Polygon’s zkEVM Mainnet Set to Launch in March 2023

With the crypto community gearing up for the next upgrade in pipeline for Ethereum; the Shanghai upgrade; for sometime next month, the most well known layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum has chosen a date to launch its zkEVM beta mainnet! Polygon chose March 27, 2023, as the date for its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta main network to go live.

The D-Day is set in stone now!

See you on 27th March, in the #zkEVM era

To #Ethereum community, with love on Valentine’s Dayhttps://t.co/SXiA3sErsT

— Sandeep | Polygon 💜 Top 3 by impact (@sandeepnailwal) February 14, 2023

Polygon’s exploring various possibilities to bring “zero knowledge,” or the ZK technology to its main chain is being praised by many experts. Polygon’s co-founder, Mihailo Bjelic said that this progress is seen by many experts as a major advancement in cryptography’s use in blockchains. Recently, in an interview with CoinDesk, Bjelic has hinted at the crucial nature of the ZK technology for the development road map of the project.

In the announcement blog post from the project itself, Polygon did not point out the developments that the beta network will be including but had shared that the team has plans to release more details about the launch that will lead up to the March date in the coming weeks. Besides the teaser, it had also mentioned that the security of the network will be of highest priority for the team.

Read More: Polygon Beats Ethereum’s NFT Numbers

In an interview last week, Bjelic said, “One of the things that we are experimenting with is upgrading the Polygon POS chain to become ZK-secure, so as to include the zkEVM into the Polygon POS chain itself.”

Many experts sees the exploration of zero knowledge technology as the means to work on increasing the speed of transactions and reducing their cost in a blockchain and cryptography. According to the blog, Polygon zkEVM has been tested extensively through actual testnet usage and the project has also been through a detailed process of auditing. It also mentioned that there will be full transparency about the security measures for the users and the developers can which will protect the Ethereum community during Mainnet Beta.

Back in October 2022, Polygon released its zkEVM testnet, which helps in deploying Ethereum Virtual Machine for the networks ZK rollups. In doing so, they allow Ethereum developers to have a seamless transition from their smart contracts from the main blockchain without having to reprogram them in a different language. Some notable achievements since the testnet has gone live, according to the blog post are:

• About 75,000 ZK proofs have been generated
• Close to 5,000 smart contracts have been deployed

WHAT IS POLYGON ZKEVM? 

Polygon’s zkEVM is one of Polygon’s scaling solutions developed to make dApps more scalable. A zk roll up means Zero Knowledge roll up sends transactions in batches to Ethereum for approving it on the main chain.

Validity proof is given by Ethereum after the zk roll up is deployed with a cryptographic proof. Polygon’s zkEVM is Ethereum equivalent which means its byte code can be run on layer 1 as well as layer 2.

Additional Read: Can Polygon Outperform Solana In 2023?

Source: CoinDesk