Polygon release Miden to deliver advanced scaling to Ethereum

Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Polygon has revealed Polygon Miden – an advanced ZK-STARKs based scaling solution built by Facebook’s former core ZK developer.

Polygon Miden is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, and the Miden team has also released an early version of a purposefully designed Miden Virtual Machine, enabling developers to get to work straight away.

Under the leadership of the core developer of Facebook’s Winterfell – Bobbin Threadbare – Polygon (MATIC) has successfully raced through the Miden roadmap and begun to integrate a VM team from Distaff.

“Polygon’s addition of the Miden Virtual Machine represents an important stepping stone in helping to overcome some of the technical challenges of being able to rely on cryptographic proofs of computational integrity,” said Threadbare.

“I’m looking forward to helping to facilitate the open source implementation of STARKs within the Polygon ecosystem and wider security and privacy communities.”

The Polygon network has been bringing together a powerful scalability tool box to prepare the ecosystem ahead of Ethereum 2.0, in particular Miden adds strength to the recent Polygon acquisition of the ZK-rollup specialist Hermez network.

What are ZK-STARKs?

ZK-STARKs refers to ‘zero-knowledge scalable transparent ARguments of knowledge’ cryptographic proofs.

Effectively, ZK-STARKs are a way to compress the information necessary for transactions by enabling one party to verify a transaction in a trustless cryptographic capacity prior to sending – thus eliminating the need to send over the full transactional proof of knowledge to a second party.

Miden represents a big step forward from prior layer-2 scaling solutions, which are reliant on ZK-SNARKs (otherwise known as ZK-rollups) as a trusted cryptographic mechanism – ZK-STARKs operates trustlessly – using publicly-verifiable randomness to create transactions.

Additionally, unlike ZK-rollups – ZK-STARKs remain quantum proof and thus more secure for transactions… for now.