Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink, on Layer 3s, Mapping zk Proofs, and DeFi| Ep. 303

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink, talks about solutions for building decentralized multi-chain infrastructure, the L3 ecosystem, and unifying the L1 + L2 ecosystems.

About Vince Yang

Vince Yang is Co-founder of zkLink, the company building the first multi-rollup Layer 3 to solve liquidity fragmentation on Ethereum Layer 2 rollups—pioneering more liquid, secure, customizable DeFi trading experiences. A former engineer, Yang began his experience in crypto with Bitcoin mining. This evolved into a deeper exploration of areas, including blockchain’s potential for financial applications and zk Proofs.

Vince Yang gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• 2024 Technical Roadmap: next steps for reducing fragmentation associated with L2s and boosting liquidity in the blockchain ecosystem
• Solutions for building decentralized, multi-chain infrastructure to unify the L1 and L2 ecosystems (more in zkLink’s new Whitepaper)
• L3 (e.g., Nexus) as a solution for fostering a more open, liquid L2 blockchain ecosystem
• Upcoming launch of $ZKL token; how $ZKL makes it easier for developers to realize the next generation of DeFi dApps and govern the zkLink protocol
• Incentivizing users and fostering collaboration through programs like zkLink’s Liquidity Alliance and platforms, e.g., Alpha Mainnet

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are buzzing as always, bit of a flu game today. A little bit sick, a little under the weather. That’s what happens in Mexico. Sometimes you catch some bugs, c’est la vie. There’s a little bit of something going around, half of Mexico’s sick right now. But we’re battling through and I am super friggin pumped to have today’s guest on the show, the one and only Vince Yang, the Co-Founder of zkLink the company building the first multi-rollup Layer 3.  Yes, you heard that right, a Layer 3, a true Layer 3 to solve liquidity fragmentation on Ethereum Layer 2 rollups. Vince and the team are pioneering more liquid, secure and customizable DeFi trading experiences. Vince is a former engineer and began his experience in crypto with Bitcoin mining. Can’t wait to get into that as well. And this has evolved into a deeper exploration of areas, including Blockchain’s potential for applications as well as ZK proofs. One of the hottest topics out there right now. Vince, super pumped to have you on my friend. How you doing?

Vince Yang
Doing well. Thank you, Matt, for the introduction. Hi, everyone it’s my pleasure to be here. And as you know, Chado is mad, I have a very good opportunity to introduce what we’ve been building for the past three years. And also, talk a little bit about my journey in the crypto space as well. And what’s happening on the market recently is very interesting. Seeing that ETF got approved and also then surprisingly the market is going down. And we’re all surprised a little bit.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, Bitcoin ETF gets approved. We all think we’re gonna be rich and then boom, gray scale, classic. You still have gray scale. For grayscale and FTX still somehow hoping us years after the whole fiasco and we’ll get into that as well. Folks, before Vince and I went live, we were discussing where he is in the world, where I am at the world. As you all know, I am in Mexico right now on Eastern Time Zone. Vince is in Singapore 13 hours ahead of me and it is 9 p.m. for him. It’s 8 a.m. for me and him and the team are still grinding at 9 p.m.  Before the show, I was like, oh God, I’m gonna have to tell Vince to turn his or to find a better solution. There’s way too much background noise because his whole team is still hauling ass. That’s so cool.  Vince, I’d love you to talk a little bit about the team, what you guys are building and is this an everyday thing? Are you guys hauling ass till 9 p.m. every single day of the week? What’s the work life balance like over in Singapore?

