The Polygon team is gradually unveiling its plan for a radical transformation project.
On June 12 it announced the Polygon 2.0 vision: a value layer of the internet made by an interconnected network of ZK-powered L2 chains. A novel cross-chain coordination protocol was pitched that would support this concept and allow an unlimited number of chains with safe and instant interactions. The announcement promised a roadmap to a future Polygon offering ‘unlimited scalability and unified liquidity’.
After building intrigue with a brief pause, this week the team shared the proposed architecture of the new protocol.
The explanation, written in the tone of a 2016 whitepaper, contains plans to replace all existing blockchain solutions with a single Polygon infrastructure. The authors describe the following layers of the proposed network:
- Staking layer – a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol using the existing Polygon token, implemented on Ethereum. The only innovation proposed is the possibility of re-staking.
- Interop layer – a cross-chain messaging protocol that bridges the Ethereum and Polygon chains. This is where the vision of unified liquidity will be enacted.
- Execution layer – the layer where actual transactions are processed and stored.
- Proving layer - a final layer to process proofs of all transactions.
All protocols utilize zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, this year’s buzzword in blockchain technologies. This is also one of the two research directions for which Polygon committed $1 billion (most of its treasury) back in 2021.
The Polygon team promised that in the coming days and weeks, they will be sharing deep dives into the Polygon 2.0 protocol layers and invited the community to review them and provide feedback.
Polygon has been experiencing hard times of late, with its MATIC token down 30% over the past month and being delisted from exchanges after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) labeled it as security at the beginning of June.
The proposed upgrade also includes plans to improve the governance of the project 'to empower the community, the role of builders, creators and all others'. This could be seen as a bid to emphasize the non-investment (and hence non-security) utility of the token, which was previously used for allocating ownership interest in the project to multiple crypto VCs.
The transition to Polygon 2.0 is planned by the first quarter of next year. As a first step, Polygon developers are currently upgrading the Polygon PoS network to utilize a recent development in Ethereum tech – zkEVM Vallidum.
