Polygon Zero Accuses Matter Labs of Code Plagiarism

Polygon Zero, the scaling arm of Polygon, has accused Matter Labs, the developer of zkSync, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, of copying a significant amount of source code from Polygon’s Plonky2 library. According to Polygon Zero’s announcement on August 3rd, the allegedly plagiarized code was found in Matter Labs’ new proving system called Boojum.

Polygon Zero claims that Boojum contains code that was copied without proper attribution to the original authors and without the original copyrights. They assert that Boojum’s design closely resembles Plonky2’s design, including strategies for parallel repetition and custom gates for efficient recursive verification, along with a lookup argument developed by one of their teammates, Ulrich Haböck.

Furthermore, Polygon points out that Matter Labs has marketed Boojum as being 10 times faster than Plonky2, raising questions about how such performance gains were achieved if the critical field arithmetic code was directly copied from Plonky2.

Matter Labs, in response, expressed disappointment at the accusations and stated that only 5% of the code in Boojum was taken from Plonky2, which was properly attributed in the first line of their module.

Plagiarism accusations are not new in the crypto community, as similar claims surfaced in the past, such as a member of the Shiba Inu community reporting identical chain IDs between the Shibarium layer-2 beta testnet and Rinia testnet, along with allegations of Shibarium alpha testnet being a copy of Polygon’s Mumbai testnet.

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