Alex V. and I (Alex G.) founded Matter Labs because we love freedom: the ability to do what you want and not do what you hate.
We wanted to be in the flow, tackling exciting technological problems on the edge of the complexity of what our minds could handle — and experience the joy of accomplishment when the fruits of our work materialize. We hated bureaucracy with its stupid rules and limitations that are so often imposed by clueless people in positions of power.
This is something we want to share with you. We're doing our best to assemble a team of talented people who are self-motivated, love what they are doing, and enjoy the highest degree of autonomy.
But freedom is not just something that guides our work — it is the end goal. I'm convinced that the single most impactful thing you can do today to make this world better is to increase people’s freedom. More freedom is key to eliminating poverty, to creating equality of opportunity and more wealth for everyone, to enabling more fun and creativity, faster scientific and technological progress, and less injustice and suffering from corruption and oppression.
In Recommendations you will find a selection of thought-provoking books and videos on this topic.
Cryptography is the most important technology protecting the world's freedom today. It's the only technology that enables a single individual to resist immensely powerful adversaries. It led to the creation of public permissionless blockchains and is making radical financial sovereignty available for practically anyone in the world, for the first time in history.
At Matter Labs, we believe Freedom leads to Progress and Prosperity. Therefore, we made it our mission to advance personal freedom for all.
We elaborated on our motivation behind this mission and the principles that guide our decision making in The ZK Credo.
To accomplish our mission, we’ve bootstrapped and are building zkSync. It’s neither a company nor a commercial product, but a credibly neutral tech and network, to be owned and governed by its community. We use advanced cryptography called zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum infinitely without compromising on security or decentralization. Our goal is to create a protocol that turns Ethereum into the limitless Internet of Value.
For more information, check out:
We have a small window of opportunity to make significant progress towards our mission.
Imagine an alternate history where the Internet Protocol (IP) doesn’t get traction. The Internet is a collection of paid data services offered by large providers: AOL, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, etc.