Vince Yang
Our passion, I mean, work is our passion. I think it is quite normal to work at 9 p.m. still. I think it is also very normal for Blockchain builders, developer teams working on exciting stuff. We’re seeing amazing progress and daily process. And this happens with the hard work and also the grinding on different parts of the world. Yeah, it’s just very normal and we’re very used to this. And working with funds is naturally achieved. And when you love what you’re doing, what you’re building, this is work is a big part of our life. And we really enjoyed the whole journey, the process. And our team right now is we are mostly Asians on the team. So we have a few colleagues that is rooted in other continents of the world. And most of the team in Singapore, Hong Kong, a few in China, and outside Asia, we have a few colleagues in the US, in North America, in Europe as well. And roughly in total, we are a team of 40 people. We have been building this since three years ago, starting in the year 2021 in Q1. And we’ve envisioned the idea of Ethereum scaling solutions, ZK Rollups, OP Rollups this work going to be very popular. There was a lot of discussions there. And we thought that there’s going to be a very important primitive in it. It’s for the interoperability among the Rollups. Then we were thinking about bringing it really and taking this problem using the ZK knowledge, zero-knowledge proof technology. I myself started in the crypto space not on very early days in the year of 2019. I joined one of my close friends who returned to Asia from the US, resigned from World Bank, and joined the industry. And he convinced me that this is the future. So there was a very big opportunity cost for him to just let go of what he had been building for a career for a long time and joined a totally new industry. And it was tech, savvy, and financial oriented as well. So somehow he thinks this is the next big thing and this is the opportunity to change, to be part of the history and to ride the wave with the history. And then we joined together to start it in a Bitcoin manufacturing company and also started our own mining operation business. And after a year or so, we decided to dive deeper into the Blockchain space, understanding deeper into the technology. So I came from a technical background. I used to be an engineer working in a French company. I did my master’s degree in France. And after graduation, I spent the first three years of my career working in an international automotive company and building out the power train system. And I had a little bit of experience with coding, like riding the low level codes with the CEC shop. And after joining this Blockchain space in 2019 and 2020, I started to learn reading codes in Solidity, understanding reading the white paper, yellow paper, Bitcoin, Ethereum, understanding all the basic concepts that started from absolutely zero. I jumped into the rapid hole with zero understanding, zero idea of what’s coming and what’s the technology is all about. And then gradually I had this, you know, idea of, the first touch with the international proof was quite an amazing experience to me. And I was immediately amazed by the properties and also the potentials of this technology. And I had a lot of discussion, brainstorming with the friends that were interested in this topic. And started from there, we had the initial idea of building out something that could bring value and enable adoption and empower applications and user adoptions in Blockchain space. That’s how the whole thing started in 2021.

Matt Zahab
I love that. So you and your Co-Founder left some really cushy jobs as well, which I, you know, you got to take risks. You want to, you want to make some shit happen? You got to take risks and I love that. Vince, let’s jump right into obviously two stars of the show. One is yourself. Two is zkLink. Love the name as well. Beautiful name you guys have. And the comfort swag for the people watching this if not listening. That’s such a clean hoodie. Feel free to send one over to me Vince and I will rock that and everywhere I go.

Vince Yang
Send me your address. I’ll make sure there are some.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Absolutely clean. I want you to give our listeners the elevator pitch on what exactly zkLink is, but before we jump into that, when I was doing a bit of research for the show, I’ve heard of L3s before. Now, my understanding of L3s is there’s a lot of L2 networks, a lot of Layer 2 companies and ecosystems that tell the narrative that they are an L3, but they’re really not an L3. They’re more like an L2.5. Then obviously everyone knows what L1s are, the biggest one being ETH,  I mean Bitcoin if you quantify that as an L1. But the problem with L2s is they’re very general, purpose scalability-oriented, where we need L3s for applications-specific scalability customization, a lot of interoperability, actually creating apps and dApps on top of these L2s to really make things seamless and make shit happen in the Web3 ecosystem. This is when I was like, wow, this is going to be a really fun episode because this is something that we really desperately need as a whole. Everyone talks about how ETH can be the catalyst in the network and the ecosystem to onboard the masses into Web3, but it very well could be an L3 that does this because without a beautiful UX and UI and very simple interface, aka an L3, it’s going to be difficult for ETH to do that. I hope that stage setting was a decent explanation in my understanding of what exactly an L3 is, but I’d love for you to jump into it, tell us exactly what you and the team are building at zkLink and give us the lowdown on what exactly L3s are and why they are so important to onboard the masses into the Web3 ecosystem.

