Polygon Launches ‘Plonky2’, A Major Step Towards Ethereum Scaling

Polygon announces the launch of Plonky2.

According to Polygon, their mission is to scale Ethereum to a billion users; to achieve that milestone, the team announced the launch of Plonky2. Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is compatible with Ethereum and 100x faster than existing alternatives. To support recursion and low verification cost on Ethereum, Plonky2 combines PLONK and FRI and the best of STARKs.

The exception is that Plonky2 can check other SNARK solutions. Polygon writes:

“To see why that’s useful, suppose that we want to prove that a batch of 1,000 transactions are valid. Generating a single proof to verify 1,000 transactions at once would be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, we can take 1,000 machines and generate 1,000 proofs in parallel, one for each transaction. Next, we can take these transaction proofs and recursively aggregate them by generating a layer of recursive proofs, with each one verifying two transaction proofs. We repeat this process until we’re left with a single proof that verifies 1,000 transactions. .”

According to the Polygon team, plonky2 have the following features:

• The plonky2 recursive approach is faster, less resource-intensive, and can be more decentralized.
• A recursive proof on Plonky2 takes 170 milliseconds on a fast computer like Macbook Pro.
• Plonky2 also allows users to speed up proving times for proofs that don’t involve recursion.
• Plonky2 is natively compatible with Ethereum. Plonky2 requires only keccak-256 to verify proof.

Plonky2 is an essential step in Ethereum scaling, just like last year when Polygon laid out its commitment to support ZK Rollups to build better ETH scaling solutions. ZK L2s have benefited from a lot of hype, but current solutions rely on cryptographic primitives that are inefficient and limit scalability. Though L2’s will compete on throughput and cost, Plonky2 will allow the Polygon ecosystem to build better scalable L2s.

According to Polygon, the recursive approach is fast, resource-efficient “and could be more decentralized.” Recall that in December, the Polygon project absorbed the Mir Protocol startup, which developed the Plonky2 protocol. The deal was worth $400 million. As a result of the rebranding, Mir Protocol became Polygon Zero. Previously, Polygon acquired the Hermez Network platform, which also specializes in L2-based ZK-Rollups. The deal was valued at $250 million.

At the same time, the project announced that it will spend $1 billion on the development of solutions related to ZK-Rollups. In November, Polygon announced Miden’s Ethereum solution based on ZK-Rollups and released its central component, a virtual machine using the zk-STARKs protocol as the underlying proof system.