With the launch of its zkEVM mainnet beta on Monday, Polygon is bringing to life what has been described for years as the “holy grail” of blockchain infrastructure, the scaling solution co-founder says. of layer 2. Fortune.
Through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, which allow a user to prove certain statements without revealing the actual data used, Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic said zkEVM will provide tremendous opportunities to increase the number of transactions. on the blockchain while incorporating the security and established ecosystem that the Ethereum network has built over the years.
Ambitiously, Bjelic compared the upcoming impact of zkEVM on crypto to the effect OpenAI’s ChatGPT has had on artificial intelligence in recent months.
Building on Ethereum’s Execution Layer, or EVM, was important to the Polygon team because it’s already the most popular blockchain for decentralized applications.
“If you have a solution that satisfies those first two features, security and scalability, but completely changes the user experience, the developer experience, you have to build the whole ecosystem from scratch. colossal task,” Bjelic explained.
The technology is complicated, and as such, Bjelic said the Polygon team originally thought it would take three to five years to complete the project. Thanks to some crypto breakthroughs and a lot of passion, especially from technical lead Jordi Baylina, the team was done in just over a year, he said.
Polygon has partnered with prominent companies such as Starbucks And instagram in the past, and Bjelic said zkEVM would be a great fit for them and other Web3 businesses or organizations. By adopting the beta version of the zkEVM mainnet, users could in some cases pay 10 or 20 times less for the same number of transactions.
Several companies have already committed to using the zkEVM mainnet beta, and on the first day of launch, Bjelic said he expects thousands of users to start using it for dozens of years. apps.
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, executed the first token transaction via a livestream on Monday, which Bjelic says shows just how important technology is. Buterin seemed to agree.
Although scaling has always been on his mind since the start of Ethereum, he said during the live stream, during the last bull run it became clear how big he was. expensive to use the Ethereum mainnet. This is a problem that zkEVM will help solve, while enabling mass scaling for Ethereum, which will make it easier to onboard new users, Buterin said.
“I feel very happy and excited for what’s to come,” Buterin said. “The whole zkEVM is something we all dream about and talk about for a long time.”
As for Bjelic, in the face of regulatory uncertainty and investor unease linked to problems in the economic and banking sectors, he hopes that zkEVM will bring buzz back to the Web3.
“I think zkEVM has the potential to reignite that enthusiasm for Web3 again,” he said, “and I think we really need it now.”
