Polygon (MATIC) plans to target Ethereum to help scale the blockchain with zkEVM in 2023. Built on Ethereum Polygon is a layer 2 blockchain that acts as a scalability bridge for layer 1 built solutions on the Ethereum chain. Polygon revealed that its zkEVM went live in the public testnet yesterday. They also added that this is the first step to making Ethereum scalable.
Known for its efficient scalability with low-cost transaction mechanism Polygon is all set to join forces with Ethereum to create a unison for faster transactions with zero knowledge roll-up technology. Polygon is a scaling tool aiming to facilitate lower-cost transactions and uses the Ethereum blockchain as its base protocol. With the introduction of zero-knowledge (ZK) roll-up technology, Polygon is hoping to become the chief scalable system for Ethereum.
Read more on: What is Polygon zkEVM?
At ETHCC Paris, the firm announced that they will be launching the zkEVM public testnet during the summer and will go live on the mainnet by 2023. The zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine will enable Ethereum developers to deploy their smart contracts in their native programming language.
Polygon uses Ethereum as the base layer (execution layer) while Polygon is the consensus layer. The zk roll-up in Polygon aims at solving challenges of scalability and speed of transactions made on the main chain Ethereum. Zk technology sends a batch of transactions to the base layer – the Ethereum blockchain for execution. Instead of confirming one transaction at a time bundling a set of transactions will not only reduce the transaction cost but also decrease the network congestion. This will also increase the throughput of the layer 1 blockchain. The zk technology uses ‘proofs’ that are byte-size encrypted data that authorize the transaction as true. Before roll-ups, Polygon helped projects scale with solutions like Plasma to solve various challenges pertaining to transactions. While the blockchain world believed that zk’s may take time to be prepared for layer 1 collaboration, Polygon threw quite a surprise with their speedy launch of zero knowledge roll-up technology which is EVM compatible. In addition to Polygon being closer to the zk launch, news coming from Matter Labs and Scroll has further added more fuel to the blockchain ecosystem.
“It was widely believed that zkEVM will take several more years to ship, which makes this an even more groundbreaking milestone, not only for Polygon but for the whole Web3 industry,” said Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic in a statement to CoinDesk.
Polygon has been at the forefront of developing blockchain scaling solutions for Ethereum developers. With Ethereum transitioning to a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism and Polygon offering 4 varied scaling solutions: Polygon Nightfall, Polygon Miden, Polygon PoS, and Polygon Edge the Ethereum landscape will dramatically transform as more developers will join the community to build better solutions and existing platforms on Ethereum and Polygon will be able to enhance their solutions to a whole new level.
Polygon has already established some meaningful partnerships in the last few months and has extended technical support to many popular projects on Ethereum. Currently, the market cap of Polygon stands at $7,041,266,216 while Ethereum stands at $157,948,443,577. Both platforms are expected to grow further as the second step towards making Ethereum a feasible blockchain solution is in the works.