The Ethereum ecosystem is ready to witness one of many hottest blockchain tendencies this 12 months, with quite a few firms keen to take advantage of Polygon’s upcoming zkEVM rollup.
What are zero-knowledge proofs?
Zero-knowledge (ZK) expertise is a cryptographic answer reshaping the blockchain trade. They execute languages and low-level bytecode at a programmable degree, backed by the identical guidelines because the Ethereum mainnet.
It’s a digital machine that makes use of zero-knowledge proofs to confirm knowledge 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 principal varieties and a fifth. Right here is his breakdown of those varieties.T
- Kind-1 zkEVMs: totally equal to Ethereum
- Kind-2 zkEVMs: EVM (not Ethereum) equivalence
- Kind-3 zkEVMs: departing from EVM
- Kind-4 zkEVMs: shut cousins to the EVM
“The undertaking is a full engineering undertaking,” mentioned Jordi Baylina, who leads the technical crew constructing the Polygon zkEVM. “The concept is that with these electronics, we one way or the other constructed a processor. On high of that, a program may be written that processes transactions. It’s a full stack of parts with completely different groups working in every of those layers in these stacks.”
In a YouTube video launched Mar. 2, Baylina defined the technical parts 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 just isn’t common.”
“We created the meeting itself. It’s a new processor, new meeting, new approach of writing {hardware}. So it’s like you are creating a expertise, however at the similar time you want to be taught to use the expertise you are creating, which is, from the generic perspective is fascinating, however it’s additionally very difficult.”
Technical particulars
With the zkEVM rollup, an ERC-20 switch will outline distinctive knowledge infrastructures equivalent to ProgramCounter, GlobalCounter, EVMWord, GasInfo, and GasCost, which embrace and include components equivalent to stack, reminiscence, and opcodes. The computer and gc are encapsulated to usize, whereas EVMWord encapsulates a u8 array with a size of 32.
Whereas StackAddress is represented as a usize, Stack is 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. To simplify memory-related operations, builders cleverly make the most of Rust macros to extract important reminiscence data equivalent to index and vary traits and implement them standardized. However, Storage is represented by a HashMap, and its key values are all EVMWord.
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 totally practical and EVM-equivalent zkEVM, with a number of the high 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 jot down Solidity good 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 Kind-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 reduce transaction prices by as much as ninety %, making it inexpensive than the Ethereum Mainnet. Polygon launched its zkEVM Public Testnet on October 10.
