There are an infinite amount of ideas that are worth fighting for. And there are infinite ways people can use blockchains to create systems that uphold and defend such ideas. At Matter Labs, we have chosen to center our mission and work around freedom.

In a world of fiat moneys, adversaries can exert powers destructive to freedom in more subtle and unrestrained ways than ever before in the history of other mediums of exchange. To preserve and extend human freedom and prosperity, Matter Labs is accelerating the mass adoption of crypto to give everyone in the world the choice of financial sovereignty.

zkSync, like Ethereum, will be decentralized, secure, censorship resistant, permissionless, trustless, transparent, and programmable.

The guiding principles

Primacy of cryptography

Cryptography is one of the most important technologies protecting freedom today, as it is the only technology that enables a single individual to resist immensely powerful adversaries. In addition to being one of the core building blocks of public permissionless blockchains, there is a subset of cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, responsible for powering breakthroughs in two critical roadblocks to worldwide adoption: scalability and privacy.

Matter Labs aims to replace game-theoretic economic security mechanisms with cryptography whenever possible, to maximize security and trustlessness.

Remaining neutral

Matter Labs will not be picking sides and playing preferences. We are committed to building a neutral layer 2 where all protocols and infrastructure can deploy and operate in a fair and equitable manner.

Community ownership

Matter Labs will be open sourcing our entire codebase under free open source licensing. This is a prerequisite for the community ownership, which we see as the only way to sustainably preserve our foundational values.

Parts of the codebase will inherit the license from our dependencies: the MIT and Apache license. But our own software will adopt the Unlicense, where “anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.” It is our hope that by adopting the Unlicense, it will empower developers to use our tools to bring more freedom to the world.

How we work: the ownership culture

At Matter Labs, you have the freedom to work on what you want, how you want, when you want, and from where you want. This culture is augmented by a high degree of responsibility and ownership: every task, project, or area of expertise has exactly one owner. The team is run by results, not hierarchy; the best ideas win.

Our results-only environment means anyone who believes in our mission can join us, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, and age. The Matter Labs team and zkSync community consists of individuals from countries with different political ideologies, religious beliefs, and cultural norms, even countries that are directly engaged in war. We ask that members of the team and community be direct, and show kindness and respect for each other.

We designed our culture of freedom and ownership to persist as we scale and to establish the base for a positive-sum community as we move toward full decentralization. Share ideas. Take ownership. The zkSync community and Matter Labs team will do everything we can to support you in all ways possible, from providing knowledge and expertise to financial compensation.

To learn more about our mission, culture, motivation, and work processes, please follow this link:

Matter Labs Team Handbook