The Ethereum ecosystem is set to witness one of the hottest blockchain trends of the year, with many companies looking to take advantage of Polygon’s upcoming zkEVM rollup.
What is zero-knowledge proof?
Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology is a cryptographic solution that is reshaping the blockchain industry. They run language and low-level bytecode at a programmable level, backed by the same rules as Ethereum mainnet.
This is a virtual machine that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to validate data without revealing any information about the contents or properties of the data. A censorship-resistant protocol that reproduces the transaction execution environment of the Ethereum mainnet.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin Classified zkEVM is classified into four main types and a fifth type. Here’s his breakdown of these types.T
- Type-1 zkEVM: Full parity with Ethereum
- Type-2 zkEVM: equivalent to EVM (not Ethereum)
- Type 3 zkEVM: Departure from EVM
- Type-4 zkEVM: close to EVM
Jordi Baylina, who leads the technical team building Polygon zkEVM, said: “The idea is that with these electronics, we’ve somehow built a processor, and on top of that we can write programs that process transactions. It’s a complete stack of components, and these stacks of Different teams are working on each layer.
on YouTube video Released on March 2nd, Baylina describes the technical components behind the rollout: It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s up to a point because the system isn’t universal.”
“circlee Created of assembly itself. this is a new processor, new assembly, new the way of write in hardware. So this is like you that is create a technology, but and of same time you need To learning To use of technology you that is create, Which teeth, from of generic perspective teeth attractive, but this is again very challenge. “
technical details
With the zkEVM rollup, ERC-20 transfers define their own data infrastructure such as ProgramCounter, GlobalCounter, EVMWord, GasInfo, GasCost. This includes elements such as stack, memory and opcodes. pc and gc are encapsulated in usize, but EVMWord encapsulates a u8 array of length 32.
StackAddress is represented as usize, but Stack is a dynamic array composed of EVMWords. MemoryAddress is also usize with values between 0 and 1023 and Memory is an array of u8. To simplify memory-related operations, developers cleverly use Rust macros to extract important memory information such as indices and range characteristics, standardize and implement them. Storage, on the other hand, is represented by a HashMap, whose key values are all EVMWords.
The battle for zkEVM supremacy
The race continues to bring practical products to market.
Several projects are racing to launch the first fully functional, EVM-equivalent zkEVM. Some of the frontrunners are Polygon zkEVM, zkSync, StarkNET, and Scroll.
Polygon zkEVM is open source and aims to reduce transaction costs by up to 90%. Meanwhile, zkSync 2.0 is live on the Ethereum testnet and allows developers to create Solidity smart contracts. StarkNET uses the more secure but limited ZK-STARK. Scroll builds advanced composability solutions that prioritize security and transparency.
Polygon’s $250 million bet on zkEVM
Polygon purchased Hermez Network for $250 million in 2021 and subsequently launched Polygon Hermez, an Ethereum Layer-2 ZK rollup solution, in mid-2022. In July 2022, Polygon announced that he would be rebranding his Polygon Hermez to Polygon zkEVM. It takes the Type-2 zkEVM approach and is comparable to EVM and not Ethereum.
Developers should adapt their code and EVM tools to the ZK rollup. Polygon aims to achieve 2000 transactions per second and reduce transaction costs by up to 90%, making it cheaper than the Ethereum mainnet. Polygon launched the zkEVM public testnet on his October 10th.