November 10, 2021

Seven Takeaways From Polygon Hermez Fireside Chat

Hermez is an open-source ZK-Rollup optimized for low-cost token transfers on the Ethereum blockchain. Recently, Hermez merged with Polygon, becoming Polygon Hermez and expanding Polygon’s suite of scaling solutions for Ethereum.

Polygon aims to become the go-to platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development and already offers an entire ecosystem of solutions. Polygon PoS chain is a hybrid between a sidechain and a Layer 2. Polygon SDK is a modular framework for building Ethereum scaling projects. Polygon Avail is a decentralized data availability solution. Polygon Nightfall is a privacy focused rollup being built in collaboration with EY. Polygon Hermez is the latest addition to the family.

The Polygon Hermez Fireside Chat featured several managers from the Polygon and Hermez teams including Polygon Hermez Technical Lead Jordi Baylina, Polygon Hermez Project Lead David Schwartz, Polygon Hermez Business Development Antoni Martin, and Polygon Co-founder Mihailo Bjelic. They discussed details about Polygon Hermez’s mission and roadmap. We have put together key highlights from the event below:

ZK solutions will play a key role in scaling Ethereum. Polygon has a strong preference for and a strategic focus on ZK solutions. The company has committed $1 billion from its treasury to fund efforts to develop its ZK thesis. Hermez is Polygon’s first foray into ZK solutions.

Polygon Hermez is a highly scalable solution. Thanks to compression strategies and a small ZK proof size, Polygon Hermez can deliver up to 2,000 transactions per second. Future upgrades will improve this metric.

With ZK proofs, Polygon Hermez can use the Ethereum blockchain for data availability but perform all of the transaction computations off-chain. Because data and zero-knowledge proofs are made available on-chain, Polygon Hermez inherits the security guarantees of Ethereum. That’s why it’s called a Layer 2 solution.
It will also help reduce fees by more than 90%. Employing validity proofs, we can batch up to 2,000 transactions using 500,000 gas, and even greater efficiency of 200,000 to 400,000 gas is in sight. The calculation of the proofs also parallelizes very well and can function like a supercomputer or simply run by many servers in parallel.

Polygon Hermez 2.0 will build upon the foundations laid by Hermez. The main development goal is to launch a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, or zkEVM. This is a revolutionary approach that will recreate all the EVM opcodes using zero-knowledge technology, enabling smart contracts to be deployed on the ZK-Rollup.

Getting the best of two ZK technologies to combine efficiency and speed. While STARK technology will be used for main state validation in the future zkEVM, they are expensive proofs to validate on chain. The solution is to create a Groth16 or PLONK SNARK circuit using circom libraries that will validate the STARK proof.

The proof of concept for Hermez 2.0 has already been built. The Polygon Hermez team will work on a public testnet during the first half of 2022. Once the team is confident with the Public Testnet, the mainnet will be released.

These are some of the main points that were discussed on the Fireside Chat #2.

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