Polygon’s ‘holy grail’ Ethereum-scaling zkEVM beta hits mainnet

cointelegraph.com:

Polygon has released its open-source zkEVM Ethereum scaling technology to the mainnet, promising reduced transaction costs and increased throughput of smart contract deployments.

Polygon’s zkEVM is a zero-knowledge rollup (ZK-rollups) scaling solution equivalent to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. ZK-rollups increase throughput on Ethereum’s blockchain by batching computations and state storage to layer-2 platforms. The technology allows thousands of transactions to be batched off-chain, with a proof containing a minimal data summary posted to the Ethereum mainnet.

Polygon’s zkEVM is a type of ZK-rollup that mimics the transaction execution environment of Ethereum’s mainnet. The open-source zkEVM is touted to allow decentralized applications (DApps) to scale through transaction batching, unlocking higher performance.

Gas fees are also set to be reduced for DApp users, which could drive wider adoption, while the use of zero-knowledge proofs sees Polygon zkEVM inherit Ethereum’s network security. Lastly, equivalence with Ethereum means that developers can simply copy across existing smart contracts to Polygon’s zkEVM.

Related: Polygon, Immutable zkEVM to tackle ‘huge incumbents exploiting players’

Cointelegraph spoke to Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal ahead of the mainnet beta launch to unpack the significance of the milestone and the anticipated effect zkEVM will have on the wider Ethereum ecosystem.

27th March 2023 will change Ethereum scaling for ever. What does a “zkEVM Mainnet” mean?1. EVM Equivalence2. Fully done and published audits3. Public access to all developers, builders and users4. PerformantPolygon zkEVM is the only game in town currently!#zk23 season! pic.twitter.com/OK34fQhTAD

Nailwal described ZK proofs as