To quote Mihailo Bjelic: “If you can't see and verify the code, it's not safe and it's not Ethereum”

Ethereum is a community led network. The main goal behind Ethereum is for people to be able to self-govern so it should come as a given that anything built on Ethereum and willing to follow its main core and values, should have an open source code.

That’s it, there are no loopholes. There are no exceptions. There are no if, and, or buts.

An application, network, or rollup that retains the value of Ethereum should retain open source code

Just because a rollup *claims\* to follow EVM equivalence doesn’t automatically mean that it truly does.

Take ZkSync for example. They are constantly being criticized by the community and especially rivaling developers for the fact that they claim to have “the first ever zkEVM” when in reality no one even knows if it even works. The code is completely closed source which is a big non amongst developers.

This is actually the main reason behind Mihailo Bjelic’s tweet (the title of this post).

Mihailo is one of the leading developers at Ethereum scaling solution, Polygon. So it wouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s some rivalry between him and the ZkSync team.

However, when confronted about having a closed source zkEVM versus Polygon’s open source, some ZkSync supporters started coming up with excuses and fork accusations all of which were shut down by what I think is any Ethereum community member could have said. Mihailo stated:

“Open source code and verifiability are some of the core Ethereum values.

Polygon zkEVM (and everything else we build) follows these values.

The community needs to demand this from every scaling project. If you can't see and verify the code, it's not safe and it's not Ethereum.”

Regardless of whether it was Polygon, Scroll, Zksync, Loopring, Arbitrum, Optimism, or any other rollup, this statement should be applied.

As I said, there should never be an excuse as to why your code is closed source on Ethereum. This is a network that is led by the community and is constantly getting improved and protected by said community as well.

If this community cannot access your code, you are technically violating everything Ethereum stands for.