The Ethereum ecosystem is about to witness one of many hottest blockchain tendencies this 12 months, with quite a few firms keen to use Polygon’s upcoming zkEVM rollup.
What are zero-knowledge proofs?
Zero-knowledge (ZK) know-how is a cryptographic answer reshaping the blockchain business. They execute languages and low-level bytecode at a programmable stage, backed by the identical guidelines because the Ethereum mainnet.
It’s a digital machine that makes use of zero-knowledge proofs to confirm information with out revealing any details about the info’s content material or properties. It’s a censorship-resistant protocol replicating the transaction execution atmosphere of the Ethereum mainnet.
Vitalik Buterin, the founding father of Ethereum, categorized zkEVMs into 4 important varieties.
- Sort-1 zkEVMs: absolutely equal to Ethereum
- Sort-2 zkEVMs: EVM (not Ethereum) equivalence
- Sort-3 zkEVMs: departing from EVM
- Sort-4 zkEVMs: shut cousins to the EVM
“The mission is a full engineering mission,” stated Jordi Baylina, who leads the technical staff constructing the Polygon zkEVM. “The concept is that with these electronics, we one way or the other constructed a processor. On prime of that, a program will be written that processes transactions. It’s a full stack of elements with totally different groups working in every of those layers in these stacks.”
In a YouTube video launched Mar. 2, Baylina defined the technical elements behind the rollout, “the system that we’re constructing is censorship resistant. It’s not an ideal answer, however as much as a sure level as a result of the system isn’t common.”
“We created the meeting itself. It’s a brand new processor, new meeting, new method of writing {hardware}.”
Technical particulars
With the zkEVM rollup, an ERC-20 switch will outline distinctive information infrastructures resembling ProgramCounter, GlobalCounter, EVMWord, GasInfo, and GasCost, which embrace and comprise components resembling stack, reminiscence, and opcodes. The computer and gc are encapsulated to usize, whereas EVMWord encapsulates a u8 array with a size of 32.
To simplify memory-related operations, builders cleverly make the most of Rust macros to extract vital reminiscence info resembling index and vary traits and implement them standardized. Alternatively, Storage is represented by a HashMap, and its key values are all EVMWord
StackAddress is represented as a usize with the Stack a dynamic array consisting of EVMWord.
MemoryAddress can also be a usize, with values between 0 and 1023, whereas Reminiscence is an array of u8.
The total technical stack of the zkEVM rollout is offered on github.
The race for zkEVM supremacy
The race is on to hit the market with a working product.
A number of initiatives are in a race to launch the primary absolutely useful and EVM-equivalent zkEVM, with a few of the prime contenders being Polygon zkEVM, zkSync, StarkNET, and Scroll.
Polygon zkEVM’s is open-source and goals to chop transaction prices by as much as 90%, whereas zkSync 2.0 is dwell on the Ethereum Testnet, permitting builders to write down Solidity sensible contracts. StarkNET makes use of ZK-STARKs, that are safer however have limitations, and Scroll is constructing a excessive composability answer that prioritizes safety and transparency.
Polygon’s $250M wager on zkEVM
Polygon bought the Hermez Community for $250 million in 2021 and later launched its Ethereum Layer-2 ZK-rollup answer, Polygon Hermez, in mid-2022. In July 2022, Polygon introduced the rebranding of Polygon Hermez to Polygon zkEVM, which adopted the Sort-2 zkEVM strategy to be EVM-equivalent however not Ethereum-equivalent.
Builders might want to adapt code and EVM instruments to the ZK-rollup. Polygon goals to succeed in 2000 transactions per second and lower transaction prices by as much as ninety p.c, making it cheaper than the Ethereum Mainnet. Polygon launched its zkEVM Public Testnet on October 10.
