Kenny Li on Manta Network’s approach to scalability and privacy

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the cryptocoin show we have Kenny Lee the co-founder of manta Network Kenny welcome to the show Ash thanks for having me you're very welcome excited to dive into Manta what you and your team have been building uh modular blockchains about ZK zero knowledge proofs and the road to mainnet

0:24for Manta Network I'd love to just kick it off from the top for for those who aren't familiar or want an in-depth explanation of sort of what is Mata Network and then we'll dive into all those details yeah sure so Manta Network we are building a a modular ecosystem specifically for uh ZK enabled applications and so what that really means is um you know we really want to make it as

0:50easy as possible for any developers that are building web free applications to have ZK enabled features um added into their apps without having to worry about the cryptography side without having to worry about the circuits just focus on your applications uh and we provide those sort of ZK features almost like ZK as a service um and you know happy to dive a lot more

1:13into the details there very cool and I would love to dive into that just for sort of like a layman's terms of like does that mean you know when you said we want ZK and everything does that mean it's going to be more private and if so like how exactly does it make it more private yeah really really good question because um it doesn't necessarily mean privacy

1:36in the sense of more so uh just general sort of control over confidentiality and I'll give you an example here because when when most of uh people think about like ZK it falls into one of two buckets right there's the infrastructure layer which is really on the roll-up side so ZK roll up CK EDM right which doesn't really have to do with privacy at all it

1:58just has to do with um batching transactions and speeding them up and verifying that those batches are correct and then there's the second bucket which is around user privacy and this is where we think about Z cash this is where we think about tornado cash this is where we think about you know individual user privacy for on-chain transacting so when I make a an if

2:19payment to you Ashton then you know the world can still see something happen that they don't see who made it who it was sent to how much was sent what was sent etc etc and so that's the on chain privacy side that ZK is also well known for there is a third Factor here that is less well-known um but definitely very much I think tangible and a very big need in the

2:43market which is on the application layer use case side so the ZK enabled application layer and uh what I mean by that is it does encompass you know some forms of the Privacy payment description that I just described but also um beyond that I'll give you an example here so ZK enabled for on-chain gaming if you think about games today web 3 games right most

3:08of it is off chain and then there's some like nft or crypto element to it so it's this hybrid of like off-chain on chain because um there's some there's some issues with creating a fully on-chained game and so here's the example right like if you and I play chess it's pretty easy to put it on chain because everything about the chessboard is fully transparent right so

3:31uh if I say I'm losing my to D7 you know exactly where it is and we don't even have to have a chess board in front of us we can just kind of play it in our heads but the issue with um other games what you describe as imperfect information gains is that you can't have that full transparency but at that same time you have to agree on the state of the game and so that agreement can be

3:54done on chain but if you don't want that full transparency then you can't put it all on chain and so an example of this would be any sort of card game right uh poker when when you and I play poker we both have to agree on the shuffle of the deck the way that the deck was shuffled is correct um we both have to agree that the card that you and I received are the cards

4:17that you and I were supposed to receive but neither of us know exactly what those cards are right and so there has to be this seemingly contradictory scenario where we have to agree that the cards you received other cards you received but we also can't know what they are right so that agreement is the consensus layer which can be done on blockchain but then you have to add that

4:38lower layer of privacy in a a peer-to-peer manner that both people can agree in a trustless sort of fashion um that it actually is what it is uh and so that's where the ZK comes in and so uh by combining ZK onto the application layer now all of a sudden you are able to build games like on-chain poker on-chain Blackjack on-chain board games Unchained strategy games with fog of War

5:06um and so that's that third category of ZK use which is specifically on enabling it on the ZK application layer so that developers can build these like new use cases that aren't seen before wow very cool and I feel like all all there's a lot of different advantages uh that are like two or three-fold especially for gaming which I want to dive into a little bit later but I want

5:30to go back to what you were just talking about on the Privacy side for personal privacy when you know like um like that we've seen in privacy coins uh in the past and and I'm curious on how exactly that would work with Manja Network whether it's isolated to like a manta coin or you can use any coins and and how it worked for example if I you know wanted to send some ether as you

