Polygon Launches a zkEVM Public Testnet, Fully Equivalent to Ethereum

Polygon Rollup to be ‘Fundamentally Equivalent’ to EVM

Polygon announced on Oct. 10 the release of its zero knowledge-EVM public testnet (zkEVM Public Testnet).

The zkEVM Public Testnet was initially announced by Polygon on July 20 at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris. Dubbed the first zero-knowledge scaling solution that is fully compatible with Ethereum, the Polygon zkEVM has been described as being “fundamentally equivalent to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) itself and fully benefits from all of Ethereum’s ecosystem.”

Polygon Co-Founder Mihailo Bjelic said the “holy grail” of any Web3 infrastructure is that it guarantees scalability and security and offers Ethereum compatibility.

According to the Polygon team’s blog post, with a complete open-source ZK proving system, Polygon zkEVM is the first zk scaling solution that strives for “maximum EVM-equivalence.”

Polygon acknowledged the limited capabilities of the testnet version of Polygon zkEVM and called on developers to test the current version to “its absolute limits” as the team prepares for audits on its way to the mainnet version.

“The testnet version of Polygon zkEVM also has limited throughput capacity, which means it’s far from its final form as an optimized scaling machine,” the Polygon team said.

For developers looking to get started on the testnet, the documentation can be accessed here.