Alex Gluchowski, CEO and co-founder of Matter Labs, announced on Sept. 3 that the company was restructuring and cutting 16% of its workforce.
According to Gluchowski, Matter Labs — the creator of Ethereum scaling solution ZKsync — has always thrived with a smaller team and has restructured the company to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving market.
Source: Alex Gluchowski
More specifically, the CEO cited the scaled-back role of Matter Labs in the increasingly decentralized ZKsync ecosystem. Gluchowski explained via social media:
“The role of Matter Labs in the decentralized ZKsync ecosystem has evolved, too. The launch of the Elastic Chain and ZK Nation was the right moment to re-evaluate our strategy, goals, and team composition.”
Gluchowski also announced severance packages for all impacted team members. The Matter Labs CEO concluded with a forward-looking statement highlighting roughly 12 blockchain projects launching on ZKsync’s Elastic Chain ecosystem this year and continued development on ZKsync Era by third-party developers.
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Matter Labs steps back as ZKsync achieves decentralization
In September 2023, Matter Labs launched the ZKsync Ecosystem Portal in collaboration with DappRadar, which was touted as a major step in fully decentralizing ZKsync’s ecosystem.
When the portal was launched, spokespeople for ZKsync announced that “relinquishing control of the ecosystem is a key step in transitioning ownership to the community” before explaining that the next steps were to “fully decentralize” the protocol’s “technology, community governance” and critical infrastructure.
Matter Labs faces backlash for attempting to trademark zero-knowledge proofs
Earlier in 2024, Matter Labs applied for a trademark on the term “zero-knowledge” to establish a claim for the intellectual property rights of the broad technology.
This sparked a backlash from industry executives. According to StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, attempting to trademark zero-knowledge technology is akin to a baker trying to claim exclusive intellectual property rights on bread.
The widespread condemnation eventually caused Matter Labs to drop all applications establishing intellectual property rights over the term “ZK” in June 2024.
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