Polygon Announces the Launch of Its Much-Awaited zkEVM Mainnet Beta In March

15. Feb 2023 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Next month on March 27, 2023, Polygon will conduct the beta launch of the much awaited zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) mainnet. Polygon said that they would reveal more details over the next few weeks as the launch approaches.

Polygon, the Layer-2 scalability platform for Etheruem has been working on building the zkEVM scaling solution for a while. As the name suggest, zkEVM uses zero-knowledge proofs to increase the overall throughput of the Ethereum blockchain network.

It’s job is to take multiple transactions off-chain, bundle them together, and further send them as proof to the Ethereum mainnet showing the validity of transactions. Polygon’s zkEVM aims to become fully EVM-equivalent.

It means that developers will be able to copy the code of their protocols on the Ethereum mainnet and further paste it on Polygon’s zkEVM to build without changing anything. In the official blog post on Tuesday, February 14, Polygon announced:

“Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta is a huge leap for both Polygon and Ethereum. But the most exciting thing is that this is only the beginning. The day is fast approaching when ZK innovations will begin to revolutionize every aspect of the Polygon ecosystem. Expect more announcements soon. Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta is a momentous occasion, but it’s not the only paradigm shift the Ethereum community will see within the Polygon ecosystem. Polygon’s ZK revolution is only beginning…”

So far, Polygon hasn’t shared the details on what the beta network will include. As the Polygon team decided to share more details in the upcoming week, one thing they have assured is that the security of the network will get the highest priority. Polygon added that  zkEVM has gone through a “gauntlet of tests and audits”.

The zero-knowledge technology is getting huge recognition in the crypto space since it increases the speed of transactions while reducing costs. Polygon has been working on the zk-rollup technology over the past three years.

During this time, the Polygon zkEVM system has touched several milestones. This includes the deployment of more than 5,000 smart contracts as well as the generation of over 75,000 zk-proofs, more than 84,000 wallets.

As said, Polygon seeks to make zkEVM fully EVM-equivalent. This would allow the scaling of Ethereum without resorting to any half measures. “The best way to scale Ethereum is to preserve the existing Ethereum ecosystem: code, tooling, and infrastructure needs to just work. And that’s what Polygon zkEVM is aiming to achieve,” it noted.