Vince Yang
Yeah, Matt, your understanding of the Layer 3 is actually very good. And you already touched the pinpoints that are, you know, Layer 3s first list is built on top of Layer 2s and Layer 2s built on top of Layer 1. And today, the most discussion of Layer 3s are like, a relative to the Ethereum ecosystem, right? So for Bitcoin’s also not deep. There are also discussions of Bitcoin Layer 2, but still not yet. They’re getting there for Layer 3 for Bitcoin or any other Layer 1. So the Layer 3s discussion nowadays is it’s within the Ethereum ecosystem. And a Layer 3 is a third Blockchain Layer built on top of Ethereum Layer 2s and the Ethereum Layer 2s are scaling solutions, building on top of Ethereum to scale the Ethereum and to try and to break the Blockchain trilemma on of Ethereum. At the second, we’re building the first cross Rollup Layer 3 or multi-Rollup Layer 3, meaning that this Layer 3 is unified Layer, the third Layer on top of multiple Layer 2s. We call it the Nexus. We have actually two platforms. So we recently launched the zkLink Nexus, which is the first multi Rollup Layer 3 on top of multiple ZK Rollup Layer 2s. And there are already very famous projects and companies building ZK Rollup Layer 2s scaling solutions for Ethereum, like Stackware, Stacknet, zkSync, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, Tyco, Consistence Linear. All those are already big projects and popular. And these different zkLink Layer 2s, they have their own ecosystem. As you already mentioned, they are general purpose Layer 2s scaling the Ethereum to build, you know, so it’s built for general purpose applications and even compatible also and developers can build in any sort of applications using a Solidity programming language. But eventually, these Layer 2s will, at some points, you know, meet the same problem as the Layer 1s that did not have, you know, the throughputs performance. They need it by some high performance applications. So then there comes the needs of Layer 3. Layer 3 will be application-specific. They will meet the specific demands for certain applications for high performance and low transaction costs. And at the same time, you don’t want to make a compromise on security. So you build a Layer 3 on top of the Layer 2s using, you know, the similar stack, like the Layer 2 developers like Arbitrum, or PMizum, Stackware, zkSync are all launching their Layer 3 solutions using their Layer 2 tech stack. So Arbitrum launched the Orbit. It’s basically setting transactions on Arbitrum. And then zkSync, Hyperchain, the ZK stack on top of zkSync era there too. And then you have the Stackware stacknet. Stacknet Layer 3, the Matara scaling engine on top of Stacknet Layer 2. In comparison with these single row up Layer 3s, zkSync is building a new type of Layer 3, which is a cross-row up Layer 3 that settles transactions on top of multiple Layer 2s. The ones that I just mentioned are the ZK Rollup Layer 2s. The reason why it is only working on multiple Layer 2s is because the ZK Rollup Layer 2s can talk to the Ethereum contract through the canonical message channel at a quicker space. So because for any cross-chain or cross Rollup architecture, if you want to achieve the finality of the transactions, you need like a fast and secure state synchronization across the Layer 2s. And only the ZK Rollup Layer 2s talk to this, Ethereum contracts through the canonical message channel at a faster space. Now at the moment as these ZK Layer 2s is still at early stage, the settlement speed is like anywhere between several hours to 24 hours up to 24 hours. But OP Rollup will take up to 7, 14 days for this challenge period, you know, because this using a…

Matt Zahab
It’s that long?

Vince Yang
Yes. And then the fraud proof is not alive yet. So no, I’m not aware of alien OP Rollups that has already launched the fraud proof. So basically the OP Rollups is running, the finality of the transactional rule, the Rollup stakes up to 7 to 14 days. And the ZK Rollups, the finality of the transactions on Ethereum Layer 1, is much faster. And it couldn’t be even faster in future with the developments of these ecosystems. Well, by theory, it can go down to like, you know, within an hour, several minutes, like that. And then a Layer 3 on top of these Layer 2s, ZK Layer 2s, and will be able to settle the transaction happening on the Layer 3 on Ethereum through these message channel between the Layer 2 and the Ethereum Layer 1, ZK Layer 2. So there’s from Layer 3 to Layer 2, the text minutes, and from Layer 2 to the Ethereum, the text minutes. So add together, you can also set the transaction, have a faster finality on Ethereum within minutes. So this is the idea of how we consider the Layer 3 can achieve a Ethereum equivalent security because this is the fundamental problem, right? So anything when you develop, any problem you try to solve, you do not want to solve the problem with the price of making a compromise on security. When there’s a most compromise on security, then you think about what benefits it comes with, right? So with the cross rub Layer 3, you have the benefits of aggregated assets and liquidity from these multiple ecosystems. Currently, I think that there are roughly 500 million on TVL, each of these ZK Layer 2s respectively, when it goes to, when they’re live on Mainnet, this number will grow for sure with the development of the ecosystem, with the launch of their token respectively. And then on this, the cross rub Layer 3, you’ll be able to tap to all these assets existing natively in these different Layer ecosystems respectively. So application building on top of this Layer 3 can list the tokens across this ecosystem, can create a trading pair of a stock and ZKS from ZK sync or a USDT or to any token, and you will be able to merge Ethereum from different Layer 2s into the same pool, into the same token. And so it’s the same for the stable coins. In that sense, you will be able to aggregate this good credit and the unified liquidity on the third Layer. So it starts from Ethereum Layer 1, and then it goes up to multiple different Layer 2s. And then with the opening and access, it emerges again and be connected with the unified Layer 3. So this is a scheme, this is similar to the Ethereum logo.

