🟪 PolyPulse #31 Polygon launches zkEVM
Also, read about institutional lending entering Polygon DeFi
Howdy family!
Welcome to Poly Pulse - your guide to staying up-to-date on the latest trends in the Polygon DeFi ecosystem.
This newsletter breaks down top stories, developments, updates, and trends from the third week of July 2022.
This week the growth in Weekly Active Users (WAU) remained pretty consistent compared to the last week with a week-on-week increase of 3%, i.e., the number of WAU increased from 795K to 819K. The Average Transaction Cost on Polygon was $3 cheaper than on Ethereum, with the Average Price per transaction cost at $0.016 per transaction.
Quickswap remains the most engaging DeFi dApp on Polygon, with approximately 223k Weekly Transactions and 38k Unique Users.
🎙️ This week at Polygon Alpha Podcast
mStable is an autonomous and non-custodial infrastructure for pegged-value crypto assets. The protocol was created to address three major problems:
Significant fragmentation in same-peg crypto assets (there are currently at least 5 major USD pegged crypto assets on Ethereum, for example)
Lack of yield in fiat currencies and pegged crypto assets
Lack of protection against permanent capital loss in pegged crypto assets
The mStable protocol addresses these problems through the creation of meta-assets, which are fully backed by a diversified basket of existing tokenized same-base assets.
Find out on this week's episode of “Polygon Alpha” with Dimitri Goleko - Product Manager of mStable and the host, Justin Havins - Polygon DeFi Marketing and Community Lead on:
What did the mStable team learn from v1 to v2?
How is mStable implementing the new ERC-4626 standard?
Why the shift from Meta-Assets to Meta-Vaults?
Listen bellow 👇
Introducing Polygon zkEVM To Build Out Your Solutions
Before deep diving into zkEVM, the first question is, “What exactly is zk, a.k.a Zero Knowledge?”
Zero Knowledge 101
Let’s understand with the help of an example of Cave-Door Analogy. If you look at the image below, there is a cave with its pathway locked in the middle. Two people, Alice and Bob, are standing outside the cave and Bob tells Alice that he knows the password.
For Alice to verify Bob’s claim, he can:
Take Alice with him to the cave and unlock the door in front of him, but here Bob has disclosed the password to Alice.
Ask Alex to wait outside, and Bob gets in from one side and comes out of the other side of the cave, thereby proving that he knows the password without even disclosing the actual password to Alex.
The second example is how zk Proofs work:-
Once we understand what zkProofs are, the next question is, “What are the major roadblocks in building it and making it functional”?
The problem of Performance: Though better in technology, generating zk Proofs was time-consuming and expensive.
The problem of Compatibility: If the rollup cannot be deployed on EVM and requires you to learn another language and build from scratch, it becomes a humongous task for anyone to even think of it.
Building a solution that enables better performance and compatibility with existing solutions was considered impossible, or was at least considered challenging a decade away.
Now onto the last question, “How Polygon Hermez addresses these problems?”
Introducing Polygon Hermez
With Polygon Hermez, Polygon has launched a zero knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, (zkEVM) that is fully compatible with Solidity code written for the original EVM. The Hermez team achieved this by developing the concept of tailor-made micro opcodes, or instructions the EVM uses to manipulate inputs.
Parsing claims and Reddit discussions of the various competing projects can be a real challenge. But one fact is beyond dispute - none offer the complete EVM compatibility that the Hermez team is building with its zkEVM. What may seem like a slight difference, often obscured by confusing terminology, translates into significant contrast in practice. Using different VM architectures breaks existing tooling and infrastructure and requires projects to build these things from scratch.
Complete compatibility means that any application built for the EVM can seamlessly run on the zkEVM without the need to account for all of the zero-knowledge complexities under the hood. In practice, this will allow more dApps to take advantage of throughput and low fees offered by Layer 2 scaling solutions. Most importantly, the zkEVM unleashed network effects of Ethereum’s rich ecosystem of applications.
For DeFi applications, this means enjoying high security and censorship resistance without the waiting period for deposits and withdrawals that come with Optimistic rollups.
Polygon Hermez is close to a testnet release of its zkEVM. You can check the documentation, or track their work on Github to learn more.
Register for the BUIDL IT hackathon and showcase your projects built on Polygon.
Looking for some returns anon? Here is a good source of it. PS: Be mindful of the risks.
The decentralized Twitter is taking good shape. Lens protocol just completed a million gasless transactions.
Polygon MATIC became a part of the Grayscale Smart Contract Platform ex-Ethereum Fund.
Land Farming is live on Gotchiverse.
Institutional DeFi is entering Polygon. Keep a lookout for returns on your stablecoins.
😄 Meme Of The Week
Soon™
Who Will Win The Race To The zkEVM?
Along with Polygon, two other protocols have paved their way into the zk Universe.
zkSync announced their first zkEVM rollup with a pathway to mainnet in the next 100 days.
Working with the Privacy Scaling group at the Ethereum Foundation, Scroll also launched their Pre-Alpha Testnet.
With all these releases and launches, the question is, who will win the race?
The answer to the above question is straightforward: The users. zkEVM compatibility opens up a plethora of opportunities for new and better applications to be deployed, which can process transactions fast and cost less, thereby making the users the ultimate winner.
Do you think differently in contrast to the above? 💭 Feel free to connect with us on our Discord channel to discuss your perspective!
-Aishwary Gupta (Community Lead at DeFi Pulse & Growth & Strategy Lead at Polygon DeFi).
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