Hi fellow Bancorians! I’ve summarized a conversation on Twitter Spaces between Hamzah Khan of Polygon and Mark Richardson of Bancor. Hope it will be of use as a tl;dr and start discussion about the collaboration!
Link to the Bancor tweet here: https://twitter.com/Bancor/status/1506048622940475394
Speakers:
@_khanhamzah – Head of DeFi @0xPolygon
@MBRichardson87 – Product Architect and Head of Research @Bancor
Polygon as one of the first scaling solutions
- Made scaling a possibility and accessible to all
- Was at the center of both the DeFi craze → NFT and gaming craze
Polygon scaling products
- Began with MATIC plasma chain in 2017 → POS chain mainnet launched in April 2020
- Goal is adoption for millions, which cannot be done with just POS chain, and plasma chain has similar problems to optimistic rollups (more below)
- ZK rollups from Starkware, Polygon Hermez and zkSync getting ready during this time, providing near “infinite scalability” and Ethereum-level security → Polygon saw ZK as the future
Should Bancor deploy on POS chain or Hermez?
- POS chain has most traction with many blue-chip protocols (Aave, Balancer, Compound, Opensea)
- For now, best to deploy on POS, then copy-paste / port onto Polygon Hermez (ZK EVM)
- Hermez = ZK rollup of Ethereum running alongside POS chain, team is led by Jordi Baylina (1 of 2 people who saved ETH from theDAO hack)
Difference between scaling solutions
- Hermez: first decentralized ZK solution
- Miden: VM to be plugged into any ZK implementation
- Zero: focused on speed, uses Plonky2 (fastest ZK proof – 0.2s on MacBook Air)
- Nightfall: privacy-focused ZK solution
- All of these solutions will be L2, which means same level of security as Ethereum
Clarifications to common misconceptions
- With rollups, Ethereum will be different, faster, cheaper
- L2s were advertised this way, but truth is these are chains work side by side and share the burden of Ethereum by dragging projects off the main chain
- Polygon POS chain as a side chain
- It is somewhat a hybrid between a side chain and L2 because MATIC staking and checkpointing is done on Ethereum, not Polygon POS chain
Competition in L2
- Polygon has been in the space for longest and over time realized that optimistic rollups will not scale because of the 7-day withdrawal period (bad UX)
- Optimistic rollups will still have their place in the near future - easy to port projects (ZK = scalability and the future, Optimistic = simplicity and short term)
- Polygon is fully committed to Ethereum – Ethereum is where most, if not all, innovation is taking place, which is then copied to other chains
Bridging
- Polygon POS bridge – 3rd most used Ethereum app (after Opensea and Uniswap v2) and so far, no funds have been lost in past years
- Works by consensus of 2/3 of 100 validators on Ethereum – which takes time, especially during Ethereum congestion
- Alternatives are centralized bridges or relayers (at users’ discretion)
Q&A:
Regaining lost confidence for Polygon users
- Bug bounties are in place to explore and expose exploits, securing the chain for the future
- Technical and security team talent has been beefed up recently and will work hard to minimize these risks
ZK rollup timeframe
- Still in early stage relative to optimistic rollups, but significant progress has been made with Hermez testnet launched next month
Difference to other ZK rollups
- EVM compatibility (Starknet/Starkware and zkSync are centralized)
- EVM was not made for ZK, so Hermez is built from the ground up as an entirely new EVM