EY and Polygon to co-develop Ethereum scaling solutions for enterprises and launch Polygon Nightfall - a privacy-focused Rollup

Polygon Labs

September 14, 2021

EY, a global professional services and technology firm, is collaborating with Polygon on building and implementing scaling and enterprise solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem.

As part of this collaboration, EY and Polygon will work on Polygon Nightfall, a public, privacy-focused Rollup. In addition to this, EY will offer its other flagship blockchain products on Polygon and jointly develop new Polygon-based blockchains for enterprise use.

About Polygon Nightfall

EY announced the initial version of Nightfall in 2019 as a set of protocols for enabling private transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. It was the first major contribution of a large enterprise to Ethereum infrastructure development efforts, and it quickly positioned itself as one of the most prominent privacy solutions on Ethereum.

With increased usage and adoption of Ethereum, network congestion and high transaction costs, known as gas fees, became realistic challenges for any project using the Ethereum mainnet. This led the EY team to start exploring Ethereum scaling solutions to mitigate these challenges and enable wider usage and adoption. The result of this effort was Nightfall 3, the next, scalable version of Nightfall.

Along the way, the EY team started collaborating with Polygon, and the idea of having a public instance of Nightfall 3 aka Polygon Nightfall, was conceived. Polygon Nightfall is one-of-a-kind, privacy-focused Rollup that effectively combines the major concepts of Optimistic Rollups with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) cryptography commonly used in ZK-Rollups, thus creating a scalable and private hybrid of the two popular technologies. With privacy being a fundamental requirement for enterprise use cases as well as one of the most required features by blockchain users overall, we strongly believe a solution like this is highly needed and will have a great product/market fit and adoption.

We will be sharing more details on Polygon Nightfall soon. The development is already well underway, so we will soon also start publishing regular updates on the development progress.

For us at Polygon, Polygon Nightfall will be a great addition to our growing suite, alongside the existing solutions: Polygon PoS, Polygon Hermez, Polygon SDK, and Polygon Avail. It also naturally and fully aligns with our recently announced strategic direction and focus on ZK-based solutions. For these and other obvious reasons, we are elated to commit significant resources and continuously work with the EY team to build and improve Polygon Nightfall and help it reach high levels of adoption.

About ongoing collaboration

With the rise of the adoption of blockchain technology, transaction volumes and costs on the prominent public Ethereum blockchain continue to rise. By integrating Polygon’s scaling solutions, EY’s platform will be able to facilitate higher transaction volumes with predictable costs and settlement times while providing end-users with the option to move transactions and assets to Ethereum. A joint roadmap will prioritize the development of Ethereum-based scaling solutions and enterprise-friendly features focused on privacy innovations. Special focus will be put on ZK-based technology, given its potential to support advanced use cases and regulatory compliance.

EY has connected Polygon's public, permissionless commit chain into EY flagship blockchain services including EY OpsChain and EY Blockchain Analyzer. EY clients can connect their business operations into Polygon networks with just a simple configuration change on blockchain.ey.com. Polygon’s main production network and test network are now both directly accessible from blockchain.ey.com.

Additionally, EY will work with Polygon to create privacy-focused enterprise chains as part of the Polygon ecosystem. These “industry chains” will be built using the aforementioned Nightfall 3 and will offer enterprises the comfort and security of a closed system while maintaining flexibility with the public Ethereum mainnet, making future transitions to public networks faster.

About EY

Blockchain is digitizing and integrating supply chains by connecting business operations and finance at the ecosystem level. EY blockchain solutions support the complete business lifecycle from contracting, ordering, fulfilling, invoicing to payments – from doing business on a blockchain to getting insight into what happened on the blockchain. EY teams also know how to manage the tax and audit requirements for blockchain-based transactions so that companies can handle the regulatory and tax complexities of an emerging ecosystem.

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About Polygon

Polygon is the leading platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Its growing suite of products offers developers easy access to all major scaling and infrastructure solutions: L2 solutions (ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups), sidechains, hybrid solutions, stand-alone and enterprise chains, data availability solutions and more. Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with 500+ applications hosted, ~600M total transactions processed, ~60M unique user addresses and $5B+ in assets secured.

If you're an Ethereum Developer, you're already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for your Dapp, get started here.