Matt Zahab
Very cool.

Vince Yang
Yeah, this is how we solve this interprobability and also liquidity fragmentation problem that are going to be a major problem for the Rollup ecosystem. Because we’re going to have hundreds of Rollups, hundreds of Layer 2 for deeper purposes. One of my colleagues just left the team to build out another Layer 2 recently, RWA focused Layer 2 because obviously he sees a market demand for that for RWA focused Layer 2. And this seems to be a very good interesting idea and a very good opportunity. But the problem is that with the more and more builders entering the space, we’re going to see hundreds of Rollups, even thousands. And all they are going to create, become very complicated and fragmented user experience, liquidity fragmentation and navigation complexities and increase the fraction cost for moving from one Layer to another. Because hundreds of Rollups meaning you’re going to have to use a lot of different bridges.

Matt Zahab
That’s nightmare fuel. That’s not we need one one single unified solution

Vince Yang
User experience that you would want, you know, if you, yeah, like you for crypto master adoption, we think we believe that abstraction is very important. Simplification is very important. Every step you reduce for user journey, every step you abstract for the user understanding, the more intuitive it becomes, the simpler it comes, and the more users you will be able to to get, you know, outside of the crypto space. For crypto native users, of course, they will try so hard and try to try all you can to understand the concepts to try out the different you take knowledge, but for general users, even using the centralized platform like you centralized exchanges, sometimes, you know, a high learning cost for them. So we have to at least match the user experience of the centralized platform like, you know, as simple as Coinbase.

Matt Zahab
It’s got to be clean.

Vince Yang
Yes, clean and intuitive. Right. So it’s user friendly, awesome. How really and what they are trying to match the user experience from the Web2 applications, very smooth, sleek, similar.

Matt Zahab
It’s going to happen.

Vince Yang
Yeah, I think the decentralized applications you eventually have to match that kind of level of user experience. Otherwise, mass adoption or onboarding building next building of users, on chain or onto the decentralized applications will not happen unless we will have the infrastructure being ready for these types of applications. Second, it is exactly building these built, the infrastructure to build for this purpose to onboard the next building traders on chain to empower the next generation of super applications, starting with the trading applications by order book or AMM driven NFT gaming inter-sider us and achieve this target. I think there’s three comes with the natural benefit of hyperscaling because it is the third Layer. Each Layer you go up, you have like a scalability benefits margin again on that. And it comes with reduced cost because you can batch transactions and generate a proof and then set the transactions on the second Layer and then the Ethereum. So you have the scalability gain, you have the cost again. At the same time, you have the ability to aggregate assets and abstract the complexities of course multiple Layer 2s, which means simplified user experience, which also means simplified developer experience. This is the valid proposition of zkLink and Layer 3. And we believe this will be particularly beneficial for decentralized financial products like order book taxes for perpetual contracts for options or gaming companies. Yes, we’re hoping to get this infrastructure mature and production ready for the best developers that can deliver the best producer experience. Like you said, simple clean user interface, one unified interface for to serve multiple purposes and using the infrastructure we’re building.

