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In addition to side chains, which 7 ZK-based products are Polygon still laying out?

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Polygon envisions a world centered on Ethereum, more precisely, a world enabled by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.

Original author: Jerry Sun

Original compilation: 0x9F, Rhythm BlockBeats

This article is based on the views of Messari researcher Jerry Sun on his personal social media platform, which is compiled and translated by BlockBeats as follows:

Many people know Polygon because of its sidechains. Cheap Gas fees, high-speed Tx throughput... are all good things.

But in addition to sidechains, the company is also building a range of L2 and infrastructure products. You'll be sure to hear more of them in the coming months, and let me explain why.

First of all, we need to be clear: Polygon expects an Ethereum-centric world. More precisely, a world enabled by zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.

Not only do they talk, they also use money to support their belief. The team is working on Dedicated over $1 billion to support ZK-based projects. What did they do with the funds? They've built a portfolio of projects and are about to launch.

Polygon has multiple L2s in development, most of which are ZK Rollups (ZKR). They are also building a data availability platform and a development toolkit.

Let's look at each separately.

Polygon Hermez

Hermez is a decentralized ZKR that has been launched. But it's now technically limited to payments and transfers. The situation should improve before long. Testing of Hermez 2.0 is underway. Hermez 2.0 adds a ZK EVM, allowing dapps to easily run their smart contracts on ZKR.

Polygon Zero

Zero is related to speed and fully meets users' needs for speed. It uses recursive proof generation to increase the number of transactions processed each time. This not only makes the network faster, but also makes computational processing easier.

Polygon Miden

Miden is related to Miden VM, which is the general ZK VM of ZK-STARK. ZK-STARKs are slightly different from typical ZK-SNARKs used in ZK proofs. STARK does not need to rely on a trusted setting like SNARK usually does, and is post-quantum secure.

Polygon Nightfall

This is a collaboration with Ernst & Young. Together, the two companies hope to build a scalable solution for enterprises. Nightfall is an optimistic rollup utilizing ZK Proof of Privacy features that will be legal and KYC compliant.

The above four projects demonstrate the four L2 solutions Polygon is working on:

1. Decentralized ZKR

2. Recursive ZKR

3. STARK-based ZKR

4. Enterprise-Focused ZKR

Now we look at some upcoming infrastructure offerings.

Polygon Avail

Avail is a data availability platform. Data availability has always been a hot topic because it is difficult to scale a blockchain if complete and correct data is not available to all nodes. Avail is an independent network designed to track only state machine data changes.

Polygon Edge

Edge is an open source software development kit (SDK) for developers who want to build their own blockchain. The blockchain of the future may be an L2 chain or an independent chain. Either way, Edge helps get started.