Ethereum layer 2 solution Polygon is unveiling a massive acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its repertoire of scaling technologies.
In a new blog post, Polygon (MATIC) announces the acquisition of Mir, a startup focused on developing zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.
ZK-rollups are layer 2 solutions that bundle hundreds of transactions off-chain and produce cryptographic proof that is instantly verified by the mainchain, resulting in a faster finality time.
With the acquisition of Mir and its recursive proof system Plonky2, MATIC hopes not only to improve the current ZK rollups compatible with ETH but also create ones that work with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
“ZK scaling represents the future of Ethereum, but scalable, EVM-compatible ZK Rollups don’t exist yet. The missing piece is efficient recursive proofs, as recursion allows us to parallelize proof generation for much better performance.
Unfortunately, the existing recursive proof systems supported by Ethereum are inefficient and slow.
This ends today. We are announcing Plonky2, a recursive proof system that is incredibly fast, and Ethereum-friendly. We believe this engineering breakthrough will be a huge value-add to the community and will open new frontiers of Ethereum scaling.”
Polygon says that Mir has been working on recursive proofs for over two years and that Plonky2 has been shown to generate recursive proofs in 170 milliseconds on a laptop computer, which makes it ideal for building a ZK rollup compatible with EVM.
According to the statement, the maximum amount committed to the deal is $100 million and 190 million MATIC tokens. With MATIC is exchanging hands at $2.07, the deal could be worth as much as $493 million.
