The Polygon has finally announced the launch of its zkEVM Public Mainnet Beta on March 27th 2023 and taken the web3 space by storm named ZK.
Right after their announcement, zk became the trend in the market and all the crypto tokens even remotely related to zk started pumping, Some even did 4-5x in a period of 2-3 days.
And seeing these coins pump, did you want to read about the ZK and get know to what was all the hype about but you found it too complex to understand?
No worries, I got you fam!
As all of this started with the polygon zkEVM announcement, I will be explaining Polygon zkEVM below in the easiest way possible.
let's dig in!
Polygon zkEVM
Think of the Polygon network as a big playground with lots of toys (smart contracts) that you and your friends (developers) can play with. Now, to make sure everyone plays nicely and follows the rules, there is a teacher (the blockchain) who watches over everything and keeps a record of what everyone is doing.
The ZK-EVM is like a special toy box that the teacher has provided to you and your friends. It's a very special toy box because it can do something really cool: it can hide your toys and your friends' toys from the teacher so that no one else knows what you're playing with.
Now, imagine you have a toy that you want to show your friend, but you don't want the teacher to see it. You can put your toy in the ZK-EVM toy box and it will become invisible to the teacher. You can even play with your toy in the toy box, and your friend can play with their toy too, but the teacher will never know what you're doing because the toy box keeps everything a secret.
This is kind of like how the ZK-EVM works with smart contracts. Smart contracts are like toys that developers can play with on the Polygon network. The ZK-EVM is a special toy box that uses zero-knowledge proofs to keep the smart contracts hidden from the rest of the network. This provides a higher level of privacy for sensitive data and transactions, and it also helps to reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored on the blockchain, making everything run faster and smoother.
Overall, the ZK-EVM is a really cool toy box that helps developers build and run their applications on the Polygon network, and it keeps everything a secret so that everyone can play nicely together!
Ok now you guys know what is a zk-rollup (polygon zkEVM in this case) and what does it do.
But let’s get a bit more technical now to fully understand Polygon zkEVM-
Polygon zkEVM is a layer 2 construction on top of Ethereum that solves its scalability through mass transfer processing rolled into a single transaction.
The "zero-knowledge proof" (ZK) technology is used to present and publicly record the validity and correctness of the rolled transfers processed on the Ethereum blockchain. By storing just the proof and the compressed data of a batch of transfers, the efficiency and the throughput of the network is multiplied.
basically, zk proofs helps in improving privacy of txs and reduces the data to be stored on the blockchain, therefore making the blockchain more efficient.
Features of the Polygon zkEVm-
Ethereum-equivalence: all smart contracts, wallets, tools etc work on zkEVM seamlessly.
Security of Ethereum.
ZKP-powered scalability, orders of magnitude higher throughput than L1.
What does it mean for the users and the developers?
Developers and users on Polygon zkEVM can use the same code, tooling, apps, etc that they use on Ethereum, but with much higher throughput and lower fees.
Developers will deploy their existing contracts to the zkEVM, and users can deposit assets from Ethereum and transact off-chain. These transactions are grouped into batches with a zero-knowledge proof proving the validity of each transaction. This ensures that the operators of the zkEVM can’t steal user funds, so we can say that it inherits the security of Ethereum L1. Polygon zkEVM offers compatibility and scalability without compromise.
Conclusion
With Polygon zkEVM you get the security of Ethereum, privacy through zk-proofs, 90% lower gas-fee, over 133x throughput when compared to eth, and to top it off, you can use all the evm compatible dapps and get these benefits once the dapps are deployed on Polygon zkEVM.
And that is why zk was in trend and will be in trend in the near future!
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