Plagiarism Allegations Against Matter Labs Developers

Polygon Zero Accuses Matter Labs of Plagiarism

Polygon Zero, the zero-knowledge scaling arm of Polygon, has accused developers of Matter Labs of copying “a substantial amount of source code” from its Plonky2 library, according to an announcement on Aug. 3.

The allegedly plagiarized code was found on zkSync, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum powered by zero-knowledge technology. Matter Labs, the developer of the zkSync ecosystem, has denied the claims.

Polygon Zero states that the code was included without the original copyrights or clear attribution to the original authors. It also notes that Boojum, a proving system recently released by Matter Labs, is extremely similar to Plonky2’s library. “It uses the same strategy of parallel repetition to boost soundness in a small field, similar custom gates to efficiently arithmetize recursive verification, and the same lookup argument developed by our teammate Ulrich Haböck,” reads the blog post.

The NEXO crypto, MXC crypto, MIR crypto, MMF crypto and ON crypto.com are all part of the Web 3.0, also known as the NASDAQ crypto, OGN crypto and NFT crypto.

Plagiarism Accusations in the Crypto Community

Furthermore, Polygon noted that Matter Labs has marketed Boojum as 10x faster than Plonky2. “Wondering how this is possible, given that the performance-critical field arithmetic code is directly copied from Plonky2?”

According to Polygon Zero:

In comments to Cointelegraph, Matter Labs expressed disappointment to see Polygon’s NEXO Crypto leadership team “spreading untrue claims.” According to a spokesperson, “the new Boojum high-performance proof system leverages 5% of from Plonky2, which is prominently attributed in the first line of our module. Where else, other than the very first line of our library would this have been included if we wanted it to be more prominent?”

This isn’t the first time plagiarism accusations have surfaced in the MXC Crypto community. In March, a member of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) community reported that the Shibarium layer-2 beta testnet and Rinia testnet had identical chain IDs, along with claims that the Shibarium alpha testnet was a copy of Polygon’s Mumbai testnet.