About Polygon zkEVM
Polygon zkEVM is a powerful, decentralized technology developed to provide Layer 2 scalability solutions to Ethereum blockchain users. It is therefore designed to seamlessly integrate with the Ethereum ecosystem. Given the tremendous increase in the number of Ethereum's on-chain transactions, the Layer 1 solution is already facing the blockchain trilemma: decentralization, scalability, and security. This is where Polygon zkEVM steps in. By providing zero-knowledge-rollups (zk-rollups) that sit on top of the Ethereum Mainnet, the scalability and the transactions per second (TPS) can be dramatically improved.
In order to prove that the off-chain computations are correct, Polygon zkEVM employs easily verifiable zero-knowledge proofs. The Layer 2 zero-knowledge proofs are based on the complex polynomial computations that provide fast finality to off-chain transactions.
What is Polygon zkEVM?
The predecessor, Polygon Hermez 1.0, was launched in March 2021. Its goal was to scale payments and transfers of ERC-20 tokens. It currently achieves up to 2000 transactions per second (tps), and thus accomplished the purpose it was designed for. See Ethereum Live TPS to keep track of Ethereum's live transactions per second.
Polygon zkEVM, henceforth zkEVM, is a decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 scalability solution utilising cryptographic zero-knowledge technology in order to provide validation and fast finality of off-chain transaction computations. It has been designed and developed to emulate the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) by recreating all existing EVM opcodes for transparent deployment of existing Ethereum smart contracts.
The zkEVM carries out state changes, which come from executions of Ethereum’s Layer 2 transactions that users send to the network, and subsequently produces validity proofs attesting to the correctness of the state change computations carried out off-chain.
Although taking on this revolutionary design approach was a hard decision to make, the objective is to minimise the users and dApps friction when using the solution. It is an approach that requires recreation of all EVM opcodes for the transparent deployment of existing Ethereum smart contracts. For this purpose, a new set of technologies and tools has been created and engineered by the team.