Introducing Plonky2
Polygon Zero’s mission is simple: to use zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum to a billion users, without compromising decentralization or security. Achieving this requires fast and efficient proof systems. Today, we’re excited to share Plonky2, a major milestone for zero-knowledge cryptography.
Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum. It combines PLONK and FRI for the best of STARKs, with fast proofs and no trusted setup, and the best of SNARKs, with support for recursion and low verification cost on Ethereum.
Plonky2 represents the latest step in Polygon’s ongoing commitment to building the future of Ethereum, and we’re proud to share our work with the Ethereum community.
Compatibility
Excitingly, Plonky2 is natively compatible with Ethereum. Plonky2 requires only keccak-256 to verify a proof. We’ve estimated that the gas cost to verify a plonky2 size-optimized proof on Ethereum will be approximately 1 million gas.
However, this cost is dominated by the CALLDATA costs to publish the proof on Ethereum. If CALLDATA is repriced in EIP-4488, the verification cost of a plonky2 proof will drop to between 170-200k gas, which could make it not only the fastest proving system, but also the cheapest to verify on Ethereum.
Conclusion
Last year, Polygon laid out its commitment to supporting ZK scaling. This represented an important transition, as Polygon moved from providing an essential solution for the present to building the future of Ethereum scaling. Plonky2 is an important step on this journey, and a major breakthrough for the entire space.
ZK L2s have benefited from a lot of hype, but current solutions rely on cryptographic primitives that are inefficient and limit scalability. Ultimately, L2’s will compete on throughput and cost, and Plonky2 gives the Polygon ecosystem the opportunity to build the most performant and scalable L2s.
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