5:51mentioned in the first example to a friend what would that look like if you were using on Manta Network in terms of the currency and the process yeah so good question so there's two parts to this um the first part is so actually let me take a step back um we have on Manta network two networks one is our layer one which is referred to as Manta Atlantic and one is our

6:15Layer Two which is referred to Manta Pacific um and so on Manta Atlantic and Manchester specific both are capable of on-chain private transacting for Manta Atlantic um there is what we refer to as a ZK address system as well as EK assets and so it's pretty standard you can Bridge your assets into the L1 and then from there you can privatize that assets and

6:40send set assets over to other recipients in a fungible Manner and so uh with that right like the the process is very straightforward and this is for all sort of crypto assets that the L1 supports um on the layer two side we have what we refer to as universal circuits and so Universal circuits are really the bread and butter of how our ZK application layers work and so what

7:07we've done is we've gone ahead and built generalized use cases for specific ZK circuits and these circuits can be called by developers using sdks and those developers can then add those circuits into their smart contract and then bam right all of a sudden you've got specific features that have or specific ZK enabled creatures so on the layer two it's really up to

7:33the application what types of private payments they support how they support those private payments which assets etc etc okay that's great to know and speaking of on the application layer I'm curious about launching applications or building applications on Mata Network you know there's millions of developers in the world in traditional web 2 but there's not as many in in web3 yet and I

7:59know all these networks are trying to lower the barriers to entry to get more developers either from from web 2 to come in or from ethereum and solidity developers to be able to easily launch you know where where the network effect is of the most applications onto their chain Manta Network in this case could you talk a little bit about the developer ecosystem and how it's going

8:18to be easy to launch applications on Manta Network yeah so um short answer is it's very easy to launch applications on mantis so one of the reasons why we built our layer to the way that we built it is so that it's extremely easy for developers so when we look in the ecosystem right now and look at like ZK application layers one of the issues here is that there's a

8:44barrier to entry and that barrier to entry usually comes in the form of having to learn a new language so you have to learn a specific language to build smart contracts that are ZK enabled for those existing ecosystems uh for us you know we didn't want to do that because there is various issues here one is like vendor lock-in right so if I build a an application specifically

9:08for your ecosystem using your language then if your ecosystem somehow doesn't you know work out for the path of users doesn't have the volume then I'm stuck on that ecosystem right I can't just Port it over to somewhere else and then on the other hand right like we also have um we're also very focused on the modularity aspect specifically with data availability to lower the cost for the

9:30end user um because with module arriving that all of a sudden the gas keys can be significantly reduced and for ZK applications gas fees have historically been sort of an issue and so what we're doing is with the ZK side the developers we're allowing them to build their applications fully on solidity what that means is you know if for one reason or another one day they decide okay Manta

9:55is no longer for me then they can still Port those applications to other EDM compatible ecosystems and so this is much more of an interoperable composable scenario and then from the user side right being able to use DK applications on Manta not only is it fully available through metamask because it's evm native but also the gas keys are extremely low

10:17um in terms of the actual development I had often mentioned you know the the sdks that people can access to enable ZK features and so I I do want to kind of quantify this a little bit so if you are a solidity developer and you are building a game a very simple card game and this card game is where the the deck gets shuffled one card gets handed to you Ashton one card gets handed to me

10:42and then we both place a bet before we reveal our cards and the highest card is the winner um that sort of very simple scenario if you wanted to build it from scratch uh including compiling the circuits and everything right that's like a thousand two thousand lines of code uh if you use our SDK you can build that same exact smart contract with all the

11:05functionality I just described for about 30 to 50 lines of code so it's a significant reduction not just in terms of the uh the code base and management of the code base but also the time it takes for a developer to really understand you know uh circuits cryptography.com these types of languages compiled into smart contracts and everything it's a fairly complicated

11:28process and we're here to simplify everything it's amazing to hear and I think people that they don't have these SDK libraries or in this case with the ZK involved it's like starting from scratch every time and just could imagine how laborious it would be yeah I feel like we need this kind of exact standard for you know if we're gonna especially if we're gonna start getting uh blockchain

