- Polygon sets the stage for Napoli Upgrade following the Inscriptions hype in December 2023.
- Some of the features expected to be activated by Polygon’s Napoli upgrade are PIP-16, PIP-27, and PIP-31.
Polygon (MATIC) Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain currently ranks among the top blockchain projects in the ecosystem as the team doubles down on its efforts to integrate more features to offset the existing challenges. In December 2023, the popularity of the blockchain reached its peak as it set an all-time high of 16 million transactions in a single day.
Interestingly, the Inscriptions on the Polygon PoS in December were twice as high as any other chain. With the Inscriptions hype over, the Napoli Upgrade has taken center stage as it achieves network consensus and rolled out on the mainnet.
In a blog post meant to unpack all the features bundled in the much-anticipated upgrade, Polygon has disclosed that the expected changes that come with this upgrade are not backward compatible. In this case, it is considered a hard fork.
According to the post, the upgrade is set to feature PIP-27. The PIP would activate Ethereum’s RIP-7212 for the Polygon PoS network by integrating a precompile for the secp256r1 elliptic curve. It is also important to note that the Polygon PoS has become the first scaling protocol to support RIP-7212.
To them, this would be a huge boost to developers in the long run to build account abstraction features on Polygon PoS with the activation of RIP-7212.
Many modern devices use secp256r1 in signing transaction data, such as Apple’s Secure Enclave, WebAuthn, Android Keystore, and passkeys. However elliptic curve signatures are expensive to prove on rollups and L2s. There have been a number of different workarounds, but RIP-7212 addresses the expense head-on.
More on the Napoli Upgrade
It is also reported that the precompile would offer a gas-friendly verification of ECDSA signatures while enabling some features to unlock more efficient and flexible management of smart accounts. The upgrade would also unlock PIP-16 which would set the stage to make parallelization even better. In the future, the added features in the client would allow validators to integrate transaction dependencies into the block headers. According to the report, PIP-16 would improve the overall health of the network.
Finally, PIP-32 would be unlocked and would activate several EIPs that relate to the Cancum upgrade of Ethereum:
including transient storage via two new opcodes, TLOAD and TSTORE; the introduction of MLOAD and MSTORE instructions, which provide an efficient EVM instruction for copying memory areas; and changes to the functionality of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode.
Polygon was recently reported to have rolled out its “Type-1 prover” upgrade, to introduce a new era of Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible chains. This was designed in collaboration with Toposware to generate zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs for any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain. This includes sidechains, optimistic rollups, and Ethereum.
As of press time, MATIC was down by 3% in the last 24 hours, trading at $1. MATIC also has a negative year-to-date return of 0.32% and a market cap of $10 billion.
Looking at the anticipation around the Napoli upgrade, MATIC has been tipped to double its current price in the near term. Also, a recent report by Crypto News Flash dived into some of the factors that could propel the price to the predicted height.
