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The Ethereum scaling and infrastructure platform Polygon is acquiring a zero knowledge startup Mir in a $400 million deal, as part of its efforts to scale Ethereum and bring users to Web3, the company announced on Thursday.
The deal was done through 250 million of Polygon’s tokens, MATIC, or about $400M, based on the price of $1.60 per coin when the deal closed on Nov. 26.
“We want to be the AWS of (the) Web3 platform for developers to build on by providing a spectrum of solutions,” Sandeep Nailwal, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview with Blockworks.
Polygon sees zero knowledge (ZK) cryptography as the most promising technology to scale blockchains, Nailwal said.
Like many crypto-focused businesses, Polygon is experiencing fast-paced growth. The platform has about 120 million unique addresses after users “increased sharply” in 2021, Nailwal said. The number of decentralized applications, or dApps, on the platform rose 9,900% from 30 in November 2020 to 3,000 in November 2021, he said.
In general, the platform has about 3,000 applications hosted, 1 billion total transactions processed, 100 million unique user addresses, and $5 billion in assets secured.
“Zero-knowledge proofs are a promising scaling solution because they allow many Ethereum transactions to be verified with a single proof,” Nailwal said. Including this acquisition, the platform has committed $1 billion from its treasury to support its ZK development, he said.
The acquisition, finalized in November, but announced Thursday, will enable the platform to have access to Mir’s ZK scaling technology, Nailwal commented. “We will be launching multiple versions of zkEVMs or EVM compatible ZK rollups. That will provide massive scaling with highest Ethereum security to thousands of Ethereum dApps,” Nailwal said.
Mir will be integrated into the Polygon ecosystem under its new name, Polygon Zero, alongside existing Polygon solutions, including Polygon PoS, Polygon SDK, Polygon Avail, Polygon Nightfall, Polygon Hermez, and Polygon Miden.
Going into 2022, the platform plans to continue to develop a spectrum of solutions for Web3 developers and users, Nailwal noted.
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