It’s a major buzz, a game-changer -maybe- and communities around Ethereum talk about it without knowing what’s in the bag for them. DAO Labs Research presents a notes block about the Polygon’s zkEVM rollup, why the recent zkEVM validium proposal could make this blockchain pop and what’s the role of the Polygon Hub Community in it.

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While most blockchain enthusiasts sit and wait for market changes to cry out loud what projects should do to be valuable, social miners research, create and share content to make something useful out of a simple post.

Polygon is at the verge of important changes in its structure. Why not discuss them, as an informed community? Why not start from the very beginning and explain why Polygon needs a revamping if it wants to resolve… a Trilemma…?

 

Why is the Blockchain Trilemma so hard to resolve?

Although every project has a different approach and philosophy, blockchains are protocols built on a specific owned architecture that organize encrypted information packages -block and data- in their own network with a reference to previously generated blocks in a chain and information about a number of new transactions. Keep this in mind when we talk about Layers a few lines below.

According to their structure, they will satisfy three golden standards to grant a good and useful way to comply with real-world needs:

1. They must provide a fast and secure way to access information,

2. Providing cost-efficiency while keeping decentralization sacrosanct and...

3. The blockchain should be ready to grow and scale providing a service to dApps and real-world use cases.

Now, this is when it turns really interesting. Or competitive, if you consider the decentralized nature of the biggest blockchains to reach building consensus and that, most of time, only two of these three goals are met.

Speed or security are not always synchronized at a desirable rate or result, and are not always as cheap as thought to begin with and once everything may look well it turns out that calculations only allow a limited number of transactions -or calculations- to produce a balanced output that everyone in the developing community is willing to learn about, use and develop for and on.

Does it sound familiar to you? It’s just like trying to get the best deal out of your shopping list or finding the love of your life. This is what the famous Blockchain Trilemma is about: A blockchain cannot scale beyond its transaction threshold without sacrificing its decentralization ability and security terms. It is not easy to resolve and must be adjusted to keep up with new discoveries and tendencies.

 

What are Layers for in blockchain?

What we just described a few paragraphs ago is something the biggest and initial blockchain projects had to deal with. In recent times, we call those Layer-1, or just L1, blockchains because they used their own network to store and keep track of information packages, where they came from and what they were heading to, in a single chain. Think of L1 chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon or Kava, to name some (and if you’re into Social Mining, you will recognize the last three, at least). All of them have a work in a different framework and in their -slightly- incompatible terms.

If you read well, you’ll remember that different approaches and philosophies gave birth to that considerable number of blockchains in the industry, all of them competing or claiming to be the fastest or more secure or less expensive in transactions, while their biggest problems were -and still are- that they found themselves with troubles to be scalable and unable to operate together or connect their networks to facilitate a seamless presence in the real world as the solution they wanted to look like. Or simply unable to spawn other L2s building on them.

As decentralization is complex, some forms of collaboration sprang to help L1s to be compatible and scale up. That’s when Layer-2 projects appeared, providing cheaper transaction fees and faster storing (often off-chain) solutions to work for and with Layer 1 blockchains to make them more efficient. By that time, scalability was approached through Sharding or Rollups methods, which seemed to be the logical step to provide quick Finality to transactions and were called optimistic solutions.

This argument evolved even more quickly to favour Rollups as the winner. Rollups allow L1s to scale by moving transactions off the mainnet, and onto a Layer 2 network. Users complete the process on this second network, with transactions being batched and compressed into a small piece of data called a proof. This proof is then sent back to the initial L1 and it's verified.

As examples you can find Lighting Network, Optimism, Arbitrum, StarkNet or zkSync, each one proposing solutions to Bitcoin or Ethereum. 

Cross-chain operation is necessary to allow the L1s achieve what the L2s were enabling. Layer-3 blockchains allow Interoperability by splitting the protocol work load into two separated but integrated sub-chains for application and execution of vital L1 and L2 inherent processes. They do that through decentralized applications, or Dapps, which are the main conversation in the Web3 world. You can see them work in the form of Polkadot, Cosmos or Chainlink, if you need notorious examples.

