We’ve made the decision to deprecate Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta next year. In this post, I want to walk you through the reasons behind this decision, as well as the support we’ll provide over the next year.
Three years ago, when we launched Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta, the ambition was to make an all-purpose, open source, Ethereum-aligned rollup for the broader community. While the product was technically impressive, showing a ZK stack could be EVM-equivalent at the bytecode level, we own that we fell short in several ways:
- Technical challenges and development delays: Support for EIP-4844 took longer than expected. Additionally, ZK counters—designed as a security feature—made certain DeFi transactions impractical, and building zkEVM with a custom client complicated debugging for developers.
- Lack of differentiation and overly ambitious goals: Despite its technical achievements, zkEVM didn’t stand out or deliver the user experience the community truly wanted. We also set aggressive goals but ultimately fell short.
- Lack of Nimbleness: With the rise of modular stacks, the ability to adapt quickly to user needs is paramount. zkEVM was not positioned to make these adaptations, and when it became clear the project wasn’t aligning with ecosystem needs, we didn’t pivot or sunset it quickly enough.
This decision is a long time coming and one we believe is crucial for the continued growth and evolution of the broader Polygon ecosystem. Stopping our work on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta a year and a half ago freed up time and resources and will continue to do so with its deprecation. This has allowed us to focus on expanding the ecosystem, including strengthening Polygon PoS—which remains among the top three chains by transaction volume with 1.3 billion transactions last year alone—and bringing Agglayer to life, with plans to have it fully built out by year’s end.
While Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta activity has been declining with our lack of efforts on it, we know this is highly disruptive for teams building on it. We especially want to support those who took a chance on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta and were willing to explore the ZK frontier. With that in mind, below is what you can expect moving forward. We sincerely apologize for any disruption and are fully committed to ensuring this transition is as smooth and supportive as possible.
- Transition Timeline: The zkEVM sequencer will run for the next 12 months, with forced transactions permanently enabled so users can exit at any time.
- Support: The support Polygon Labs provides for Polygon zkEVM will be lower. It will not support new EIPs and the internal service level targets will be lower than previously.
- Asset Safety: No funds will be lost—users will always have the ability to withdraw bridged assets. However, we expect the use of forced transactions to be difficult, meaning that unsophisticated users should exit below the sequencer stops running.
- Transitional Grant Support: We will support teams that want to migrate their infra, assets, or products to a new chain, such as Polygon PoS. This will include grants to support capital costs for moving to a new chain.
Shutting down a chain is never an easy decision, and we don’t take it lightly. We’ve always aimed to take risks that push the industry forward, but we know that sometimes things don’t work out as planned. Your feedback has been invaluable in helping us make this call. If you have suggestions on how we can wind down zkEVM or thoughts on what’s next, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out in reply to this post or to your contact at Polygon Labs.