zkEVM Product Brief for zkFriends
June 27th, 2023
zk2023_brief #3
“zkEVM is currently 20x cheaper than Ethereum, but it doesn’t stop there. Current optimisations are not changing the gas estimation but the final gas price to users. After Polygon zkEVM processes the tx, the user will know the exact impact of L1 data, the price will be automatically readjusted to the final price for each tx - We call it Effective Gas Price ”
- David Schwartz
ZM ZM, zkFriends!
It’s been a big month for the Polygon community with the announcement of Polygon 2.0, a proposed vision to build a ZK-powered scaling environment unlike any existing protocol. Polygon 2.0 is a proposed network of ZK-powered L2 chains, unified via a novel cross-chain coordination protocol–which in the future may connect networks like Polygon zkEVM with networks like the (ultimately ZK-powered) Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) chain, and all to Ethereum.
On the Polygon zkEVM front, core devs were in Barcelona earlier this month for the first of several educational workshops planned for top tier organisations. An impressive list of participants joined to learn about building on Polygon zkEVM and explore use cases currently under consideration by many companies for implementation.
All this activity, interest, and technical excellence is coming during an impressive milestone: the end of the first quarter of uninterrupted uptime for Polygon zkEVM on Mainnet Beta. The network has experienced organic growth and seen a million transactions. This is just getting started!
Today, the month closes with the next version upgrade on schedule for deployment in the next 2 weeks. Look for a blog post soon to be published announcing the upgrade which involves updating the logic of the zkEVM’s Consensus Contract. Stay tuned 
Product Updates
There was a major update completed this month on Polygon zkEVM testnet and mainnet Beta on Jun 2nd and 8th respectively.
Prover v1.1.4-fork.4
- Fixed missing STOP opcode in FullTracer traces
- Fixed database connection leak that was causing the Executor to run out of connections and exit
Node v0.1.2
Call tracer includes fixes in customer tracer:
- Fixed memory reading for custom tracers when memory is smaller than stack values
- Fixed how to handle revert opcodes for internal transactions
- Fixed how to handle consecutive calls with internal delegate calls
- Fixed gas and gas used
- Fixed value for internal transactions
Find the detailed change log for each component below.
Prover: v1.1.4-fork.4 changelog
Node: v0.1.2 changelog
The latest bridge service version remains: v0.1.0
Security
Polygon zkEVM has completed two important Security Audits both performed by Spearbit’s security researchers. All reports have been shared in the Polygon Polygon zkEVM Github repo
Forced Transactions
Soon ready for public testing, next week a blog will be published with the details of the bug bounty and tooling that can help test. We invite the community to hack away and stress-test the forced transactions.
Performance
Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta proving costs are considered negligible when compared to transaction fees and proving times are minutes for large batches of transactions (and constantly improving): @edudiez, a core dev for Polygon zkEVM, has been having fun testing the current prover capabilities with the latest improvements. This postprovides a full view of the benchmarks…enjoy!
Always check version release
For the network to function as expected, ensure you are working with the latest version of the main components:
Mainnet Beta / Testnet
LATEST VERSION
Node: v0.1.2
Prover: v1.1.4-fork.4
Bridge Service: v0.1.0
Looking ahead
DragonFruit is a soon-to-be-released upgrade of Polygon zkEVM–essentially Fork ID5. Stay tuned for a blog post announcing the upgrade which involves updating the logic of zkEVM’s Consensus Contract. A timelock will be initiated for a period of 10 days. This allows the contract to be upgraded only after the timelock period.
Among other things…
June has been a very productive month for the Polygon zkEVM Wiki team. Here are some of the latest documents now available:
Get to know what a Polygon zkEVM Upgrade covers: here is the Upgrade Process
Pro-tip Alert
The wiki offers a complete set of documents on Stark Recursion:
- CIRCOM in zkProver: How CIRCOM is implemented in the zkProver
- Proving Setup Phase: Describing STARK’s proving setup
- Intermediate Steps: Converting between STARK proofs and their verifier circuits
- Final Recursion Step: The last conversion step between STARK proof and its verifier circuit
- Proof Generation Phase: All proof generation phases
zkResearch
Using Nova instead of Groth16 for tx proofs: work continues toward verifying Nova proofs on Ethereum. The aim is to have Fusion txs/blocks instantly verifiable on Ethereum. Core researchers of Polygon zkEVM are getting close with Nova Circom Verifier.
Polygon zkEVM fflonk Optimizations
Learn about a strategy to reduce the computation and shave off constant factors. The overall solution requires less multiplications, additions, and modular operations
when comparing against the operations in the verifier.sol.
Analytics
Organic growth on Polygon zkEVM continues steadily this first quarter, with1.5M transactions reached after three months. . Additionally, Polygon zkEVM has earned a 10th position within the L2 Scaling chains, reaching a TVL of 42M. Analytics demonstrate a steady growth since the launch of Mainnet Beta earlier this year.
zkEducation
Polygon Labs hosted, for the first time, a series of presentations to top organizations interested in mass adoption using web3 technologies.
The interactive 2-day workshops created the space for deep technical dives and 1-1 interactions between organizations and Polygon zkEVM team. It was a great educational session that demystified the technology and general misconceptions of rollups.
Attendees included: Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Borse Group, Deutsche Telekom, eBay, Banco Santander, and Telefonica Tech, among others.
zkCommunity
Here are some highlights from this month:
- #BUIDLWeek2023: Jordi presented the future of Polygon along with a brief overview of Polygon zkEVM roadmap.
- zkPanel EDCON 2023: Vitalik, Scroll, Starknet and Polygon zkEVM moderated by Ethereum Foundation.
- Polygon Discord: Polygon zkEVM Community Update: A Technical AMA with @Carlos Matallana. One noteworthy fact happening during this community update, 1192 NFT (OAT Onchain Achievement Token) were issued to participants of the Community Update.
Want to attend the next update? Make sure to join the Discord server.
zkEcosystem
Last but not least, there has been massive traction on Polygon zkEVM TVL as DeFi has grown in the last weeks to $29M. This latest growth has been driven by Balancer, Open Ocean, Kokonut Swap, Magpie, Sushi Dex aggregator and Quickswap’s integration.