Polygon has unveiled Miden, an Advanced zk-STARKs based scaling solution intended to address the issues of network congestion on the Ethereum blockchain.
Developers don’t need to be a cryptographer or have any understanding of what zero-knowledge proofs are to use it. From the end-user’s perspective, Miden is nothing more than a regular stack-based virtual machine with linear read-write memory.
The core developer of both Distaff VM and Facebook’s Winterfell, Bobbin Threadbare, is joining Polygon as Miden Lead, to work on the reintegration of Distaff which combines both Distaff and Winterfell, and continue the development of Miden VM and the ecosystem around it.
“Polygon’s addition of the Miden Virtual Machine represents an important stepping stone in helping to overcome some of the technical challenges of being able to rely on cryptographic proofs of computational integrity,” said Threadbare in a statement. “I’m looking forward to helping to facilitate the open-source implementation of STARKs within the Polygon ecosystem and wider security and privacy communities.”
Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, further explained “ZK is the way ahead for Ethereum and Miden VM is one of the most important elements in Polygon’s roadmap for Ethereum scalability. It will simplify and accelerate validation for DeFi apps and cryptocurrencies — enhancing the speed and scale of the Polygon ecosystem.”
Polygon has already begun to significantly expand the feature set of the Miden VM and develop it into a production-grade, open-source, and transparent proving system built with privacy by design.
The Polygon team plans to increase the viability of the VM by instilling the following unique characteristics: A multi-language paradigm, enabling flexibility and extending usage to a wider demographic of developer languages such as Move, developed by Novi / Diem; and blockchain-centric safety, achieved by integrating features, including static analysis, formal verification, and limited mutability.
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