On Monday, Polygon, a scaling platform for Ethereum, unveiled its beta version of the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) to the public, marking the newest addition to what is anticipated to be one of the most popular blockchain trends of 2023.
Polygon further stated its commitment to making all aspects of the zkEVM open source, enabling developers to examine and collaborate on the code to spur further advancements in the realm of zero-knowledge.
First Transaction Sent by Ethereum’s Buterin
During a recent announcement ceremony, the Polygon team granted Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, the honor of initiating the first transaction on the new zkEVM. The event was live-streamed at ETHGlobal at 4:30 p.m. Central European Time (10:30 a.m. ET). Vitalik Buterin executed a successful transaction on the zkEVM, sending a sum of 0.005 ETH along with a light-hearted message to a randomly designated recipient.
The message was ostensibly a reference to Neil Armstrong’s famous first words upon walking on the moon: “A few million constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind.” According to a press release from Polygon, more than 50 companies have announced their intentions to utilize Polygon’s zkEVM technology for building. Recently, the competition for being the first to release the zkEVM technology came to an end when Matter Labs, Polygon’s rival, made its zkEVM, known as zkSync Era, available to the public.
Polygon Launches zkEVM
Polygon, a prominent Ethereum Layer-2 solution, revealed the release of its much-awaited Ethereum zkEVM scaling solution on Monday. The Polygon team made the announcement, stating that the zkEVM, which is currently in beta, is permissionless and public for anyone to build and use. Polygon reportedly offers fast finality, is entirely open-source, and has already incorporated various projects such as Lens, Balancer, The Graph, and others.
The launch of Polygon zkEVM is now live on the Ethereum Mainnet
The holy grail of Ethereum scaling is considered to be zkEVMs, such as the one launched by Polygon. Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, or zkEVMs, aims to imitate the EVM but with the added efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs. This is achieved by generating proofs for transaction batches stored off-chain, thus reducing gas fees.
Polygon launched its zkEVM recently, but there was no material reaction from its native cryptocurrency, MATIC, which is currently trading at $1.08, down 2.8% in the last 24 hours according to data from CoinGecko. Seemingly claiming the title of “first zkEVM to deploy on Ethereum mainnet”, Polygon’s zkEVM was launched just a few days after zkSync launched its own
zkSync Introduces Era zkEVM Just Days Before Polygon zkEVM Launch
The competition among teams in the ZK wars has been intensifying lately. On Monday, Polygon was poised to be the first to deploy a zkEVM on the mainnet, but on Friday, their plans were derailed by a surprise launch from a rival team. Matter Labs, the development team behind zkSync, launched its own zkEVM version, called zkSync Era, on the Ethereum mainnet.
Polygon and Matter Labs had been engaged in an ongoing dispute over who would launch the first zkEVM. However, with the introduction of zkSync Era on Friday, it appears that the argument has been resolved, at least temporarily
About zkEVM
The reason why ZkEVM technologies are called “zk” is that they batch transactions on rollups into a zero-knowledge proof and then execute them on Ethereum. This technology reduces transactions into small data pieces, thus preventing Ethereum from becoming congested with activity.
According to Bjelic, developers can easily move projects written in Solidity, Ethereum’s programming language, to the networks because these proofs are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine
Final Thoughts
Polygon has launched its beta version of the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM), which is open-source and permissionless. The launch is expected to be one of the most popular blockchain trends of 2023. The first successful transaction on the new zkEVM was initiated by Vitalik Buterin, who is a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. Over 50 companies have shared their plans to build using Polygon’s zkEVM technology, which aims to imitate the EVM but with the added efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs, reducing gas fees