Polygon, the largest Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, has announced the launch of its Miden solution which it says would help to clear up some of the congestion in the Ethereum network.
Ethereum has been suffering for around 2 years with high congestion and high gas fees as well. This has forced many of the users and the developers to seek alternatives for the network and over the last year, they have laid their eyes on the Polygon network which sits on top of Ethereum but can process transactions at a much greater speed and with very low fees as well. During this period, we are seeing a lot of developers building their applications on Polygon and its usage data also shows that more users are migrating to the network which is a loss for the Ethereum network. Recently, Polygon decided to pivot its business model and focus on zero-knowledge solutions and as a result of that, it merged with another startup called Hermez which was already working on such solutions.
This combination has now released its first component of the ZK ecosystem that it plans to build and that is called Miden. This is a virtual machine that supports arbitrary logic and transactions, which is something that is not available at the moment and it automatically generates proof of execution. The team would be led by Bobbin Threadbare, who was the core ZK researcher over at Facebook and it is expected that the resulting solution would be able to push the ecosystem forward in a strong manner. The component is still in prototype only and once all the testing is complete, it would be moved to live in the coming months.
It will have multi-language support as well and would be open source and the company believes that it would be the centerpiece for the ecosystem that it is built for the ZK industry. Though it is a bit of an alien concept for most of the common crypto users, it is beginning to gain traction steadily and we will have to wait and see how the ecosystem develops in the coming months. Polygon is betting big on this to grow further which is why it has committed $1 billion from its treasury for the research and growth on ZK.
