Pinnacle of Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling: Polygon zkEVM

3 min readMar 15, 2023

TL;DR

Polygon zkEVM is to launch the mainnet on March 27.
UniLend all set to launch v2 on Polygon zkEVM.
Polygon and UniLend share a vision of Ethereum decentralization and scalability.

It’s time to take a leap from Ethereum to layer-2. Yes, you heard it right! UniLend is ready to launch our v2 testnet on Polygon zkEVM.

Before we dive into why we decided to expand to Polygon’s zkEVM, let us go through some basics.

What is a Rollup?

Rollups mean a bunch of transactions turned into one data point and then submitted to the Ethereum mainnet. They are designed to improve the scalability of blockchain while maintaining the security of the network. In a roll-up scaling solution, transactions are processed off-chain and then bundled into a single transaction to be processed on the blockchain network.

What is Polygon zkEVM?

Polygon’s zkEVM is one of Polygon’s scaling products to help scale the Ethereum network. A ZK (Zero-Knowledge) is a cryptography protocol that provides more security when creating proofs to validate a statement.

Polygon’s zkEVM is Ethereum equivalent which means that smart contracts are compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) while leveraging the zk rollup technology.

Why Polygon zkEVM?

Polygon zkEVM is becoming the gold standard for EVM equivalence, satisfying all the Ethereum test vectors that apply to a zkEVM. All the Ethereum tooling works on Polygon’s zkEVM and developers can simply use the Ethereum smart contracts without making any changes.

Polygon zkEVM has been battle tested and has achieved impressive milestones. With 84k wallets and over 5000 smart contracts deployed, it has seen great response among the developers. Polygon has brought down the cost of generating zk proofs for a large batch of transactions to $0.06 and proof generation time to almost 2 minutes.

Keeping all the above developments in consideration it was an easy choice for our team to leverage this new technology to help scale UniLend and Ethereum alike.

How does Polygon Scale up UniLend Protocol?

There are several advantages to using Polygon’s zkEVM for UniLend’s permissionless lending and borrowing platform.

Polygon network is efficient and supports Ethereum smart contracts
zkEVM provides fast network finality with validity proofs
Fees reduction of upto 90%
Shares the vision of decentralization

Embracing the Road Ahead

With Polygon zkEVM, UniLend v2 will be scaled exponentially allowing users to take part in the decentralized economy of money markets. The road to decentralization is long and UniLend is on the path to changing DeFi forever.