ZKSync developer, Matter Labs dragged to court for IP theft

ZKSync’s parent company, Matter Labs, has been sued by Bankex, a now-defunct digital asset banking platform, which has accused it of intellectual property theft.

According to law documents filed on March 19 with the New York State Supreme Court, former Bankex employees Alexandr Vlasov and Petr Korolev allegedly stole the company’s technology and used it to start Matter Labs, which went on to receive over $450 million in venture capital funding.

Matter Labs is not worried about the claims

According to the complaint, Bankex CEO Igor Khmel and the Bankex Foundation are the plaintiffs. They claim the Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, reached out to Bankex sometime in 2017 to build operational software for “Plasma,” a technology that was floated as a way to make using Ethereum more affordable.

Alexandr Vlasov and Petr Korolev were reportedly Bankex employees at the time, and they had the task of completing the Plasma project. Rather than work on the project which was assigned to them by the Bankex CEO, Vlasov and Korolev allegedly decided to use the opportunity to secretly develop “a competing company, Matter Labs, through which they intended to appropriate the blockchain technology of Bankex for their own use and benefit and to compete with Bankex.”

The complaint also claimed that the two developers were secretly transferring “Bankex’s technology to Matter Labs and covertly developed and stored operational code bases,” all with the company’s resources and funding.

Vlasov is currently the head of R&D at Matter Labs, while Korolev is the founder of blockchain security firm OXORIO, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Co-founder Alex Gluchowski, crypto-native investment fund Dragonfly, and Chris Burniske, a partner at Placeholder Capital and a former co-director at Matter Labs, have been listed as defendants in the lawsuit. They are also being sued for their alleged involvement and knowledge of the theft.

A spokesperson for Matter Labs has said the claims are “entirely without merit,” claiming that the complaint is centered around ZKSync being built on code that was originally developed at Bankex.

According to the spokesperson, the allegations are “false” because ZKsync is reportedly original technology that is not based on or derived from any code developed by Bankex. They have asserted confidence in their ability to beat the “baseless allegations” and are looking forward to a showdown in court.

Matter Labs has been facing several issues recently

This is not the first time Matter Labs has been slammed with accusations of stealing intellectual property. In 2023, it was accused of copying some of Polygon’s codes without attribution and in the process made some false claims about the original work.

The system whose codes were copied were Plonky2, a zk proof system that boasts very fast speed, and the copied parts were used to create a proving called Boojum.

The alleged copy-and-paste was done without proper attribution, and Alex Gluchowski, the founder of Matter Labs, also claimed that Boojum was 10x faster than Plonky2.

Matter Labs ultimately resisted the accusation, claiming that only 5% of Plonky2’s code was used, with attribution provided. They also expressed disappointment at Polygon for making such claims.

The new lawsuit is yet another challenge Matter Labs has to deal with. The company also took heat last year when it attempted to trademark the term “ZK,” which led to criticism from its rival,s including StarkWare and Polygon.

Matter Labs eventually withdrew the trademark applications in June 2024 following mass outcry. The company also had to lay off about 16% of its workforce in September 2024, citing market changes and strategic shifts.

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