Matt Zahab
I love that. It’s funny and you brought up a great point there, Vince. In order to onboard the masses, again, this isn’t fake news. This is the realist of news and it needs to be clean. It needs to be sexy. It needs to be easy. It needs to be frictionless. And the teams that build those products right now are nine times out of 10. They’re exchanges. They’re centralized exchanges. And when we onboard a Web2 user into the Web3 ecosystem, usually their first touch point is in exchange. But once you leave that exchange and you start messing around with DeFi, it’s nightmare fuel. It is way too complex. There is so much friction. I’ll still never forget the first couple of times I sent a MetaMask transaction or let alone had to bridge a coin to another coin. Like, are you kidding me? That was scary as hell. I’m just like, where’s my money? Is it gone to an abyss? And that’s scary stuff. So we need more teams like you guys build. And Vince, we need to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. But when we get back, we still have a bunch of topics to discuss. We’re going to get into ZK proof, some ETH, some DeFi unifying L1s and L2s. And of course, the Bitcoin ETF, we all thought it was going to pump and it dumped. We also got to get into ZKL token. You and the team had a lovely public raise going on. I believe it just concluded and we’ll get into that right after this. But until then, huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. That is PrimeXBT. We love the team at PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a veteran, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions and solutions to all of their customers. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. And you can use that to receive 50%. That is 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50. All in word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Vince. Let’s jump right into ZKL. I was flabbergasted perhaps as a bit of a big word, but it was such a clean raise done by you and the team. Obviously, we’ve been planning this for a couple of weeks now. So whenever I have a guest on the pod, as soon as we get them locked and loaded, I do my initial deep dive and then every couple of days after that, I’ll lurk socials, see what’s going on, read blog posts, check coin price whatever. You guys obviously don’t have a public trading coin, but this is what the purpose of this raise was for. It was done just beautifully in my opinion. Everything was super clean, really good update, clear communication. I’d love if you could walk us through sort of the rationale behind one launching the coin. What is its utility? And if you could start by talking about how you guys chose to do the public raise and how you guys made it so clean. So perhaps other teams who are listening could emulate and follow what you guys did. I think that’d be a great place to start your events.

Vince Yang
Yeah, thank you very much, Matt, for, you know, yeah, this whole process behind it, since actually, you know, we have been spending a lot of time and, you know, made a lot of efforts to make this happen. Or the reason that we choose to do this community race is mostly to, you know, engage and, you know, grow our community and to be able to deepen our relationship with our early community members and supporters. This is a very good opportunity for us to establish a deeper relationship with our community with this community sale. Because this token sales actually comes at a discount. Our last round of private runs was raised as a higher valuation than the community sale round happening right now. So we want our community members to have the feeling that their support, ongoing support is deeply appreciated and we will reward the early adopters and their non-term support in many different ways. This is the, I think, starting with the community sales is a good way, in our opinion, to show our appreciation. And the whole process is managed by our team together. And we have seen overwhelming support from our community. We have roughly in total 300 to 350,000 of community members in our Discord channel. And we’ve seen overwhelming support and very positive feedbacks from our community members. They like the idea that we are launching at the right timing after almost three years of grinding, technical grinding and building and seeing that the ecosystem is also beginning to grow very fast. Recently, as we continue to embody more ecosystem applications, developer teams, and we’re launching different initiatives to enhance the momentum of the ecosystem growth, we recently launched the liquidity alliance program to onboard market makers to provide the liquidity to boost equal liquidity in our ecosystem application. And to make all these initiatives possible, then a token will be naturally needed. And also this token, fundamentally, is the native utility token and the governance token of the protocol. It will be the payment token for the proof market to provide the necessary computational resources needed to generate the proof and sustain the operation of the network and also as a governance instrument to ensure the decentralization and the sustainability of the network in long term. And to govern the key developments and also the different matters like the community votes and how to develop our ecosystem for other important initiatives after the token genesis events. They will be collectively decided by the Katao member together using the token as the instrument to coordinate this process. And also it will be the utility token for developers to use as a license fee to pay for the infrastructure service. And also, of course, the developers in the beginning as startups, they might find it is expensive to pay in this token, so the DAO will provide initial support for the, to onboard the early-stage startups to facilitate the whole process and to promote adoption. And in return, there could be some sort of agreement between the DAO and the developer team is to pay by future revenue sharing, so it’s quite flexible over there. And with this token sale, we’re entering the fast track to bring the product and the Mainnet life and to involve multiple teams. And we have a very busy pipeline of key partnerships and integrations in the next few months with the strategic technology providers related to the Rollup framework that we’re building, and also some important applications that we think that will be very exciting for our community and the users. So I cannot reveal the details right now, but I’m personally very excited for what’s coming. And we hope that our community members who have been lucky and won the lottery for the whitelist to board and for those who have not, they will still have the opportunity to be rewarded. And we want to engage them in non term, and we really appreciate their support. And I think it appears to me that this community sale is one of the most popular ones in the recent history of current list. So we’re really happy for that, and we deeply appreciate the support from our community members.