11:53and ZK technology into gaming for example they're going to want to have you know everything preset to go on like this is the standard of especially if we want to have interoperability between games as well yeah and that's you know that's a really good point because at the end of the day everyone's Reinventing the wheel but we're all building the same Wheels right

12:14it's uh the the use cases are um pretty you know you can bucket them into different categories uh and provide them as a service it's the same for any sort of software as a service that you see today right so uh accounting no one or I wouldn't say no one but most people probably don't do accounting on notebook paper and then like you know calculate their taxes by hand anymore you've got

12:38software that does that for you because everyone needs Accounting in some way or another yeah sure very state by state or country by country but at the end of the day you know a balance sheet is a balance sheet right an invoice there is an invoice and so accounts payable accounts receivable you know it can all be serviced and so it's the same for us

12:56for ZK and that's why you know for our test net we've for man to Pacific we've launched it about a month now and we've seen about um I believe around 80 to 100 verified contacts already deployed there's been around uh around like 170 000 wallet addresses uh testing out around like two to three million transactions so far so it's just been extremely easy to use as

13:22the feedback that we've seen on the developer onboarding side we see them onboarding their applications existing applications in a matter of just days um so yeah we're just here to try to make it as easy as possible wow that sounds like an incredible start to to the test net and I was going to ask about you know all the moving pieces and and what's the timeline of getting it

13:43out I'm guessing you guys have been working on getting the test net out for quite a while um and sometimes these protocols have to be tested for quite a while to before they hit mainnet as well yeah yeah so we've been we've been at this for about three years now um so it's been quite a quite a journey because when we started we were specifically focused on our layer one

14:09and the reason why we're doing this is because you know we wanted to provide the best user experience when it came to ZK applications and you can't just natively do that on evm um and just to kind of give you an example here doing a ZK transaction on ethereum um for like privately sending you know assets to other users um at the time when we were trying it

14:35out uh it was around like 50 to 100 round trip and so that's it that's a financial barrier for most users right and so the issue that emerges here is you have a selective bias you only have users who not only have the funds necessary to not care about that 100 dollars but also the the the the reason why they're using it has to be way more than a hundred dollars right and so the

15:03selective bias ends up having this sort of um I guess leaning towards not Everyday Use but more so you know certain limited use cases which kind of um conflate the idea that there's more uh nefarious use cases for privacy which is why people are like oh yeah I don't need privacy because I'm not doing anything bad but if you were able to enable privacy for users and remove that

15:32Financial barrier then you would be able to really escalate those use cases right because now you have fully on-chain uh payroll right that you can do around the world and no one have to worry about that but it's just one sort of use case there um and so in order for us to do that we couldn't just build directly as a smart contract we really needed to optimize

15:53and so we needed to build as an L1 and so that's what we really focused on first and then this layer two that we've released the modular Layer Two that uses you know a fully EDM native environment um that was released about a month ago that was also about six ish months in the I'm making um but that was you know sped up in terms of how we could deploy because of

16:16all the work that we've already done on the optimization and the ZK side previously um and so now it's just a process of getting as many applications onboarded as possible getting our contracts audited getting our Network audited and then from there uh yeah we're looking towards uh pretty hopefully uh successful mainnet launch very cool great to hear

16:39and speaking of you know protecting privacy and uh you mentioned you know it could be for nefarious uses most most applications where you're submitting a lot of funds they all have a kyc process nowadays uh even in web 3 and I know that there's ways to improve that and I know Manta is working on some kind of Technologies to improve at least the Privacy protection part of of kyc

17:07because you know people have no problem giving out their information to verify who they are to get involved in a project or to send a large amount of funds it's just a matter of when you give over that personal information you know who exactly are you giving it to or you know is it stored in a secure way and from what I understand the ZK technology can help with protecting

17:27people's privacy I know in in the earlier days of web 3 there have been people who gave over their kyc information and it was an unprotected way and then that was exploited or we're still seeing you know phishing scams or people trying to siphon out people's information so how exactly is this technology that your team's building helping with the kyc procedure

17:50yeah so um thanks for bringing that up so the zksps is something that we developed approximately I don't even remember how long that was I'm just relative you know but um it's a technology that we released a while back specifically focused around verifying on-chain identity in the least intrusive way possible and one of those use cases is specifically or around kyc

