India-based Polygon acquires ZK-rollups startup Mir, for $400 million

India-based crypto platform Polygon has acquired zero-knowledge technology developer Mir for US$400 million. Polygon announced in a post, 

“The Mir team is now joining Polygon in order to utilize this groundbreaking technology and build our new project – Polygon Zero, a highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup.”

The maximum amount committed for this deal stands at $100M and 190M $MATIC tokens, which at the date of deal closure is close to $400M based.

Thank you all for joining #polygonzkday.

The event is now over but our #ZK journey has only just begun or as @MihailoBjelic said “We are just getting started at #Polygon”.

There is a lot more to come, so stay tuned!

— Polygon | $MATIC – We’re hiring! (@0xPolygon) December 9, 2021

Polygon has been focusing on scaling Zero-Knowledge (ZK) cryptography, ear-marking $1 billion to the effort. Polygon Co-Founder Sandeep Nailwal told Bloomberg, 

“The addition of Mir enables Polygon to gain access to the world’s fastest and most efficient ZK scaling technology.”

Previously, Polygon had announced a merger with Hermez Network, and projects under Polygon Miden and Polygon Nightfall.

Nailwal added, 

“Polygon wants to offer a wide range of secure, fast, affordable, and energy-efficient Ethereum scaling solutions for web3 developers.” 

Under Polygon Studios the platform is also catering to game companies, and focusing on gaming with web 2.0 and web 3.0 decentralized technology. With the current acquisition, Polygon will introduce EVM-compatible ZK Rollups that don’t exist at the moment, as claimed by the platform. 

With the deal, Polygon also announced plonky2, “a recursive proof system that is incredibly fast, and Ethereum-friendly.”A sector where Mir has been working alongside Polygon with more details expected soon under Polygon Zero.

Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic told a media house that “Plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop.” Adding that plonky2 is “practical to use on Ethereum, with 45kb proofs in size-optimized mode.”

“It is a great piece of engineering.”

The company said that Polygon Zero will be a crucial part of its ecosystem, with solutions like Polygon PoS, Polygon Hermez, Polygon Miden, Polygon SDK, Polygon Nightfall, and Polygon Avail. The ecosystem aims to become a leading blockchain platform while onboarding the “first billion users to Ethereum.” In this context, Nailwal also said,

“Zero-knowledge is the ultimate frontier for internet-level scale for blockchains.”

Meanwhile, Polygon remains a major chain in focus for investors with $4.88 billion DeFi TVL and 129 protocols on-chain. However,  MATIC’s price action has been quite weak. At press time, the token is priced down 8.9% in the last one day on CoinGecko.