Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin initiates first transaction as Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta goes live – Cryptopolitan

Polygon, a leading Ethereum scaling platform, announced the public launch of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) beta Monday. This release is anticipated to be one of the most sought-after blockchain trends in 2023 and reflects Polygon’s commitment to open-source values by making all aspects of zkEVM code available to developers for study and collaboration. As part of its launch celebration, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, was granted the honor of initiating the first transaction on zkEVM, live-streamed at ETHGlobal at 4:30 p.m. Central European Time (10:30 a.m. ET).

Vitalik Buterin recently demonstrated the success of his zkEVM transaction, sending 0.005 ETH to a random address with a cheeky message referencing Neil Armstrong’s famous first words upon walking on the moon: “A few million constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind.” This sparked an industry-wide race to create and launch zkEVMs, with Polygon ultimately asserting their victory by publicly announcing that over 50 companies had agreed to build on the Polygon zkEVM technology. However, Buterin himself warned in a blog post back in August that different versions of zkEVMs come with various trade-offs, such as speed versus the degree of compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. “In general, it’s healthy for the space that all of these types are being explored,” he wrote.

Polygon’s zkEVM is now available to users, but co-founder Sandeep Nailwal has stressed that caution should still be exercised as the technology is in its early days. To ensure user safety, Polygon has reiterated its commitment to exploring zero-knowledge technology for its main chain, the Polygon POS chain. Nailwal believes that this technology is the future of Ethereum and expects to see most large web3 applications built on zero-knowledge-proven layer 2 chains within the next 18 to 24 months.