Polygon (MATIC) has announced that it has launched the public testnet zkEVM, the first open-source zk-Rollup scaling solution. It is intended to enable full opcode equivalency for the EVM, allowing frictionless transactions on Ethereum, improved scalability, and maximum security.
Although it is anticipated that Ethereum’s move away from Bitcoin’s (BTC) energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm and toward the proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism will increase improvements that will catapult the world’s leading smart contracts blockchain from its current 8.85 – 14 transactions per second (TPS) to 100 TPS, this dream may never become a reality without the launch of cutting-edge Ethereum scaling solutions.
Now, Polygon (MATIC), the industry’s premier Ethereum layer-2 scaling platform, has announced in a blog post published on October 10, 2022, that their zero-knowledge proof (ZK) rollup Ethereum scaling solution, which is being referred to as Polygon zkEVM, is now live in testnet.
For those who aren’t familiar, a zk-Rollup is a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum that aims to tackle the platform’s persistent scalability problem by combining the execution of several bulk transfers into a single transaction. The ZK technology demonstrates and publicly documents the correctness and validity of the rolled-up transactions that Ethereum processes.
The Polygon team has clarified that zkEVM is the first open-source zk-Rollup solution that provides total opcode equivalency with EVM. The zkEVM solution was developed to make it possible to conduct Ethereum transactions quickly and easily without compromising the security of the network.
According to Polygon’s statement, the company feels that the zkEVM solution is the next step for the Ethereum blockchain. However, for the solution to reach its full potential, it must first go through the proper stages of testing and be pushed to its limits.
With the use of on-chain data, the Polygon zkEVM solution is intended to reduce transaction costs by as much as 90 %. The company claims the solution includes an extendable EVM processor that uses a brand-new assembly language called zk-assembly. In addition, developers will be able to execute their pre-existing Ethereum smart contracts on zkEVM in a way that does not require permission.
The development team at Polygon strongly recommends that blockchain projects and developers join the recently established zkEVM public testnet and begin evaluating the technology as soon as possible.
The development team claims that some of the most prominent EVM-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and Web3 applications, including Aave, Uniswap, Lens, and the game studio Midnight Society, will be among the first platforms to launch on the zkEVM Testnet. As of the time this article was written, the price of MATIC, Polygon’s native cryptocurrency, was hovering at £0.71, and it had a market value of £6.26 billion.