Polygon, “the leading Web3 infrastructure used by some of the world’s biggest companies including Meta, Stripe & Reddit,” announced the launch of Polygon zkEVM. on Wednesday, July 20. Polygon zkEVM claims to be “the first Ethereum-equivalent scaling solution that works seamlessly with all existing smart contracts, developer tools, and wallets, harnessing advanced cryptography called zero-knowledge proofs.” Polygon is “used by some of the world’s biggest companies including Meta
What exactly is the $MATIC Polygon?
Polygon is “a decentralized Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with cheap transaction costs without ever sacrificing on security.” Polygon was developed by the Polygon Foundation. Polygon is described as “a protocol and a framework for developing linking Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks” in the Polygon Lightpaper.
Anthony Sassano, an independent Ethereum instructor, investor, and advisor, came to Twitter on the 18th of May, 2021, to dispel some of the misunderstandings about Polygon (e.g. some people refer to Polygon as a sidechain to Ethereum, while others call it an L2 blockchain). Listed below are a few noteworthy contributions to that Twitter thread:
- “There is the Matic Plasma Chain and the Polygon PoS chain. The vast majority of the activity is happening on the PoS chain.“
- “The PoS chain is what people refer to as a ‘sidechain’ to Ethereum because it has its own permissionless validator set (100+ who are staking MATIC) which means it doesn’t use Ethereum’s security (aka Ethereum’s PoW).“
- “The PoS chain goes beyond a standard sidechain and actually relies on and commits itself to Ethereum (what some people may call a ‘commit-chain’). It relies on Ethereum because all of the validator/staking logic for the PoS chain lives as a smart contract on Ethereum.“
- “This means that if the Ethereum network went offline, the Polygon PoS chain would also go offline. Secondly, the PoS chain actually commits/checkpoints itself to Ethereum every so often.“
- “This has 2 benefits: it provides Ethereum-based finality to the PoS chain & it can help the chain recover in case of a catastrophic event. This also means that Polygon is paying Ethereum to use its blockspace (in ETH) & paying for it to secure the contracts & checkpointing.“
In addition, Sassano took advantage of this occasion to discuss the two bridges that connect Ethereum and Polygon, which are as follows:
- “There are 2 bridges – the Plasma bridge which is secured by Ethereum and the PoS bridge which is secured/operated by the PoS chain validator set.“
- “Of course, for the PoS bridge, 2/3 of the validators could theoretically collude and try to steal the bridge funds but there’s $3.4 billion at stake so this is risky. If this attack did happen, the checkpointing & social coordination could be the only recourse.“
Additionally, he offered his thoughts on the use of multiple signatures for Polygons contracts:
- “The multi-sigs exist to allow the contract to be upgraded in case of a bug/exploit which is a practice used by many existing projects (especially those within DeFi).“
- “However, Polygon’s multi-sigs are 5 of 8 which is definitely not ideal and not decentralized and the plan is to greatly improve this in the near future.“
In conclusion, he stated that the firm is “committed to building and deploying L2 solutions like rollups in the future,” and that this is the topic about which he is “most excited about.”
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