his team 3 years before Plonky2 paper 2.
As such, the Plonky2 team never gave matter labs credit though they referred to RedShift in their white paper. However, Matter Labs never bothered as it was glad to see someone else build on and improve their work.
However, he also conceded that there are either attribution standards that they should have used and will be more mindful of going forward. Additionally, he also called out Polygon Zero for going straight public with claims that made it look like Boojum was a total copy-paste work.
“Open Source is all about genuine cooperation. If the Polygon Zero team wanted additional credit, the easiest way would have been to submit a pull request which we would have happily accepted. Going ahead with public accusations of a complete lack of attribution (even if it was true, which is not the case here) is anything but the spirit of the Open Source movement. If you’re not happy about others – including potential competitors – using parts of your code, maybe Open Source is not for you?” Part of the tweet reads.
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