According to one of Polygon’s co-founders, the Ethereum ecosystem’s top development firms creating zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) to scale the network are engaging in healthy competition.
Jordi Baylina, the technical director of Polygon Hermez zkEVM, spoke before starting the EthCC in France. As developers across the Ethereum ecosystem converge on Paris, zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proofs) scaling tools are expected to be a primary focus.
Polygon zkEVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) employs ZK-proofs to reduce transaction costs and increase the throughput of the Ethereum network while taking advantage of the layer-1 blockchain’s security and finality.
Particularly for the Ethereum ecosystem, ZK-proofs have proven to be an essential scaling tool. The technology enables protocols such as Polygon’s zkEVM to perform transaction computations off-chain before providing a resource-lite proof to the Ethereum mainnet without disclosing associated data.
Baylina, who is in charge of Polygon’s zkEVM, asserts that the breadth of ZK technology development has immensely benefited the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
“Having different projects adds a lot of experience and it’s also a way to test different approaches, ways of handling things or solving things.”
Baylina added that various ZK-based projects attempt to improve upon and imitate successful developments, while failures serve as a teaching tool for all ZK-based projects.
Polygon zkEVM is operational on the mainnet, and the network is approaching 250,000 unique active addresses. The number of daily dynamic Polygon zkEVM addresses is also increasing, indicating that user adoption is expanding.
Meanwhile, Baylina highlighted the number of applications based on Polygon zkEVM as his team’s most essential metric. In turn, this generates a plethora of information and feedback from developers, which is shaping protocol modifications:
“Hearing from developers the issues that they have, if they notice something that can be improved, or the quality of the tooling that they have on top of that for me, these are the real metrics we are working hard on.”
Developers had identified issues with timestamps that were crucial to the operation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) oracles, as demonstrated by Baylina.
While a permanent remedy is being developed, Bayina’s team devised a temporary solution. Nevertheless, as more builders join the ecosystem, their input helps to enhance the protocol.
“Important projects are coming to the network and we are getting a lot of experience and knowledge on the needs of different applications.”
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal previously said that Polygon’s zkEVM is the “holy grail of Ethereum scaling,” as it enables the protocol to submit proofs to the Ethereum mainnet without requiring the layer one blockchain to rerun computations.
The technology is expected to scale Ethereum significantly, allowing developers to create DApps without being constrained by the network performance of the underlying blockchain.