Matt Zahab
100%. Well said there. I mean, I’m sure you can’t tell me this, but you know, you got to shoot your shot. What’s the plan for centralized exchanges? You guys are going to do the whole Kip/Bam and Kaboodle, Binance, Coinbase, everyone. You’re going to do all the big boys, all the big gals. Is that coming up soon?

Vince Yang
That’s definitely our target. Yeah, we definitely want to try our best. So we’re still in the process of figuring out what’s the opportunities, what was possible. We try very hard and we try our best to get the list on the best platforms to have a stronger momentum for everything. This is like, stay tuned.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. You know, Vince, I had to ask. I mean, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t. Let’s take a step away from zkLink and yourself, of course. And we’re going to talk about the Bitcoin ETF. I mean, this impacts everyone. Obviously, you guys aren’t involved in the Bitcoin space primarily. You guys are team ETH building an L3, of course. But did you guys expect this price action to happen? Like, you know, I want to say when the Bitcoin ETF launched at 46, 47, heck, we might have even been at 48 at the time. And then boom, we’re, you know, I think yesterday we hit 39,000. Like, what’s going on there? I know you guys have some very incredible and very switched on smart lads and lasses on the team. Like, did you guys expect this to happen? Was this a big shock to you? Do you think it’s going to increase long term? Do you think the halving will still have the effect that everyone thinks it does? What’s your sort of short term sentiment on Bitcoin?

Vince Yang
To start with, I have to admit that I’m not an expert in trading. So I’m really not very good at market analysis or pricing predictions. But we all care about the price of Bitcoin because of course it’s the beta of the whole market. So it’s the indicator that we all care about. I still have a lot of friends that are working in the Bitcoin space, the Bitcoin miners and also the mining companies, the mining farm companies. So I’m still pretty close to the Bitcoin community. The feeling that I’ve got from the Bitcoin community is that they really don’t care that much about the short-term price changes, whether it’s like writing from the 26K to the 48K, with the rally due to the idea of approval, the expectations, or whether it’s just the most recent, the last three days, the selling pressure coming from probably the grayscale and the liquidations. Within the zkLink team, I think everyone is very focused on building out the infra. So they don’t really know what’s going on.

Matt Zahab
But you guys don’t give a shit about that. I had to ask just because again, it’s, you know, it’s real estate. It’s some of the biggest news.

Vince Yang
It’s not actually 100% that we are not, you know, caring much about the price changes because this will give us more time. I think if we somehow we think this is, we expect this to happen. And it’s not a totally a bad thing for the builders, for the developer teams. When the pricing is really very fast, everything is rising very fast. And then you see, there’s a feeling with the team data, okay, are we too slow? Everyone else thinks really, yeah, the big boys is really, you know, made it and they’re going so fast and everything moving so fast. We have the feeling that we’re not doing it. We’re not executing another dealer in fast enough. But when the price is stabilized or slowly going down, then we feel like, okay, there’s more time for us and we can be more focused on the coding and developing the ecosystem and everything. But as we’re doing the community, so of course we hope that the whole market is going strong and we do believe that in, we don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next one, we got two, but we know that in this year, the overall, the market is will go strong. So there’s a lot of positive signals we’ve seen with the Bitcoin halving, which is gonna happen very soon, with the Ethereum upgrade, can go now updates. So a lot of impositives things and also with the infrastructure getting mature very quickly, new types of applications being unlocked, new doors being opened, and also with interest, a cut, is the expectation. Don’t think that this short-term dumping pressure will be a big problem with long-term. Yeah, so overall, we just do, once we’ve continued to focus on what we were building and once we ship fast, as fast as possible.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Vince, this has been absolutely incredible. A couple more questions, mate, and then we’ll wrap up. Let’s talk 2024 trends, 2024 hot topics. Besides the solutions and pieces of infrastructure that you and the team are working on, is there anything outside of you and your guys realm that really excites you at the moment? Obviously, you guys are doing everything. ZK related, L1, L2, L3, more specifically L3. Any other areas of crypto or ecosystems that really tickle your fancy at the moment?

