October 11, 2022
Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has launched a public testnet of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).
In an announcement on Monday, the Polygon team said its zkEVM was the first to reach public testnet with an open-source ZK proving system.
Rollups are a Layer 2 scaling system that bundles several transactions into a single one by shifting the computation off-chain. In doing so, they reduce congestion on the underlying blockchain, thereby enabling transactions to be processed more quickly for a fraction of the cost. Zero-knowledge rollups verify that these bundled transactions are valid off-chain.
ZK rollups for an EVM-equivalent environment will mean that developers can port their smart contracts to Ethereum without having to use any new programming languages. The Polygon team describes its zkEVM as “the next chapter for Ethereum” as it continues to build scalable solutions for the blockchain.
“EVM-equivalence is a spectrum, and the testnet version of Polygon zkEVM is not yet everything we want it to become,” said Polygon in a blog. In its current state, Polygon’s zkEVM falls in the “Type 3” category of protocols in terms of EVM-equivalence, as per a framework outlined by Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin.
“Our goal is to become a Type 2, meaning Polygon zkEVM will eventually ‘look exactly like Ethereum “from within,”’” said Polygon.
The Layer 2 scaling solution invited developers to begin “battle testing” its zkEVM testnet. Polygon claims that some big names in the DeFi space, including Aave and Uniswap, will soon deploy on the testnet.
