Polygon Unveils Recursive SNARK Plonky2 That’s 100x Faster, MATIC Jumps 3%

We have key news coming up from Polygon developers as they unveil the world’s fastest ZK Scaling Technology, Polnky2. This is a part of the Polygon Zero mission that uses zero-knowledge proofs to scale the Ethereum blockchain to a billion users.

As per the official announcement, Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that’s natively compatible with Ethereum and 100x faster than the existing alternatives. The announcement further adds:

Plonky2 combines PLONK and FRI for the best of STARKs, with fast proofs and no trusted setup, and the best of SNARKs, with support for recursion and low verification cost on Ethereum.

One of the biggest strengths of ZK-Proofs is recursion. Meaning it allows one SNARK to verify the other SNARKs making the network performance even faster. Apart from being faster, the recursive process is less resource-intensive and more decentralized.

Recursive proofs help in significantly reducing the proving times and thus are very critical for blockchain scalability.

Plonky2 Compatibility With Ethereum

As the blog post notes, the scaling technology of Plonky2 is completely compatible with the Etheruem blockchain. the latest step will also help Polygon transition from being just a solution provider to building the future of Ethereum. The blog post notes:

ZK L2s have benefited from a lot of hype, but current solutions rely on cryptographic primitives that are inefficient and limit scalability. Ultimately, L2’s will compete on throughput and cost, and Plonky2 gives the Polygon ecosystem the opportunity to build the most performant and scalable L2s.

This is yet another feather to the cap of Polygon which has been releasing some promising updates over the last few months. As a result, investors are also keen on getting their hands on Polygon’s native cryptocurrency MATIC. Soon after the news, the MATIC price jumped another 3% and is currently trading at a price of $2.16.