Polygon Sets March Date for zkEVM Mainnet Beta to Go Live

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

In a blog post, Polygon did not specify what the beta network will include but shared that the team will be releasing more details leading up to the March date in the coming weeks, and that security of the network will be of highest priority.

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.

ZkEVMs are a type of zero-knowldege (ZK) rollup, a scaling solution that processes transactions faster on a layer 2, then sends the transaction data back to the mainnet blockchain – in this case Ethereum. ZK rollups use “proofs'' to show that a transaction was not spoofed with by only sharing a snippet of information about that transaction.

In October, Polygon went live with its zkEVM testnet, which deploys the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for its ZK rollup, allowing Ethereum developers to move over their smart contracts from the main blockchain without having to reprogram them in a different language.

Since the testnet went live, over 75,000 ZK proofs have been generated and 5,000 smart contracts have been deployed, according to the blog post.

In an interview last week, co-founder of Polygon Mihailo Bjelic told CoinDesk the blockchain is also exploring ways in which it could bring ZK-technology to its main chain, the Polygon POS chain.

“Polygon zkEVM Mainnet is set to be the first fully EVM equivalent ZK rollup to reach mainnet, this represents a huge step towards scaling Ethereum and bringing Web3 to the masses,” Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon, said in an email to CoinDesk. “The countdown is on.”

The price of Polygon's native MATIC token is up 56% this year.

Read more: Polygon Exploring Use of ZK Technology for Main Chain, Co-Founder Bjelic Says