After a rigorous testnet trial, Polygon zkEVM, a new layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum by Polygon Labs, will go live on the mainnet in the next month.
In a blog post on Tuesday, February 14, Polygon Labs, the company behind the Ethereum scalability project Polygon, announced the future roadmap for the much-awaited zkEVM. According to the roadmap, the developer plans to release the mainnet beta of Polygon zkEVM on March 2027.
Polygon zkEVM is on Track
Polygon Labs first introduced the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) rollups solution at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris in July 2022. The testnet went live in October 2022. The developer promised to deliver the mainnet beta in early 2023.
According to the team, zkEVM recorded textbook performance during the six months of battle-testing on public testnets. Key milestones recorded include passing “100% of Ethereum test vectors that apply to a zkEVM”, over 84,000 wallets on the network, passing two public third-party audits, the proof generation time of 2 minutes, and the cost for generating a proof for a large batch of transactions down to about $0.06.
The testnet produced 300,000 blocks with 75,000 ZK proofs generated, and over 5,000 smart contracts deployed.
Being satisfied with the testing, the team is confident to go ahead with the mainnet beta launch on March 27. Polygon Labs did not provide much details about the mainnet but said that they will be releasing more information in the coming weeks and that the security of the network will be of the highest priority.
zkEVM: EVM Equivalent
Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology is one of the main types of rollups to scale the capabilities of a blockchain network by using a secondary network called L2, with Optimistic rollups being the other type. ZK is considered the superior technology, but its complexity caused it to lag behind Optimistic rollups.
However, according to the Polygon, current ZK-based scaling protocols do not bring any ease for existing Ethereum developers as they used an entirely new programming language. This is where Polygon zkEVM sets itself apart.
Polygon’s new Ethereum scaling solution is equivalent to Ethereum’s Virtual Machine, meaning that it supports the same code as Ethereum. This allows developers to just copy and paste the code to launch an app on zkEVM. The blog post reads:
“Developers can copy-paste code that works on Ethereum and use it to build on Polygon zkEVM without having to change a thing–all Ethereum tooling works seamlessly with Polygon zkEVM. That’s frictionless scaling.”
Polygon [MATIC] is steadily making its way up. As reported, Polygon accommodated a large number of projects caught in the whirlwind of the Terra ecosystem collapse in 2022. The price of Polygon’s native MATIC token is up 56% this year.
