Polygon Launches zkEVM Public Testnet

The zero-knowledge (ZK) R&D team focused on Polygon, the world’s leading blockchain development platform, today announces the launch of the Polygon zkEVM Public Testnet, Bankless Times learned from an exclusive press release.

‘Holy Grail’ of blockchain

zkEVM has been considered the Holy Grail of blockchain; it is the only solution that achieves three major blockchain design goals: infinite scalability, high security guarantees and a familiar developer experience to Ethereum.

Polygon is the first project ever to deliver a full-featured, open source implementation of zkEVM; a groundbreaking milestone, not just for Polygon, but for the whole industry.

Aave, Uniswap to deploy testnet

Some of the biggest DeFi platforms — including Aave and Uniswap, as well as web3 social platform Lens and gaming studio Midnight Society — will be amongst the first protocols to deploy on the zkEVM testnet in order to scale their decentralized apps (dApps).

The Polygon zkEVM Public Testnet launches today and developers are encouraged to try it out, deploy contracts, identify bugs and collaborate with us to usher in a new era of Web3 adoption.

High security and censorship resistance

Polygon zkEVM’s high security and censorship resistance is also advantageous for DeFi applications. Unlike their optimistic counterparts, zk-rollups don't have to wait for long periods for withdrawals, meaning Polygon zkEVM offers much greater capital efficiency.

Polygon Co-Founder Mihailo Bjelic commented:

Today, we are excited to release the Polygon zkEVM Public Testnet, the first ever full-featured, open source zkEVM network. It was widely believed that zkEVM will take several more years to ship, which makes this an even more groundbreaking milestone, not only for Polygon but for the whole Web3 industry. We invite the whole community to try out the testnet, help us test its limits, break things and identify bugs, so we can all together deliver the first ever zkEVM to the world!

First fully open-sourced zk-Prover

Notably, the Polygon zkEVM Testnet also includes a completely open-sourced zk-Prover — the first of its kind to be released publicly. This significant breakthrough marks a major step towards Ethereum’s final and most scalable form.

What sets Polygon zkEVM apart from its competitors is its full equivalency with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which means that developers don’t have to use new programming languages and tools or transpile existing code in order to migrate to zkEVM.

This is a major benefit from a builders’ standpoint since it removes any onboarding friction as well as the need for additional security audits of their current codebase.

More efficient and cheaper algorithm

Additionally, Polygon zkEVM’s prover algorithm is much more efficient and cheaper than its counterparts, offering faster finality — minutes instead of weeks — and more capital efficiency.

Polygon continues to spearhead education for developers to increase knowledge, understanding and ultimately, adoption of zk technology.

The creation of ZK Whiteboard Sessions presented by ZK Hack and powered by Polygon represents the first state of the art zk education anywhere in the world and is available to access now for developers.

Today Polygon are opening access to the Polygon University beta site featuring a zkEVM module where developers can learn how to get started building with the public testnet.