- Matter Labs has drawn backlash for comparisons made to its multichain architecture.
- Matter Labs’ chain verification claims have become clouded in suspicion
- Matter Labs continues to be the subject of scrutiny among peers in recent weeks.
Flying jabs are commonplace in every competitive space, and the burgeoning Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem is no different as leading scaling solution providers square off for supremacy. Amid the frequent squabbles, Matter Labs, the developer of the popular zkSync Era chain and the ZK Stack, has often found itself at the center of controversy.
On Tuesday, July 2, the firm unveiled its Elastic Chain vision, a multichain architecture that bears a striking resemblance to Polygon‘s AggLayer. While the newly unveiled architecture promises to serve as a boon for the zkSync ecosystem, claims made by Matter Labs about competing architectures in comparison to the Elastic Chain have drawn significant backlash.
Matter Labs Propping up Elastic Chain With “Made up Metrics”?
Matter Labs has drawn backlash for comparisons made to its multichain architecture. In the July 2 blog post announcing the Elastic Chain’s architecture, Matter Labs compared it to Optimism‘s Superchain and Polygon’s AggLayer on five metrics. These metrics included their tech stack, verifiability, shared interoperability, native interoperability, and throughput, all of which appeared to combine to give Matter Labs’ Elastic Chain the edge over the competition.
According to several Polygon and Optimism team members, however, Matter Labs’ presentation of the facts is misleading.
Source: Matter Labs
The developers in several X posts highlighted multiple issues with Matter Labs’ claims. For one, access to the Polygon AggLayer is not restricted to chains built with Polygon’s CDK. At the same time, while Matter Labs claims that chains in Optimism’s Superchain were not verifiable, fraud proofs are already live on the OP mainnet. Moreover, throughput has nothing to do with the AggLayer, the Elastic Chain, or the Superchain.
Surmising the gripes of several community members, crypto content creator Jesse Eckel argued that Matter Labs appeared to be propping itself up with “made up metrics.”
The recent uproar over Matter Labs’ claims about the AggLayer and the Superchain are the latest in a growing list of instances where the firm has found itself at the center of criticism in recent weeks.
Matter Labs x Controversy
Matter Labs has frequently faced backlash in recent Ethereum Layer 2 squabbles. In May 2024, the firm drew the ire of several crypto community members for deciding to use “ZK” as its ticker when another project, Polyhedra Network, had already laid claim to it.
Barely a week later, with the dust yet to settle on the ticker dispute, Matter Labs again found itself in the line of fire, this time for filing to trademark “ZK” in multiple jurisdictions.
Despite the continuous controversies surrounding Matter Labs, zkSync Era remains the largest ZK-powered Layer 2 chain by TVL with $1.3 billion, according to L2Beat data at the time of writing.
On the Flipside
- Matter Labs founder Alex Gluchowski maintains that the table comparing Elastic Chain to the AggLayer and the Superchain painted a correct picture of the current technological maturity of each project.
- While joining the Elastic Chain requires developers to build with the ZK Stack, joining the AggLayer does not.
Why This Matters
The recent dispute over Matter Labs’ Elastic Chain claims highlights the escalating tensions among Ethereum Layer 2 developers in the battle for dominance.
Read this for more on Matter Labs:
zkSync’s Matter Labs Faces Pushback Over “ZK” Trademark Efforts
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Consensys Fast-Tracks SEC Lawsuit Following Enforcement Action
