The Ethereum ecosystem is about to witness one of many hottest blockchain traits this yr, with quite a few corporations keen to use 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 information with out revealing any details about the information’s content material or properties. It’s a censorship-resistant protocol replicating the transaction execution setting of the Ethereum mainnet.
Vitalik Buterin, the founding father of Ethereum, categorized zkEVMs into 4 primary sorts.
- 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 mission is a full engineering mission,” stated Jordi Baylina, who leads the technical workforce constructing the Polygon zkEVM. “The thought is that with these electronics, we in some way constructed a processor. On prime of that, a program will be written that processes transactions. It’s a full stack of elements with completely 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 shouldn’t be common.”
“We created the meeting itself. It’s a brand new processor, new meeting, new manner of writing {hardware}.”
Technical particulars
With the zkEVM rollup, an ERC-20 switch will outline distinctive information infrastructures akin to ProgramCounter, GlobalCounter, EVMWord, GasInfo, and GasCost, which embody and comprise parts akin to stack, reminiscence, and opcodes. The laptop 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 essential reminiscence data akin to index and vary traits and implement them standardized. Then again, 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 obtainable on github.
The race for zkEVM supremacy
The race is on to hit the market with a working product.
A number of tasks are in a race to launch the primary totally purposeful 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 stay 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 method 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 minimize transaction prices by as much as ninety %, making it cheaper than the Ethereum Mainnet. Polygon launched its zkEVM Public Testnet on October 10.