Some ecosystems have nurtured successful multilayer projects while others seem to integrate more by providing their own created solutions. Ethereum’s bet is on EVM, or an Ethereum Virtual Machine, to use just a part of a transaction to -optimistically- validate it, but this is just a start because, again, security loopholes will occur and some L2 projects took the idea to revamp it and take this chain to the next level.

 

Is Polygon being treated as Ethereum's stepchild?

Ethereum is the largest smart contract platform within blockchain technology and will remain like that as long as it can enhance its cross-chain ability, general security and privacy concerns, not to mention the scalability problem. It gets congested very often, and for transactions to execute faster users must pay higher fees. 

The zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine -or zkEVM- is the current most visited idea to make Ethereum scalable without messing too much with the L1 security structure. In Mihailo Bjelic’s words, Polygon’s co-founder, “it’s the holy grail of blockchain scaling”. It is indeed a Polygon created L2 solution for Ethereum, produced by a succesful project that work on the Ethereum ecosystem, like could have been done by Scroll or Matter Labs with zkSync.

Let's focus on Polygon’s approach. This solution would provide the blockchain with updated means to scale up and remain useful in the future. And Polygon accepted the challenge.

Anyone who wants to rewrite Ethereum from scratch must gather and supervise a gigantic developing international team to fulfil the task. At the moment this note is being produced, the Ethereum chain has a massive 1062.99 GB size. To make a new blockchain to contain this data would be long, costly and, due to its inherent structure change, could also leave many L1 security aspects with no reliable ways to patch or adapt. It’s just not worth it.

Ethereum has collapsed many times due to congestion and a scalability solution was urgent. Many projects offered to provide it, like Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync and Polygon. Polygon proved to be more fitted to pull the wagon if you consider who carried Ethereum in 2021.

Besides full EVM equivalence, so all things built on Ethereum like smart contracts and wallets will work seamlessly on Polygon zkEVM. It offers less transaction cost while inheriting Ethereum’s security, resolving the scalability problem but not the interoperability. Not yet, at least.

Polygon 2.0 is largely developed keeping this kind of compatibility with Ethereum as a common value builder to expand the Ethereum ecosystem. At this moment, the Polygon community is about to discuss if the Polygon PoS will migrate to a zkEVM validium, as Mihailo Bjelic recently wrote on the Polygon’s forum.

Some of the Polygon community members, though, see this action as a potential value loss for their staked tokens, hinting questions about if gas fees will be charged in MATIC. In the end, it’s always troublesome to keep everyone happy in such a big global community.

With Polygon zkEVM, Polygon became a capital player in Ethereum history, no matter what sceptics voice on social media.

Maybe it is much better to point out that the Polygon community is playing its role in the ecosystem. And for that, we’ll play our role, too, as social miners.

 

What would the social mining community do for Polygon?

It is oxymoronic to claim that a community is just an organized mob. Every social group gathers around an idea, common benefits and simple sets of rules to allow it to keep it tight and running. Tribalization would be a more fitting term.

The first step is to get the right and assertive information to support useful collective decisions. Will this Polygon’s zkEVM validium proposal be good for Polygon’s community? Well, it’s the Polygon’s community duty to do the research and support the right direction the project will head.

After we do the research, we spread the word. Should we do it in Facebook articles, Reddit notes, tweets, memes or any other medium to deliver the right information to the right people? That’s the second part to do in order to build grounds for a discussion, and right after that we can achieve consensus or provide the decision makers with the most information to take the best option.

At Polygon Hub, we will be deploying a task series towards this goal to be fully validated and rewarded in the next 90 days. Let’s be part of the blockchain history by doing our best efforts to support Polygon, one of the biggest L2 blockchains in the Ethereum ecosystem.

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DAO Labs Research is part of DAO Labs.

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