In Game of Thrones‘ seventh season, Sansa hints, “...the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.” This statement rings true for every successful open source technology from Git, to Node.js and VS Code, where the strength of the technology rests in the number of core contributors bringing unique perspectives and ideas.

Since the very beginning, the ultimate vision for Matter Labs has been to incubate and launch the zkSync protocol and ZK Stack. The next phase is to decentralize the open source protocol by enabling accomplished and talented core development teams to help build, maintain, and upgrade the network and ZK Stack.

To move toward this next phase of decentralization, we’ve onboarded close to a dozen outstanding development teams outside of Matter Labs. The purpose of this is two-fold: (1) decentralization — ensuring Matter Labs is one of many contributors to zkSync Era, and (2) onboarding elite teams capable of building valuable tools utilized by crypto projects and big brands building their web3 ambitions using the ZK Stack.

The latest of these core development teams is Blockframe, the zkSync Era NFT marketplace and creator platform. Blockframe recently introduced Bulk Semaphore — a protocol enabling scalable anonymous messaging and signaling that Blockframe uses to implement sealed bid auctions commonly used in traditional auctions by Sotheby's and Christie's — to provide efficient price discovery for NFTs. Blockframe also provides a prototype of how Bulk Semaphore can support any blockchain workflows requiring private transactions such as private governance.

Bulk Semaphore is also used to make editable NFTs possible on Blockframe: the protocol can be used generally to verify any off-chain computations such as edits to an image via an image editor and once impossible due to prohibitive gas costs, until now and on all EVM chains.

Introducing Blockframe

Built with support from Matter Labs, Blockframe is an NFT marketplace and creator platform that features on-chain royalties, AI-assisted NFT creation tools at scale, and an NFT perpetuals exchange, enabled by new ZK protocols.

Blockframe also leverages new ZK primitives to create sealed bid auctions, meaning all bids are private and credibly neutral, which allows for a reliable system for NFT price discovery and a standardized on-chain pricing mechanism.

Blockframe’s fast, low-cost, scalable, and efficient anonymous membership and signaling protocol is made available for any member of the ZK community to use.

Learn more about Blockframe ⬇️

New Tooling for Builders

A primary objective of onboarding new core development teams is to involve them in building new primitives that other developers can use; this will ultimately lead to the permissionless building of the ZK Stack and its community ownership.

Blockframe’s new open source protocol, Bulk Semaphore, is a tool that can be utilized by developers building on zkSync to scale without sacrificing the privacy of the protocol and its users.

Blockframe uses Bulk Semaphore to implement scalable sealed-bid auctions on zkSync Era and  EVM chains, but there are numerous other use cases for the privacy protocol. Bulk Semaphore is the first solution to effectively address and achieve privacy at scale using ZK primitives on EVM architectures.

Learn more about Bulk Semaphore and how to utilize the open source primitive ⬇️

Join the ZK Core Development Team

There are already close to a dozen core development teams working on zkSync and ZK Stack, and we highly encourage more teams to join the effort. Common characteristics shared by these core development teams are (1) deep familiarity with zkSync Era and ZK Stack, (2) notable contributions to open source protocols and projects, and (3) true believers in the ZK Credo. Please reach out to Omar Yehia, the Head of Investments at Matter Labs, for more information.

Bringing in teams to build on zkSync and ZK Stack opens up the path for decentralizing the development and management of the network. This is the first of many collaborations that will help to build a vibrant and self-sustaining ecosystem, rightfully owned by you: the zkSync community.