Polygon’s mainnet beta to go live in March

Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology is seen by many as a major improvement for blockchains and cryptography, aimed at increasing the speed of transactions and reducing their cost

Polygon, an Ethereum scaling project, chose March 27 as the date for its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta main network to go live.

In a blog post, it did not detail what the beta network will cover but stated that the team will be revealing further details leading up to the March date during the coming weeks, and that security of the network will be of highest priority.

Zero-knowledge (ZK) technology is viewed by many as a significant enhancement for blockchains and cryptography, aimed at raising the speed of transactions and lowering their cost.

Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines are a type of zero-knowledge rollup, a scaling solution which processes transactions swifter on a layer 2, then sends the transaction data back to the mainnet blockchain – in this case Ethereum. Zero-knowledge rollups use ‘proofs’ to demonstrate that a transaction was not spoofed with by only sharing a piece of information about that transaction.

In October, Polygon went live with its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine testnet, which uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for its zero-knowledge rollup, permitting Ethereum developers to move over their smart contracts from the main blockchain without having to reprogram them in another language.

Since the testnet went live, more than 75,000 zero-knowledge proofs have been generated and 5,000 smart contracts have been deployed, as per the blog post.

Co-founder of Polygon Mihailo Bjelic told CoinDesk in an interview last week that the blockchain is also considering ways in which it could bring zero-knowledge technology to its main chain, the Polygon POS chain.

Polygon zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine Mainnet is set to be the first fully Ethereum Virtual Machine equivalent zero-knowledge rollup to reach mainnet, this represents a big step towards scaling Ethereum and bringing Web3 to the masses, Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon, told CoinDesk. The countdown is on.

The cost of Polygon’s native MATIC token is 56 per cent higher this year.