Polygon Launches Final Mainnet for zkEVM Solution to Scale Ethereum

Another day, another zkEVM launch.

Polygon today announced the final mainnet for its zkEVM product after the product’s testnet launch last October.

“zkEVM can be recognized as the ‘holy grail’ of blockchain scaling,” Polygon’s co-founder Mihailo Bjelic told Decrypt. “It offers simultaneously three very important features. First is scalability. The second one is security. And the third one is EVM equivalency, or EVM compatibility. All three are equally important.”

The launch comes just days after zkSync launched its scaling solution, joining the competition to make Ethereum faster.

What is zkEVM?

zkEVM technologies batch transactions on so-called rollups into a zero-knowledge proof, hence the “zk,” and then execute those proofs on Ethereum. By reducing transactions into small pieces of data, this technology helps keep Ethereum relatively unclogged with activity.

As mentioned by Bjelic, these proofs are also easily compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, making it easier for developers to simply move projects written using Solidity—Ethereum’s programming language—over to the networks.

Given the complexity of the code in play, the Polygon co-founder has also urged caution for users onboarding to the scaling solution.

“This is bleeding edge technology that is deployed on mainnet for the first time and made available to everyone,” he said. “We definitely advise caution and not moving large amounts of funds to it. Give it time, basically, to become a little bit more battle-tested and mature.”

That doesn’t mean that the network is by any means untested, insisted Bjelic.

It’s already been through a comprehensive auditing cycle, both internally and externally. The team has also already identified several bugs and “made many improvements” to the network since its testnet launched last October.

“Like any code, especially complex code like this one, it still needs time to fully mature. Here’s why the label name is Beta,” he told Decrypt.

Besides various crypto-native projects, including MetaMask and Lens Protocol, Telefónica Tech is also joining Polygon’s zkEVM Beta. The telco’s digital transformation subsidiary is turning to Polygon for its traceability and notarization solution called TrustOS.