Polygon acquires Mir for 400 million USD

Polygon announced on their website that they has acquired Mir ZK startup for 400 million USD. As per their announcement, “We are excited to announce that Mir, a startup building groundbreaking ZK tech, is joining the Polygon family in a $400M* deal. Mir gathered a team of talented cryptographers and engineers, and after almost two years of work developed the world’s fastest ZK scaling technology. The Mir team is now joining Polygon in order to utilize this groundbreaking technology and build our new project – Polygon Zero, a highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup.”

Polygon is focused on Zero-Knowledge (ZK) cryptography as the end game for blockchain scaling. As per their release Polygon has committed $1B from the Polygon treasury to this effort, with plans outline in ZK Thesis.

This is just one step in many that have been made by Polygon so far. The first was the merger with Hermez Network (now Polygon Hermez) and the announcement of zkEVM, a ZK-friendly EVM implementation. This was followed by the announcements of Polygon Miden, a STARK-based, Ethereum-compatible rollup, and Polygon Nightfall, a privacy-focused rollup built in collaboration with EY.

According to Polygon, ZK scaling represents the future of Ethereum, but scalable, EVM-compatible ZK Rollups don’t exist yet. The missing piece is efficient recursive proofs, as recursion allows Polygon to parallelize proof generation for much better performance. Unfortunately, the existing recursive proof systems supported by Ethereum are inefficient and slow.

As such Polygon has announced plonky2, a recursive proof system that is incredibly fast, and Ethereum-friendly. As mentioned in announcement, “We believe this engineering breakthrough will be a huge value-add to the community and will open new frontiers of Ethereum scaling. The Mir team has been quietly working on recursive ZK proofs for almost two years. In 2020, they were the first to implement recursive proofs based on PLONK and Halo. This year, the team set an ambitious goal: sub-second recursive proofs. They built plonky2, a carefully optimized proving system based on PLONK and FRI.”

Additionally, the unique features of plonky2 open the door for horizontal scaling of blockchain networks. Currently, the throughput of every blockchain (including every scaling solution) is limited by the capacity of the weakest node in the network, because every node has to process every transaction. With horizontal scaling, the throughput can be proportional to the total computing power available in the network. This can fundamentally improve scaling properties, because the throughput increases with every node that gets added to the network.

Plonky2 will be announced in the coming weeks, along with benchmarks and explainers. The announcement adds, ” We are very excited about this solution and confident that it will push the frontiers of Ethereum adoption by allowing huge scaling improvements without sacrificing security.”

Polygon Zero will become an integral part of the wider Polygon ecosystem, alongside existing Polygon solutions: Polygon PoS, Polygon Hermez, Polygon Miden, Polygon SDK, Polygon Nightfall, and Polygon Avail.