This article compares Polygon's four major ZK solutions: What are their characteristics and advantages?

Original author: s, venture capital analyst

Original Compilation: Felix, PANews

When Ethereum faced network congestion, the sky-high fees made the Ethereum network too expensive, and some users could not afford it, causing many users to leave the Ethereum ecosystem. Given;Ethereum;'s;rollup;centric roadmap and;Vitalik;believes that;ZK rollups;will defeat;Optimistic rollups;positions in the future. As an Ethereum sidechain designed to address scalability; Polygon, sees; ZK; the potential in bringing the next billion users into the blockchain space, and invests; $1 billion; to build; ZK; plan. Regarding the layout of Polygon on ZK, venture capital analysts interpreted Polygon's four major ZK solutions.

Polygon Hermez | zkEVM

Hermez; is the first decentralized; ZK Rollup on the Ethereum mainnet, and began to provide payment services as early as; 2021;; March; Polygon Hermez; based on the; ZK-SNARK; architecture, aims to solve the scalability problem of the Ethereum blockchain by using zero-knowledge proofs to enable faster and cheaper transactions on the Ethereum network. Since the;EVM;was not created to generate;ZK;proofs (ZKP), the;Polygon Hermez;mainly builds the;zkEVM by recreating all of the;EVM;operating code.

Why zkEVM?

By building; zkEVM, Polygon Hermez; emulated; EVM; opcodes can bring the following advantages:

1. Inherit the strong security of Ethereum

2. Ease of adoption, as the Ethereum developer community can easily migrate their; EVM; work to; zkEVM; and use existing tools (good development experience).

performance

Based on; ZK-SNARK; the architecture can provide up to; 2000 TPS, and keep the cost below; 300,000; Gas;

Polygon Zero | SNARK + STARK

Polygon Zero; formerly known as; Mir Protocol. When Polygon Zero;was originally developed;Plonky;2;, it took;2;minutes to generate recursive proofs. And now;Plonky;2;only takes;170;milliseconds to generate a recursive proof on a laptop.

Polygon Zero;finally builds the most scalable;zkEVM powered by;Plonky;2;. Plonky;2;is a recursive;SNARK that is;100;times faster than any other;ZK;scaling scheme on Ethereum. This is achieved by combining the advantages of STARKs (fast proof and no trusted setup) with the advantages of SNARKs (recursion, low verification cost).

EVM; Compatibility

Plonky;2;Compatible with native Ethereum, supports;Solidity;code, and converts it to;ZK;bytecode. Thus; Polygon Zero; can leverage the existing Ethereum; dApp; ecosystem.

Polygon Miden | STARK

The ;rollup; based on the ;STARK; has the following functions:

• Transparent and scalable: no trusted setup/preprocessing required
• Lean Cryptography: Future Quantum Computer Attacks Are Impossible
• High performance: leading proof generation and verification times

Polygon Miden; centers around the Miden VM (Virtual Machine) and supports arbitrary programs. More developer-friendly by hiding all the cryptographic complexity of the ;ZKP; and following architectural patterns familiar to developers (stack machines, reading and writing memory, etc.).

Safety

One of the main features of Polygon Miden; is safety. The protocol removes some unsafe features (available on the ;EVM;), which makes it easier to statically analyze smart contracts and prevent certain bugs at the virtual machine (VM) level.

EVM; Compatibility

Miden; is compatible with Ethereum at the "Solidity" level. Developers can deploy most;Solidity;smart contracts on;Miden;without modification. Another novelty is compatibility with other languages such as ;Move; and ;Sway.

performance

At launch, TPS; will be between; 1000; and ;2000;. Once the fragmentation is deployed on Ethereum, TPS; will reach about; 2; million; TPS.

Polygon Nightfall| Optimistic + ZK

In contrast to the aforementioned;ZK;solutions, Nightfall;focuses on private transfers and payments, supporting;ERC;20, ERC;721; and;ERC;1155; tokens.

Any data that does not need to be stored on the smart contract is stored off-chain, optimizing the smart contract. The team is working on an instant withdrawal mechanism so users can bypass the 1 week deadline for submitting proof of fraud. The protocol is significantly slower, up to ;105;TPS. However, it is estimated that the "gas" fee for transfers can be reduced by up to; 86%; and stabilized at about; 9000 gas.

Compare

The figure below is the author's summary of the four schemes:

in conclusion

Obviously, Polygon; is investing a lot of time and money, spearheading the development of; ZK; scaling solutions. Let’s wait and see the performance of the mainnet and how it works with other “ZK” protocols.