Polygon Expands with $400M Acquisition of Mir Ethereum Scaling Protocol

Ethereum layer 2 aggregator Polygon is continuing its expansion in a big way. Its latest acquisition is the Mir Protocol which uses next-generation zk-rollups to scale Ethereum.

In an announcement on Dec 9, Polygon revealed that it had agreed to purchase the Mir Protocol for $400 million. The deal involves 190 million of its native MATIC tokens and $100 million in USDC stablecoins.

Polygon stated that it has gained access to the world’s fastest zero-knowledge (zk) scaling technology. Mir has created a way to speed up existing zk-proofs by using recursive proofs that it has called Plonky2.

Even more scaling for Ethereum

ZK rollups enable transactions to be processed faster because they do not process all of the data on the root chain and can bundle, or rollup, transactions together to be processed as one.

According to Polygon co-founder, Mihailo Bjelic, Mir’s enhancements are “orders of magnitude faster than anything else and is practical to verify on Ethereum.” He labeled it as a great piece of engineering:

Plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop. Most importantly, Plonky2 is practical to use on Ethereum, with 45kb proofs in size-optimized mode.

Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon, commented that the platform plans to focus on zk cryptography as the “end game for blockchain scaling,” before adding:

We believe this is the way to establish Polygon as the leading force and contributor in the ZK field and onboard the first billion users to Ethereum.

Mir will be integrated under its new name, Polygon Zero. It will join the ever-expanding array of existing Polygon solutions such as Polygon PoS, SDK, Avail, Nightfall, Hermez, and Miden.

In mid-August, Polygon merged with roll-up platform Hermez in a $250 million deal. The following month, multinational professional services network EY selected it to deploy and scale its enterprise blockchain on Ethereum.

In mid-November, Polygon unveiled Miden, a STARK-based EVM-compatible rollup that would have the ability to scale smart contracts.

MATIC price outlook

The deal is a part of a three-year vesting period during which the Mir team will be able to withdraw funds gradually.

Polygon’s native token, which is still called MATIC, has actually declined on the day in a 6.7% fall according to CoinGecko. Currently priced at $2.18, MATIC has been performing well recently with a 14% gain over the past fortnight.

The token is currently down just 16.7% from its May 18 all-time high of $2.62 giving it a market cap of around $15 billion which is similar to that of Crypto.com’s CRO.