Polygon acquired Mir because of its goal of sub-second recursive ZK proofs.
On Thursday, Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution, Polygon announced the acquisition of Mir, a project on Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Proofs, for $400 million.
The Mir team, along with Polygon, is now working towards building Polygon Zero, a highly-scalable Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup.
ZK Rollup is a blockchain scaling technology that helps aggregate and push batches of transactions onto a network. Computation happens on an outside network that executes the transactions and generates validity proofs for these transactions. These proofs are ultimately merged in the original blockchain.
This solution decongests the blockchain because transactions are executed outside the mainnet, making transactions faster and cheaper.
This acquisition will allow Polygon to build efficient recursive proofs, as recursion enables parallelization of proof generation for much better performance. Polygon claims that this was the missing piece they were looking for. The Mir team is pursuing the goal of sub-second recursive proofs.
The same day Polygon announced its upcoming Plonky2 project, a recursive proof system that is fast and Ethereum-friendly.
“Plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop.”
Its rollout will be announced in the coming weeks.
At such speed, Polygon could capture a significant market share among the other Ethereum scaling solutions. It is trying to improve its ZK Rollups arsenal for a while. In August, Polygon had acquired Hermez, another ZK rollups project.
Polygon is positioning itself as a low-cost solution to Ethereum’s high gas fees. But the validity proofs required in a ZK-Rollups are quite intense to compute. This means that it will be infeasible for Decentralized Applications (DApps) with little on-chain activity. Moreover, it is held that a Rollup operator can influence the ordering of transactions.
The Mir acquisition was made with 250 million MATIC tokens at a price of $1.60. Post the agreement MATIC has risen to $2.10.
Technological advancement is gradual. As the need arises, the solution appears. As the solution appears, another need arises. With the rapid advancements in blockchain technology, the world is surely going to adopt it. Earlier, mass adoption was seeming insurmountable. But a fast, scalable, and seamless system will kickstart a blockchain revolution.
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