Mihailo Bjelic, cofounder of Polygon, announced on December 9 that they had acquired Mir, an Ethereum scaling startup. The deal was worth $400 million. The Mir team of cryptographers and engineers are joining Polygon in order to create a “highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK rollup” called Polygon Zero.
Mihailo Bjelic: ‘Polygon Is Focused on Zero-Knowledge Cryptography as the End Game for Blockchain Scaling’
Following Polygon’s acquisition of the Hermez Network (now Polygon HermezThe project purchased Mir, an Ethereum scaling startup, for $250 million in August. Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic revealed the acquisition on Thursday and said the startup is “building groundbreaking ZK tech.” The $400 million deal will pave the way for Polygon’s new ZK Rollup project.
“The Mir team is now joining Polygon in order to utilize this groundbreaking technology and build our new project – Polygon Zero, a highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup,” Bjelic said. “Polygon is focused on Zero-Knowledge (ZK) cryptography as the end game for blockchain scaling. We have committed $1B from the Polygon treasury to this effort, and we outlined our plans in our ZK Thesis,” the co-founder added.
During the last 30 days, the Polygon network’s native token MATIC climbed 24% in value, and year-to-date, MATIC has jumped 11,750% in USD value. According to l2fees.info, although ether transfers cost $8.31, $125 is spent to send the same amount using Polygon Hermez. Polygon also revealed several rollups prior to Mir’s acquisition.
Miden, Nightfall, Plonky2
Recently, the project revealed Polygon Miden (a STARK-based and Ethereum-compatible rollup) on November 16th, as well as Polygon Nightfall (a privacy-focused rollup). In addition to the Mir acquisition, Polygon’s co-founder details that the team plans to introduce efficient recursive proofs.
“ZK scaling represents the future of Ethereum, but scalable, EVM-compatible ZK Rollups don’t exist yet,” Bjelic says. “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.” Bjelic further added:
This is over. Plonky2, an extremely fast and Ethereum-friendly recursive proof method, is now available. We think this engineering breakthrough will bring a lot of value to the community. It will also open new avenues for Ethereum scaling.
Bjelic further explains that plonky2 is “practical to use on Ethereum” and “plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop.” The Polygon co-founder detailed that plonky2 will be officially announced in the next few weeks. Polygon is fourth in terms of decentralized finance’s total value locked (TVL), at $4.88 billion.
Defillama.com statistics show that the 4.88 trillion in Polygon’s defi protocol accounts for 1.96%. Projects like Aave and Quickswap are all examples of Polygon defi protocol leveraging Polygon. Bjelic notes in a post that Mir was acquired with MATIC tokens.
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