Polygon (MATIC) introduces Miden to relieve Ethereum congestion
Polygon, the Layer 2 scaling solution on Ethereum, has announced the launch of Miden which is a zero-knowledge scalable, transparent, argument of knowledge (zk-STARK) based solution that is aimed to relieve the congestion on the Ethereum network.
Polygon had recently committed $1 billion for the zero-knowledge technology solutions and had also merged with the zk-company Hermez to push ahead with such solutions. The Miden Virtual Machine would withhold certain information which will help one party to inform the other that they hold the private information without revealing what that information is. This is likely to be a big use-case for DeFi applications that focus on healthcare and insurance where it is very important to keep details of the transactions and the patients private. Bobbin Threadbare, who joined Polygon from Facebook, would be heading this project which is in the prototype stage right now but is expected to proceed to the full production version in the coming months.
Polygon says that the ZK solutions are very promising but they do not support arbitrary transactions as in the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This is why the Miden Virtual Machine has been developed which will form the core component and automatically generate a STARK-based proof of execution for every transaction made on the VM. The Miden project is an open-source project that would be having multi-language support as well in the future. The company has plans of leading the ZK ecosystem and work is underway on many projects including PoS, SDK, Nightfall, and other such products.
Polygon has been a leading Layer 2 solution on Ethereum for a long time and has also managed to scale up its solutions and services pretty quickly which has made it the network of choice for those developers and users who have been big backers of Ethereum for long. It has been able to draw away a lot of developers and their applications from Ethereum apart from being able to attract new developments on its due to its upgrades and innovations and also due to the speed and the low gas fees that it offers.
The company has also been very active in bringing in collaborators into the ecosystem and encouraging them with partnerships, investments, and in other ways as well which has helped to attract some of the best projects onto the network. Though the zk-domain might be pretty new to the crypto industry at this time, Polygon is betting big on this space and it would be interesting to see how this evolves.
