Polygon’s Co-Founder Shares his Concerns on zkEVM Fallacies

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Polygon Announces the Launch of zkEVM Public Testnet
  • Sandeep Nailwal tweeted about the fallacies and confusion arising about Polygon’s zkEVM.
  • Toghrul Maharramov once claimed that Polygon’s zkEVM is not EVM-Equivalent.
  • Responding to Brendan Farmer’s detailed description of Polygon’s zkEVM, Maharramov clarified his claim.

Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the blockchain platform Polygon, commented via his Twitter page about the fallacies and confusions arising on Polygon’s EVM-Equivalent. He responded to the chain of messages between Toghrul Maharramov and Brendan Farmer, in which both of them argued about Polygon’s implementation of zkEVM.

On April 1, 2023, Nailwal shared a Twitter thread quoting “hope this puts to rest this unnecessary game of definitions”:

On March 31, the official Twitter page of Polygon was updated with a post claiming “Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta IS EVM-equivalent”. The platform also provided a detailed explanation of how zkEVM is equivalent to EVM.

Earlier, Toghrul Maharramov, a Senior Researcher at the EVM-Equivalent zk-Rollup, Scroll, commented on July 22, 2022, that “Polygon zkEVM is not a zkEVM”, when Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon’s co-founder shared the specifications of zkEVM.

Interestingly, Polygon’s co-founder Brendan Farmer, came up with a detailed sketch of the platform’s EVM-Equivalent zkEVM, subsequent to the platform’s recent tweet. He claimed:

EVM-equivalence is a term that has existed for a while and refers to zkEVMs that can process transactions in the same way as the EVM – so all code, tooling, and infrastructure just works.

Following the series of threads from Farmer, Maharramov clarified the reasons why he claimed that “Polygon’s implementation is not a zkEVM”:

Significantly, he noted that there was no zkEVM type classification earlier; it was only introduced by the Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

Nonetheless, after a series of discussions, the researcher tweeted admitting Polygon’s definition of zkEVM, commenting:

If you want to use Vitalik’s definition, then feel free to use it – however, don’t forget to add the caveats when using that terminology. Or at least, be consistent when you apply the same terminology to others.

In response to Maharramov’s final tweet, Nailwal shared his happiness in viewing “people accepting their mistake, conceding and coming around”.

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