Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon has released its zero-knowledge proof rollup network on the mainnet.
The highly anticipated zkEVM network was unveiled on a YouTube broadcast at 10:30 am ET on Monday, with Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin executing the first transaction.
“Millions of constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind,” said Buterin in an embedded message.
The Ethereum co-founder has long been an advocate of this technology, which helps scale the Ethereum blockchain by moving computation and state-storage off-chain.
In February, Polygon announced the launch date for zkEVM to go live on the mainnet after more than a year of development and six months of “battle-testing” on public testnets. More than 50 crypto firms have launched on the mainnet beta on day one, including decentralized applications like Balancer and infrastructure providers Alchemy and The Graph.
Polygon has also opted to make zkEVM fully open-source under an AGPL v3 license, meaning developers will have access to the repository and be able to change and modify the code however they see fit.
In order to make the network fully censorship resistant, users can force transactions to Ethereum Layer 1 in the event of failures – a mechanism that will be made available shortly after the launch.
The team also issued a note of caution to users, urging them to be mindful of the risks involved given the newness of the technology.
“Polygon zkEVM was designed to be as secure and performant as possible, but there will inevitably be bumps in the road as we discover unexplored parts of the Web3 landscape,” they said.
