Author: Nancy, PANews

One wave has not yet settled, and another has risen. Recently, the L2 project ZKsync has been embroiled in a trust crisis due to the hacking incident involving its airdrop distribution contract. Its developer, Matter Labs, is now involved in legal disputes and public opinion turmoil due to allegations of intellectual property theft.

Matter Labs Sued by BANKEX, Accused of Misappropriating Technology and Taking Away Core Development Team

On March 19 of this year, BANKEX CEO Igor Khmel and his associated entities filed a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court, accusing former employees Alexandr Vlasov and Petr Korolev of misappropriating BANKEX's core technology during their tenure, secretly founding the competing company Matter Labs, and obtaining over $450 million in venture capital as a result.

LinkedIn profiles show that Vlasov is currently the head of R&D at Matter Labs, having served for 6 years and 8 months, primarily responsible for preparing the Plasma release for the Ethereum mainnet and developing a GPU-based zkSNARK prover for the next-generation Plasma protocol. Prior to this, Vlasov served as the chief research scientist at the BANKEX Foundation from March 2018 to January 2019, leading the implementation of Plasma and developing a complete set of tools, including backend systems and smart contracts, to support the practical operation of Plasma. Another key figure, Korolev, is currently the founder of blockchain security company OXORIO. He served as co-founder and operations head at Matter Labs from August 2018 to January 2020. Before joining Matter Labs, Korolev was the CEO and co-founder of the BANKEX Foundation, leading the establishment of the institution's R&D system, with Plasma development being one of the four core projects he participated in and promoted during his tenure.

The lawsuit reveals that as early as 2017, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin approached BANKEX to develop software related to "Plasma," which was then seen as a key technology to enhance Ethereum's scalability. At that time, Vlasov and Korolev, as BANKEX employees, led the specific development of the project, with BANKEX providing funding, manpower, and community resources. The related results were open-sourced on GitHub and showcased at multiple developer conferences, receiving public recognition from Vitalik.

However, according to the lawsuit documents, in February 2018, while still an employee of BANKEX, Vlasov created a new GitHub account named "Matter Labs" and uploaded a codebase that was almost identical to BANKEX's existing "Plasma Contract," without crediting BANKEX or adhering to the original Apache/MIT license requirements. Vlasov subsequently released the "Web3Swift Library" under his own name, which constituted a clear conflict of interest and violation of intellectual property rights.

On August 13, 2018, Vlasov and Korolev suddenly announced their resignation without prior notice or arranging for a technical handover, and within a week, they publicly released the Matter Labs white paper on GitHub, detailing the Plasma scaling architecture while deliberately avoiding mentioning that the technology originated from BANKEX. The white paper not only reused BANKEX's previously submitted code structure and algorithm design but also referenced their achievements at the "ETHWaterloo Hackathon" and Vitalik's recognition without indicating that these results were obtained under BANKEX's name. Additionally, the white paper repackaged BANKEX's previously public Plasma technology demos, illustrations, and algorithm details as original results of Matter Labs.

More seriously, after their departure, the two quickly induced key BANKEX engineers to collectively "jump ship," with Matter Labs' initial technical team almost entirely composed of former BANKEX core members, including foundation COO Sergey Korolev (Korolev's brother), Anton Nezlobin, Georgy Fesenko, and Konstantin Panarin, among other senior engineers. Even on the GitHub project page, BANKEX's official project was changed to indicate: "web3swift development has been frozen, welcome to use [matter-labs/web3swift]," openly leveraging BANKEX's influence to divert users.

With the loss of core technology and team members, BANKEX quickly fell into trouble. In mid-2018, the company's valuation reached $530 million, with annual revenue of $6.5 million, but by the end of the year, it shrank to $200 million. Furthermore, due to the depletion of core technology and team members, BANKEX was unable to secure financing and completely ceased operations in 2019. Khmel once sought emergency funding from the Ethereum Foundation but received no response. In the fifth round of funding announced by the Ethereum Foundation in February 2019, Matter Labs was listed first, while BANKEX was completely excluded.

The lawsuit also points out that Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski, Placeholder partner and former director Chris Burniske, as well as investment firms Dragonfly and Placeholder Capital, are also accused of knowingly or participating in the misappropriation of technology, becoming one of the defendants.

In response to the allegations, Matter Labs stated to Coindesk that these accusations are baseless. The core of the lawsuit is the claim that Matter Labs built ZKsync based on BANKEX's developed code, which is completely untrue. ZKsync is original technology and is not based on or derived from any code from BANKEX. We are confident in the integrity of our work and look forward to clarifying this unfounded accusation in court after receiving a formal subpoena."

Reputation Suffered Heavy Blow, Ecological Activity Significantly Declined

In fact, this is not the first time Matter Labs has faced accusations of "plagiarism." As early as 2023, Polygon, also part of the ZK ecosystem, publicly criticized zkSync for copying its open-source code without permission and using misleading language in its release. In response, zkSync stated that only about 5% of the Boojum module code is based on Polygon's Plonky2 library and clearly marked the source on GitHub.

Moreover, in May of last year, Matter Labs faced a joint boycott from ZK ecosystem project parties due to its submission of a "ZK trademark application." Although it ultimately abandoned the application, its founder Alex claimed to oppose the concept of "intellectual property," stating that everything he created is released to the public under a free open-source license, which intensified external criticism of its "open-source abuse."

These controversies have severely damaged zkSync's reputation. However, compounding the issue, zkSync has recently fallen into another trust crisis due to a theft incident. On April 15, the official zkSync team announced that the administrator account of its airdrop distribution contract had been compromised. The attacker minted approximately 111 million unclaimed ZK tokens from the airdrop contract by calling the sweepUnclaimed() function. This incident was limited to the airdrop distribution contract, and the attacker could not conduct further attacks through this method. According to Alex, this incident was caused by a leaked operator key, but the project code was not leaked. About a week later, zkSync stated that it was willing to offer a 10% bounty for the return of the stolen funds, with a deadline of 72 hours. If the hacker returns the funds within the deadline, the incident will be publicly confirmed as resolved; if not, it will escalate to a criminal investigation and be handed over to law enforcement.

Now, the once-promising ZK star project is facing market challenges. Data shows that zkSync's ecological activity has significantly declined. According to DeFiLlama, zkSync's daily revenue and daily fees have plummeted from the previously common hundreds of thousands of dollars to consistently below $10,000 since June of last year, with some recent days even recording zero.

At the same time, Artemis data shows that as of April 21, the number of daily active addresses on zkSync has dropped from a peak of 445,000 to just 9,200, a decline of over 97%. During the same period, the daily transaction count also fell from a historical high of 5.2 million to 50,700, and the transaction volume dropped from over $770 million to just $3.32 million, a decline of over 95%.

From allegations of technical infringement to the theft of the airdrop distribution contract, and the sharp decline of the ecosystem, zkSync is now struggling amid a trust crisis and competitive market incentives.

Related Articles: zkSync Developer Sparks Trademark Dispute Over "ZK," Faces Joint Boycott from Multiple Crypto Leaders

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