Polygon to discuss proposal to upgrade ‘Polygon PoS’ to ‘zkEVM Validium’

Promoting Polygon 2.0

Polygon Labs, which develops the technology of the crypto asset (virtual currency) Polygon (MATIC), announced on the 20th that the engineering team has proposed to upgrade “Polygon PoS” to “zkEVM Validium”.

zkEVM Validium is an L2 solution that leverages zero-knowledge proofs. According to the company, this upgrade will improve the safety and performance of Polygon PoS. And this upgrade will be an important achievement in the ecosystem because it will serve as the center of the next-generation polygon “Polygon 2.0”.

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Polygon Labs announced the development plan of “Polygon 2.0” on the 12th. At the time, he said that the newly developed solution would leverage zero-knowledge proofs.

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In this announcement, he touched on this development plan and explained that the core of Polygon 2.0’s vision is to make all polygon chains L2 using zero-knowledge proofs. On the other hand, the current Polygon PoS is secured by its own validator instead of zero-knowledge proof, and due to this feature, Polygon PoS is classified as a “sidechain” rather than L2.

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Polygon Labs explained the proposed upgrade as “a work to add zkEVM’s technology to one of the most successful chains today.” Citing figures such as Polygon PoS processing an average of 2.5 million transactions per day, he said, “Especially for existing chains of this scale and importance to become L2, add zero-knowledge proofs. It’s the first time it’s happened,” he said.

If approved by the community, we will implement this upgrade. In order to test in advance, the mainnet upgrade will be scheduled for February to March 2024. It stresses that the proposal will not change the user or developer experience or the economics of the network.

Challenges of Validium

The Polygon ecosystem has already developed Polygon zkEVM. According to Polygon Labs, “zkEVM Validium can be thought of as a sibling to roll-up technologies such as Polygon zkEVM.”

On the other hand, he pointed out that zkEVM Validium guarantees security in a similar way to ZK rollup, but the difference is that transaction data is stored off-chain. This difference has the following two main advantages over rollup.

• significantly lower fees
• Greater scalability

Source: Polygon

The technology itself, called “Validium,” is not new. The reason why the fee can be greatly reduced is that it can reduce the consumption of Ethereum’s gas. The scalability is greatly increased because the processing of rollups is restricted to transactional data.

On the other hand, Alex Gluchowski, CEO of Ethereum’s L2 development company “Matter Labs”, pointed out in June 2020 that Validium’s mechanism leads to increased processing volume, but there are also sacrifices. He also said that if data availability is not guaranteed by a mechanism like ZK rollup, there is also the issue that assets can be frozen.

Token utility and the role of validators

Polygon Labs also explained the usefulness of the token MATIC this time. At Polygon PoS, validators who staked MATIC currently maintain the network, and explained the operation after the upgrade.

As with existing Polygon PoS, validators will still prove that transaction data is available after the upgrade. With this mechanism, Polygon PoS claims to be “the first Validium where data availability is guaranteed in a decentralized and secure mechanism.”

It also said that validators still decide which transactions to include in a block and in what order. He said the structure would maintain decentralization and ensure that transaction fees would still be paid to stakers after the upgrade.

He also explained that he will use validators to solve problems in data availability. In addition, zkEVM Validium and Polygon zkEVM coexist and complement each other.

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