18:15and on-chain identity and this is just one of many things that we are working on because you know at the end of the day we we definitely want to make sure that you know we're we're being as safe uh as possible with the network with the users um but so for the the zcast BT side so um you already have these instantiations these um attempts at on-chain kyc that

18:39you just described Ashton uh binance being one of those so by an answer if you're kyc'd on binance they will issue you an account bound token a binance account token which is a soul bound token linked to your address um so you can use that Soul bound token go to the other other applications and say hey I'm a good actor I've been KY received on binding right and so

19:01um the issue with that though is that that's still fully public and so if I went to a DEX and I verified to the Decks that I was you know uh kyc through Finance okay that's great but now the Dex also sees my wallet address and they see my net worth right and these types of services you can probably extrapolate the potential vulnerabilities there is now I know who you are and how much

19:27money you have and all these your willingness to spend and how that could be you know used against you and so um we created the zkbab using our zkfdts so our zksdts are just privacy enhanced soul-bound tokens and so we were able to still verify that you've been kyc'd on finance but at the same time you don't have to reveal your wallet address or any of your other assets and so now you

19:53have this Restless fully verifiable on-chain identity that doesn't reveal anything thing else about you um and binance is just one of those sort of kyc mechanisms we also have Galaxy as a partner and we're partnering with other sort of kyc services as well um so that's all an attempt to you know help users transition over to you know on-chain uh fully on chain identity in

20:17the most safe manner possible we've seen about I believe like 150 to 200 000 uh users on kyc through those eksbts wow that's very cool and yeah I was curious about that so thank you for helping the Privacy procedure you know because yeah it's you know all of this with these layer ones with you know from the infancy having no protection where you

20:44send uh five dollars to somebody and all of a sudden they can see everything that you own um and if especially if it's a new decks or people that are speculating on new applications you know sometimes those applications don't always make it um or maybe they're in the good hands but eventually there's a vulnerability there and someone breaks in if it's not

21:04directly into your wallet it's through an application that you used and there's still a lot of uh in the decentralized world people are giving approving contracts that they don't always understand exactly what's in the contract uh and that there's potential to siphon funds or anything like that so I feel like this would be a great help for uh decentralized exchanges or

21:26anywhere where you're going to be Trading yeah yeah and I you know I hate to admit it but I've I've also been victim to these types of attacks um it's it's really hard to you know keep uh an active mind about it every single application you interact with and I think this is more so a general issue with the web free ecosystem right now which I think you've probably heard it a

21:55million times by now but user experience right and it doesn't matter if you if this is your first time sending assets or if this is your thousandth time spending assets it's always very nerve-wracking you're always you know kind of on edge thinking did I send it to the right place should we send a test amount first right and so these types of complications

22:15um the complexities can lead to a lot of sort of opportunity for vulnerabilities that I think in general need to be solved and so um all and that's exactly what we're doing as well right like at the end of the day you know our approach is through ZK but I think our mission is really to just simplify the user experience as much as possible yeah well thank you for

22:38doing that and and now flipping back to the positive side uh sounds like there's you know great work so far on on the test net launch I would like to know if you're just looking at you know developers launching more applications or if there are users uh that can in some way contribute to the test net or get involved prior to this mainnet launching down the road

23:01yeah so um you know with the with the developers they're launching the applications but um with the users it's very important to start getting as much feedback as possible to know what types of applications people like and also a lot of the developers that we're working with right now um you know they want that feedback as well and so that's a great way to help

23:23them improve their applications it helps us improve and monitor our Network as well um and so there's a lot of ways for users to get involved um there's if you just head over to our website or our Twitter you'll get a link that can give you a whole guide on all the different activities all the different applications how to use them and um yeah so that's a great place to start

23:45amazing and I can leave those notes links to that in the notes below as well Kenny is there any last words you wanted to mention before we wrap up about Manta and how to get involved or what's headed next in the future um no I think that was very comprehensive and thank you very much again Ashton for the time really appreciate the conversation and I think

24:06we got through a lot of interesting points I completely agree thank you so much Kenny all the best with everything Amanda Network moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you all right see you later foreign