Polygon invests 400 million in Mir

Polygon has announced that it has invested $400 million worth of MATIC tokens in the startup Mir. 

1/8 It's official: #Polygon welcomes @MirProtocol, a groundbreaking ZK startup in a $400M deal!

Mir's amazing team developed the world’s fastest ZK scaling tech; we are joining hands to utilize it and build Polygon Zero – a highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup. 🦄💫 pic.twitter.com/99m7Y0tDTN

— Polygon (Labs) (@0xPolygonLabs) December 9, 2021

Polygon Zero

Mir’s team has developed the world’s fastest Zero-Knowledge (ZK) scaling technology with which they intend to build Polygon Zero, a highly scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK rollup.

Polygon was created as a second-layer solution to speed up and scale transactions on Ethereum in order to significantly reduce gas. 

The company has allocated a $1 billion fund in MATIC tokens for ZK-based solutions, and thanks to this they were able to acquire Mir to develop Polygon Zero. This will be a highly scalable ZK rollup, obviously compatible with Ethereum, with the potential to be “the holy grail” for scaling this network, as stated by Polygon. 

Thanks to this new technology, they are testing a new recursive testing system, called plonky2, which is extremely fast (0.17 seconds to generate tests on a laptop) and Ethereum friendly. 

Plonky2 also paves the way towards horizontal scaling, in which throughput increases with each node that is added to the network.

The company says the development of Polygon Zero is already well underway, thanks to a transpiler that will make Solidity contracts compatible with Zero VM.

The collaboration between Polygon and Mir

Mir’s team of cryptographers and engineers has been working for nearly two years to develop this new ZK scaling technology.

Polygon says it has been working together with the Mir team for some time now, and plans to share more details about the project soon.

The planned solution involves compiling Solidity codes in a new “ZK-friendly” format. This will allow smart contracts on Ethereum to use plonky2. 

The company states: 

“Our industry is still in an early phase when it comes to scaling and blockchain infrastructure in general, and at Polygon it is our strategic decision to explore and encourage all meaningful scaling approaches and technologies at this stage. We believe this is the only way to establish Polygon as the leading blockchain platform and to onboard the first billion users to Ethereum.

As mentioned above, we are especially optimistic and focused on ZK-based solutions. We are happy to already have four such efforts under the Polygon umbrella, and even happier that they are already actively collaborating and working towards common goals and vision. It is our belief that Polygon now has all the necessary components to become the industry’s leading ZK powerhouse and significantly push the frontiers of innovation in this exciting field”.