Polygon (formerly Matic Network) continues its work to reduce the load supported by the Ethereum blockchain. This time, the project has announced the acquisition of Mir Protocol, a second-layer Zero-Knowledge Rollups solution, for a total of $400 million.
Polygon acquires Mir Protocol
Polygon (MATIC), the popular scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain, has acquired Mir Protocol, a solution based on Zero-Knowledge Rollups (ZK Rollups).
The total purchase price is $400 million, of which $100 million will be paid in USDC and the rest in MATIC, or 190 million tokens.
1/8 It's official: #Polygon welcomes @MirProtocol, a groundbreaking ZK startup in a $400M deal!
Mir's amazing team developed the world’s fastest ZK scaling tech; we are joining hands to utilize it and build Polygon Zero – a highly-scalable, Ethereum-compatible ZK Rollup. 🦄💫 pic.twitter.com/99m7Y0tDTN
— Polygon | $MATIC – We're hiring! (@0xPolygon) December 9, 2021
The Mir Protocol acquisition is part of Polygon’s ambitious plan to spend $1 billion, or a significant portion of its cash flow, on research into these ZK Rollups solutions.
In a press release last August, Polygon announced that it was looking to acquire world-class start-ups innovating in the ZK Rollups sector. The first of these was Hermez Network, for $250 million.
Just as Hermez renamed itself Polygon Hermez, Mir Protocol will be integrated into the Polygon ecosystem as Polygon Zero. According to Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon Zero is expected to be operational during 2022.
Along with eight other colleagues, the two co-founders of Mir will join the Polygon team as part of the deal.
Ecosystem of second layer solutions deployed by Polygon (Source: Polygon Twitter)
ZK-Rollups to the rescue of Ethereum
We all know the problems that the Ethereum blockchain is currently facing: drastic increase in the number of users and smart contracts deployed which leads to congestion and disproportionate gas costs.
Faced with this, Vitalik Buterin himself is pushing for the democratisation of second-layer solutions that shift some of the load off the main network in order to lighten it.
Among the solutions that are popular are rollups. In a very simple way, they allow a multitude of transactions to be processed on a second layer external to Ethereum, before agglomerating them and recording them at once on the blockchain.
They have a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain on which they publish only the important information of the rollup. This reduces the space used and the associated gas costs.
Mir is an Ethereum scaling protocol based on ZK rollup technology. It inherits the properties of rollups, but also of Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP).
As data protection becomes a crucial issue in our society, ZKP protocols are attracting more and more attention. ZKP protocols allow us to prove that a piece of information is true without having to reveal the information about it. In other words, they can give people back control over the data they share about their identity.
That said, the main difficulty with Zero-Knowledge Proof technology is that every situation is a special case, and to solve it there are several possible solutions and paths.
In this case, according to Polygon, the Mir protocol has designed “the most advanced and fastest Zero-Knowledge Proof technology”. In other words, in every situation, Mir generates proofs faster and even checks more transactions in a proof.
