Matter Labs, the company behind the blockchain of layer 2 ZKSYNC, was chased by Bankex, a digital banking banks platform, for the flight of intellectual property.
Former Bankex employees, Alexandr Vlasov and Petr Korolev, stole business technology to start Matter Labs, who received more than $ 450 million in venture capital funding and has become a major player in the blockchain industry, the CEO of Bankex, Igor Khmel and the Bankex Foundation, alleged in a complaint on March 19 from the Supreme Court of New York State.
The complaint allegedly alleged that Bankex had been approached by the co-founder Ethereum Vitalik Buterin in 2017 to create operational software for “Plasma”, a technology that was observed at the time as a means of making Ethereum cheaper to use.
According to the complaint, Alexandr Vlasov and Petr Korolev were employees of Bankex at the time and were responsible for the CEO of Bankex, Igor Khemel, to finish the plasma project.
The complaint allegedly alleged that Vlasov and Korolev had rather secretly developed “a competing company, Matter Labs, by which they intended to appropriate the technology of Bankex’s blockchain for their own use and benefit and to compete with Bankex”. In addition, the complaint said that the two developers secretly transfer the “Bankex technology to laboratories and the operational code bases developed and stored secretly” using the resources and the financing of the company.
Vlasov is currently the R&D chief at Matter Labs, and Korolev is the founder of the Blockchain Oxorio security company, according to their LinkedIn profiles. The co-founder of Matter Labs, Alex Gluchowski, Crypto-Native Investment Fund Dragonfly, and Chris Burniske, partner of Planholder Capital and former co-director of Matter Labs, are also prosecuted for their alleged involvement and knowledge of the flight.
“We believe that these claims are entirely baseless,” a spokesperson for Matter Labs in Coindesk said in a statement sent by e-mail. “The thrust of the complaint is that Matter Labs built Zksync above the code which was initially developed in Bankex. This is categorically false. Zksync is an original technology which is not based or derived from any code developed by Bankex. We are assisted at our work and look forward to treating these baseless allegations in front of the courts once we are served.”
Dragonfly, Burniske and Korolev did not respond to several requests for comments.
Bankex’s lawyer Clayton Mahaffey told Coindesk in a statement that the cabinet “prefers not to comment on the case at that time, except to reiterate his conviction that allegations in the complaint are well founded and that she is impatiently awaiting her time in court.”
Read more: Matter Labs accuses the polygon of spreading the “false complaints” with allegations of codes-coffre
