Polygon zkEVM Launch with Mihailo Bjelic and Jordi Baylina

Hey Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. We're talking today about scaling Ethereum with the Polygon ZK EVM that was just announced today. David couldn't make it for this episode, so I am solo with Mahalo and Jordi from the Polygon ZK EVM project. Really excited to dive into this conversation. A few things we're talking about. Of course, as we said before, this is ZK EVM season. We had ZK Sync on Friday. Today, the Polygon ZK EVM is now out, so we talk about it. As we get into this episode, we're about to discuss what just dropped today, so what you can use today. Then we discuss ZK rollups versus optimistic rollups, which ones are better and for what purposes. We also discuss what happens to the Polygon proof of stake chain. We discuss the new frontiers and opportunities that this unlocks. And of course, we talk about the future of the Matic token. One disclosure before we get in, I am an advisor of the Polygon Project, been supportive of this project for a long time and excited to see what they're doing here. Okay, guys, we're gonna get right to the episode with Polygon, but before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Bankless Nation. I am super excited to introduce you yet again to Mahalo, who is the co founder of Polygon, and also Jordi, who is the technical lead for Polygon Hermes, otherwise known as the Polygon ZK E VM. Jordy, Mahalo, how are you guys doing today?

Very good thing.

You guys just dropped something big. We got some news. Let's start there. What just happened? The Polygon ZK EVM.

What just hit us?

I'm gonna hand it over to Jordi first because he's the one who's the created this amazing technology. So let him start and maybe I can add something.

Well, uh, many is um it's a milestone. So this is a milestone for scaling Ethereum. That's what's uh happening. So

uh

if we go two years ago,

scaling Ethereum was uh

I mean nobody so nobody knew how to do it. Actually, it was two years ago, uh, after a blog from Vitalik that

uh

People start realizing how to do that. And then we started with rollups and started talking about uh optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, and especially in the ZK. Then we started to build uh, I mean, only payments rollups, but the the the big challenge here was to do a ZK VM, so an Ethereum compatible, so something that works exactly the same as Ethereum, but scales, okay, which is what needs a scaling Ethereum.

And here is where the challenge started. And uh, well, we started that two years ago, uh, not even two years ago.

And has been a I mean a long trip

in in it's a short trip maybe in time, but it's a long trip in in engineering in going deep in solving problems and in figuring out

how to do this uh how to bring this technology practical practical.

And today is I mean it's

it's not the end of the road, it's a milestone, but just putting this putting this technology, creating the system and making it uh available in the real system in mainnet, this is really it's really an important.

It's really an important achievement, and this is what's happening. I mean, this is what's happening today, and this is why we believe this is an important moment for the the for the Ethereum community.

So this is an important moment for Ethereum because we've been on the quest uh in crypto to basically scale our trustless technology to scale Ethereum for the past what eight years? I mean, since the inception, since Ethereum's birthday, it's been a long time. And before that, we were even trying to scale Bitcoin. And now uh we've come this far. We've got this new technology called uh ZK Technology. We've built an EVM around it so we we can have uh ZK layer twos that are programmable. And what just launched, as I understand it, is the Polygon ZK EVM. And when you guys say launched, do you mean on mainnet? Is this available for users? Mahalo, what just launched this morning? What can people go do right now?

Yes, it's a great question. And it's important to state that this is an actual mainnet, right? So we have been running ZKVM on testnet for months already, with very good results. We learned a lot. We have more than, I believe, 7,000 applications and smart contracts deployed, thousands of transactions and thousands of users have already tried testnet with test assets, right? We are now hitting the mainnet. It's the actual mainnet, and we are fulfilling, I would say, or ticking all the checkbox that you would normally expect from a full blown mainnet. So these are real world, uh, real actual assets bridged from layer one. Uh the ZK VM is full featured. We have multiple external and internal audits, uh, prover is running.

All code is visible and uh with the permissive uh open source license. So basically, it's a full-featured, complete, full-blown mainnet, I would say. Uh, it's important to state, and Jordi can add to that, this is a mainnet beta, and this is a very, very complex bleeding edge technology. For us, it's very important in this moment. We are incredibly excited and incredibly proud that we have been able to ship this uh uh this bleeding technology. And as you probably know, and many people familiar with the matter know that um estimates are that it's gonna take three to five years probably to ship this technology, and even then it was uncertain.

Whether it's going to be practical, what will be the computational requirements? Will we need data centers to run these provers? How everything will turn out.

We're very, very excited and very happy that we have full featured mainnet with very, very practical prover. We have been running prover, the whole testnet basically is running. The prover is running on regular AWS instances that are costing us, I believe,

around $2 per hour. So this is really, really practical technology. And we are very happy about all of this.

But all that being said, we really want to advise caution uh for to users of the mainnet. This is bleeding edge technology. This has never been shipped. Polygon is the first one to put this into production now.

