According to CoinDesk, Polygon Labs, the developer behind the Polygon blockchain, has released a 'Type 1 prover,' a new component that allows any network compatible with Ethereum's EVM standard to become a layer-2 network powered by zero-knowledge proofs and connect to Polygon’s broader ecosystem. The release is considered a major breakthrough, as it makes layer-2 networks nearly equivalent to main 'layer-1' blockchains like Ethereum. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also praised the technology as key to achieving this equivalence.
The Type 1 prover is part of Polygon's 2.0 roadmap, which focuses on making its ecosystem more interconnected and heavily relies on zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography. Existing EVM chains or optimistic rollups can connect to the prover without modification and plug into Polygon’s newly released Aggregation layer, providing access to 'all of the liquidity and value on Ethereum itself,' according to Polygon’s blog post. The Type 1 prover can generate ZK proofs for Ethereum mainnet blocks at an average cost of $0.002-$0.003 per transaction. It is open-sourced and available on GitHub, with licenses obtained from MIT and Apache 2.0.
Vitalik Buterin has previously written about the different types of provers, stating that while Type 1 provers are perfectly compatible with Ethereum, they require a significant amount of computation power to produce ZK-proofs compatible with Ethereum, taking up to hours to produce. Brendan Farmer, a co-founder of Polygon, said in an email to CoinDesk that delivering a performant Type 1 zkEVM was seen as impractical and cost-prohibitive, but Polygon has demonstrated its industry-leading development of ZK technology by delivering an efficient Type 1 zkEVM.