Vince Yang
I think for the past few weeks, we have seen interesting things happen with the modular production space. So building a Layer 3 harshly is also part of the broader modular landscape, because you have to decouple some of the key components to be flexible, to be customizable, to meet the diversity of bounds. So we work hand in hand with the modular solution providers like Celestia, EigenDA, or the Oracle, the other shared sequences. This will be a very important trend for the Rollup ecosystem. You have to decouple the components to be flexible, customizable, to meet the diversity of bounds, to have a flexibility to reduce the cost and to have some enhanced performance in certain areas using different solutions, making compromise on different parameters. So I think this is the way. But we’re also doing this within the Ethereum ecosystem. This is still the strongest developer community where most of the fundamental innovations are happening on a daily basis. So we expect that this is still we want to focus on the Ethereum community. And there are constraints coming with Ethereum for sure. And outside the Ethereum community, there are also important innovations happening on a daily basis, like within the Cosmos ecosystem. We’ve seen exciting things, like dYdX building out at their way four, is a fully decentralized margin engine implemented in the Cosmos Layer 1 chain. It’s amazing. We’re internally exploring what their building and that we find is really amazing. And also innovations happening on other ecosystems, like Solana recently just, you know, what have come back, right? So after the FTX inclusion, and the Solana ecosystem is growing so fast that it’s getting strong. And for us, from the technology perspective, we think that the most important game changer in the year 24 is account abstraction. Because this is most fundamental element related to user experience, abstraction again is so important for user experience for adoption. Account abstraction will give us, will set the grounds for us to build out everything, you know, on top of it. So they can get also working with account abstraction solution providers. And we’re more like, you know, doing some deep work on the front of chain Rollup of abstraction, trying to integrate them and, you know, abstract these and simplify these for developers and users, while account abstraction is providing solutions for all end users, including you and me. And I hope that in 2024 we’ll be able to see some amazing products using account abstraction and, you know, give us like, this product that we like to use day to day, like exchanges with social accounts, social recovery, social login, et cetera. And I’m mostly excited about the progress on abstraction. I would say this is too pretty early and there’s a huge potential there. And a lot of the infrastructures will have account abstraction embedded. And it’s not mature yet. It’s not user-ready. It’s not production ready. I hope that it will get ready very soon.

Matt Zahab
Yep, well said. Vince, pleasure having you on, my man. This was a great episode, super pumped for you and the team. You guys are building something incredible and sky’s the limit and I’ll be following along. Really appreciate you coming on and can’t wait for our second round. But before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and zkLink online and on socials.

Vince Yang
Yes, you can find me on Twitter. My Twitter is @zkVinceReal, and it’s a verified account with a black punk. And you can find also Zekilink official Twitter accounts, @zkLink_Official. You can also visit our official website, which is zk.link. And there’s a detailed explanation on our documentation, the developer docs, explaining in detail how the solution works. And also, of course, you can also find us in Discord channel. There’s only one zkLink Discord channel, and we were happy to chat with you there and answer your question, any question related to the project or any other topic. And yeah, thank you, Matt. This is a great session. I love it. Great chatting with you. And let us know if there’s the second opportunity. When we can come back, and next time, maybe with bigger news, with more exciting progress and advancements on the tech and also the existing development. And of course, hopefully one day, when we come back, we’ll already have a token.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Folks, what an episode with Vince Yang, Co-Founder of zkLink. We jumped into a whole lot of stuff here. Everything, Layer 3 related, mapping ZK Proofs, DeFi, ZK Rollups. You name it, we touched a huge shout out to Vince and the team for making this happen. Vince was unreal, dropping tons of knowledge bombs left, right, and center. If you guys enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speak to the team. Love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Justas The gaudiest sound editor in the world. You’re the man. Appreciate you and back to listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.