Polygon Unveils World’s First ETH-Compatible ZK Scaling Solution

The Ethereum-based Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon announced the launch of the world’s first zero-knowledge (ZK) scaling solution, which is “fully compatible” with Ethereum.

We are proud to announce a giant leap forward for Ethereum scaling and ZK innovation.

Introducing Polygon #zkEVM, the first EVM-equivalent ZK L2.

Today we’re releasing a complete implementation, fully open-source, and we’re just getting started.

[1/6] pic.twitter.com/P929DRCT1y

— Polygon – MATIC 💜 (@0xPolygon) July 20, 2022

According to Polygon’s blog post, zkEVM, abbreviated from — Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine — will enable developers to coherently deploy any ETH smart contract to scale infinitely and reduce fees drastically.

In the announcement, Polygon mentioned, “it is just like using Ethereum, but with the groundbreaking scaling power of ZK tech.” Although Polygon has been working on an Ethereum scaling solution for quite some time, the company decided to launch the ZK proof early as they believe it is more promising.

zkEVM is a Layer 2 protocol that rolls up an extensive batch of transactions and proves it all to the Ethereum blockchain with a single ZK validity proof. Therefore, Polygon calls it “the future of Ethereum scaling.”

Since its inception, Polygon has maintained seven discrete teams to build an interrelated web of products, and three of those teams, namely Hermez, Zero, and Miden came together to create the zkEVM.

In detail, the ZK proof technology addresses some of the biggest concerns regarding scaling solutions. It significantly reduces gas fees by batching transactions into groups and later broadcasting them to the Ethereum network as a single transaction. It thereby splits the gas fee among the participants.

Mihailo Bjelic, the co-founder of Polygon, explained that the “holy grail of Web3 infrastructure must contain three major properties — Security, Scalability, and Ethereum-Compatibility.” He added that

Until now, it has not been practically possible to offer all these properties at once. Polygon zkEVM is a breakthrough technology that finally achieves that, thus opening a new chapter of mass adoption.

Polygon has designed zkEVM as a permissionless, open-source solution. zkEVM’s code has already been published by Polygon and is available for everyone to use. Meanwhile, the company announced that the zkEVM testnet will be live soon, but refrained from providing any further details about the potential launch date.

However, according to sources, the zkEVM testnet will launch sometime this summer and the mainnet launch is expected to happen in early 2023.