Polygon Miden: Sprinting Towards Testnet, September Update

Polygon Labs

September 29, 2023

As Polygon Miden heads towards the launch of a public testnet later this year, the focus has been on development and improvements to Miden VM, the Rust-based virtual machine where ZK proofs are generated. The improvements to Miden VM include a one-of-a-kind Tiered Sparse Merkle Tree that will dictate storage on the rollup, and completion of the first wallet compatible with Miden Assembly language.

If you’re unfamiliar with Miden VM, here is a gentle introduction. If you’re unfamiliar with Polygon Miden, here is an even gentler introduction.

Miden VM

Simplified range checker: The range checker component in Miden VM is responsible for verifying that a given value is between 0 and 2^16. It is a core building block that allows Polygon Miden to provide efficient u32 operations and is also needed to support random access memory.

Over the last several weeks we've dramatically simplifies the range checker component in Miden VM.

The new design is described in detail here https://t.co/2MXh41fsy3 but here are the main points 👇
— Bobbin Threadbare (@bobbinth) August 17, 2023

New Merkle Tree: The unique Merkle Tree used for storage on Polygon Miden is finished and available on GitHub. The Tiered Sparse Merkle Tree is a one-of-one variation of a Sparse Merkle Tree. This is a more efficient version of the storage structure used in Miden’s account database.

Miden Assembly: The compiler used on Polygon Miden cannot directly convert Rust to Miden Assembly. In order for Polygon Miden to support more widely-used languages (including Rust) in the future, the researchers behind Miden decided to use an intermediate representation for converting WASM to Miden Assembly.

The first wallet: In Miden Assembly, a basic wallet is required to prove that receiving and sending assets are correctly executed.

Miden in the Wild

This month, Polygon Miden co-founder Bobbin Threadbare gave a presentation on the efficient tracking of nullifier sets, and product manager Dominik Schmid presented at L2Warsaw on how Polygon Miden uses privacy to drive greater scalability.

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If you’re a developer interested in building on Polygon Miden, join the Discord and connect directly with researchers in the Polygon Miden Channel. If you’re a developer that prefers to drink straight from the tap, check out the GitHub repos.