Polygon Adds Mir to ZK Scaling Arsenal for $ 400 Million

Polygon added another zero-knowledge scaling project called Mir. The team hopes to leverage Mir to complete their arsenal of scaling solutions.

Polygon acquires Mir

Polygon has acquired a startup called Mir, which offers fast zero knowledge (ZK) evidence. The strategic acquisition will help expand Polygon’s scaling portfolio.

ZK is a cryptographic mechanism that can allow data verification or calculation without revealing it to a third party. Over the past year, several Layer 2 scaling solutions have integrated ZK functionality to improve both speed and privacy.

Polygon is one of the best scaling projects on Ethereum, consisting of its flagship Proof-of-Stake and Layer 2 sidechain solutions. Its chain hosts some of the largest decentralized applications (dApps) on Ethereum, including OpenSea, Aave, SushiSwap, Curve, Balancer and others.

According to a press release on Thursday, Polygon signed an agreement to acquire Mir in exchange for $ 400 million paid in MATIC tokens. The purchase was made from Polygon’s $ 1 billion cash fund dedicated to acquiring ZK-based projects.

This is Polygon’s third acquisition linked to ZK. The team acquired Hermez, an EVM-enabled ZK stacking service, for $ 200 million in August. This agreement was followed by the acquisition of Miden, a ZK-STARK rollup, in November.

At a virtual event called “ZK day,” Polygon co-founders announced that the team viewed ZK crypto as “the most promising solution to evolve Ethereum.”

Mir uses a scaling solution that leverages cryptographic evidence known as ZK-SNARK. It is based on plonky2, a recursive proof protocol compatible with Ethereum. ZK-SNARKs have also been deployed by Mina Protocol, a scalable blockchain with a fixed size of around 22KB.

According to Polygon, Mir is currently one of the fastest ZK-based scaling solutions on the market. The team noted that generating ZK proofs on a machine is generally slow and inefficient. However, Mir’s scaling technology can help natively run ZK proofs on a machine such as a laptop in 170 milliseconds. The team now hopes to take advantage of this and build an Ethereum solution under Polygon Zero.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the owner of this coin owned MATIC and several other cryptocurrencies.