We're excited about that. But users should be mindful when bridging especially larger amounts of assets to mainnet. So that's something that is very important for us to communicate. Every

Code, every complex code needs some time to mature. And this technology will certainly need some months to become really battle-tested and proven. So

I want to I want to definitely emphasize that guys and we'll we'll have uh uh time to discuss sort of security. But when Mahalo says bleeding edge, bleeding means you can get cut, right? And so um you know be be cautious as we enter here. We'll talk about security, the status now, and and where you want to evolve that to and how it becomes safer and that that trajectory. Um but before we do, let's talk about a user and what they can experience on Polygon ZK EVM right now. And just to refresh people, Mahalo is absolutely right. I, you know, been the space since like a couple we've been talking about the uh the holy grail of the ZK EVM for a while. So we have some ZK technology that allows us to do sort of simple transaction-based kind of back and forth Bitcoin type of things. Um, but we haven't had the technology previously to create a general purpose uh EVM, which is the programmability that Ethereum brings to the market. And now we have that, and that's ahead of schedule. I want to emphasize that. I mean, two years ago, like the crypto world was saying, I don't know, this is five years away. Can it even be done? Is it 10 years away? And now we're here. So that's why this is so monumental. But let's get back to kind of the the users for a second. Our analogy at Bankless for a new layer two that opens is we got a theme park. Everyone's in a line at the theme park, the gate's open.

You can go start to use the rides. Now, right now, they may be dangerous rides. You might have a roller coaster that kind of you know is tossing people off, people getting getting jostled around a little bit. All right, so there's some danger. But tell us about the rides. What can people do when they um you know enter the gates of the theme park today? Do I just go and I set my MetaMask, you know, RPC to uh Polygon ZK EVM? And then I can start using apps. What what what are the apps like? What's the user experience like? Is this just like the Polygon proof of stake uh network? Uh can you tell us about that first, Mahalo?

yeah, very happy to answer that. The great thing about ZKVM, and why let's just take a little one step back and explain why uh ZKVM has been considered the holy grail of scaling, because it is a technology that simultaneously offers three very, very important features. One is scalability, the second one is security. So we get to increase throughput significantly.

without sacrificing security. We'll full-blown uh uh leverage the security of Ethereum. And the third very important component or feature is EVM compatibility or equivalence, if you will.

The third component actually makes uh things incredibly easy for developers and users. Ethereum EVM is the standard uh for web free programming, right? And uh it's already a mature ecosystem. There are wallets like MetaMask, developer tools like Remix, Hardhat, Solidity is already a pretty mature language and all of that. So there's this whole ecosystem that has been built around EVM. ZK EVM, uh, one fantastic thing about it is that it's completely leveraging all these tools and this whole experience, and uh both developers and users simply continue to use these networks in the same manner like they use Ethereum. So developers just simply take that their existing Solidity contracts, they can deploy them on ZKVM using the same tools like Remix, like hardhead. They're

Basically, no differences for developers and for end users. End users simply connect their MetaMask, they submit transactions in the same manner like they would do on Ethereum.

It's absolutely the same developer and end user experience with a

comparable level of security and with much lower fees and much higher scalability. So, yeah, all in all, we're very, very excited and we believe this is a very important milestone. But Jordi.

What what would you add to that, Geordi?

Yeah, to highlight to that, because this is very important, it's not so we are not man so we are using exactly the same tooling. That means that we are not maintaining a parallel uh version of hard hat to work in our system or a parallel version of uh uh MetaMask or a parallel version of Solidity compiler.

It's so we are using the Solidity, the Ethereum Solidity compiler.

We are using the hard hat, we are using whatever tooling

that uh that you have, and we are using that tool. We are not maintaining any of those tools. Those tools are maintained by the third third parties. Okay, and this is what defines the EVM. You know, it's like because we are

Uh executing the EVME is Ethereum virtual machine. Okay, and this is the what's uh the the Ethereum, so it's Ethereum virtual machine, okay. And this is so

we are

being fully compatible with this uh with this byte code,

and this is what allows

to uh uh use any of this tooling, so any of the systems of Ethereum. Smart contract, you don't need to compile again the smart contract, you just take this smart contract and you deploy it there, so it's like an extension of Ethereum.

It's not a new thing, it's an extension of Ethereum. And this is, I mean, this simplicity, because I remember that the first time that I was doing a presentation about uh the ZKBM,

I feel like bad because I mean,

okay, you just connect to remix, you just deploy some smart contracts, everything. I mean, there was nothing new in there. Uh, people know how to deploy smart contracts. So, where do you see the difference? But this this is a magic.

Okay, and this is a cool thing.

Of this uh of this project is that the users don't notice the difference

on deploying uh on on Ethereum or in SKBM, except of course on the price and in the on the throughput.

Is it accurate to say, guys, that everything that is available on uh the Polygon proof of stake network, like all of the smart contracts, all of the apps, all of the things that you can do there, you can fairly easily, or maybe like perfectly easily, uh port those over to or duplicate those on the Polygon ZK EVM. Is that is that what we're talking about here?

Yeah, it's most of them I hear there are, I mean, I need to be just to be very clear. Uh there are some uh we have mainly we have some pre compiled smart contracts that are not implemented yet. We are working on that and we are going to implement in the next version. We are talking about paintings or we are talking about uh Shadow 56 or some extended. So if your comp if your smart contract is not using this, uh

You can just uh copy them. I mean, just deploy here, deploy there. The same way that you are you can deploy something in Polygon POS or you can deploy that in mainnet, or you can deploy that in Worldly or in any other Ethereum network, you can deploy it in uh ZKVM. Here, there is these exceptions of these precompiled smart contracts. They are not used very much, uh, most of them. So I would say most applications would should not have any problem. But we are working on that, and we hope that in a few months we can.

we can extend that so that every time we're gonna be more

more more compatible um on that.

So, Geordi,

I mean you need to

can you guys underline this for me? So, um, or for listeners rather. So,