Polygon has released its zkEVM Public Testnet, the company announced on Monday. It is the first zkEVM to reach a public testnet with an open-source ZK proving system and is a significant breakthrough for the Ethereum Community.
“Announcing Polygon zkEVM in July was a groundbreaking moment for us at Polygon, but also a big milestone for Ethereum and the whole industry,” the company statement says. “This was a major step towards the seamless scaling solution that the community had long been hoping for.”
The testnet is now available for users to test. The project is still a work in progress, but Polygon is looking for feedback to improve it and eventually make the system widely available. The open-source ZK proving system helps Polygon demonstrate that they are generating ZK proofs within the EVM-equivalent environment, using their own purpose-built proving system.
“The better a zkEVM is at generating ZK proofs, the more it will test the limits of its equivalence with Ethereum,” the statement adds.
In addition, the testnet prepares developers for a full release, according to the announcement. The testnet version of Polygon zkEVM is not yet everything that they want the project to be, and the testnet allows developers to accelerate the process of full Type 2 compatibility.
Ethereum Founder Vitalik’s framework currently puts the zkEVM in the “Type 3” category of protocols, which are “almost EVM-equivalent, but make a few sacrifices to exact equivalence to further improve prover times and make the EVM easier to develop.” “Our goal is to become a Type 2, meaning Polygon zkEVM will eventually “look exactly like Ethereum ‘from within,”” developers say.