Polygon Continues Rapid Expansion With $400M Acquisition of Mir

Ethereum scaling startup Polygon has recently announced a $400 million acquisition of zero-knowledge (ZK) startup Mir. The new deal is part of the company’s journey in scaling Ethereum and ushering in a new era of Web 3.0.

According to Polygon, the company will gain access to the world’s fastest ZK scaling technology. They believe that zero-knowledge proofs are key to allowing many Ethereum transactions to be verified with a single proof.

To address the issue of slow ZK proofs, Mir generates faster recursive proofs. 

Mihailo Bjelic is co-founder of Polygon. 

“The industry is still in an early phase when it comes to scaling and blockchain infrastructure in general,” Bjelic said. “One of the key missing components required to build highly scalable solutions has been performant recursive proof systems; they simply haven’t existed so far. This ends today. We are introducing a recursive proof system that is orders of magnitude faster than anything else and is practical to verify Ethereum. This is a huge win for the entire industry.”

Details of the Deal

Polygon is currently building up its scaling solutions, and the acquisition of Mir will play a major role in the company’s $1 billion Ethereum scaling strategy. The deal will also bring new talent into the Polygon ecosystem, especially given the team Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov built as founders of Mir. This team included individuals that held engineering roles at Google to Ph.D. researchers in the field of mathematics. 

“Joining Polygon is an incredible opportunity for us to work toward scaling Ethereum.” Farmer said. “Polygon is one of the most dedicated and successful teams in the space, and we’ve been impressed by their commitment to ZK as a scaling solution for Ethereum. We’re very excited to dedicate our world-class team and the technology that we’ve developed toward achieving this vision.”

The purchase was carried out with 250 million MATIC tokens at a price of $1.60. Since the agreement, MATIC has risen to $2.26.

Layer 2 Blockchains

Given the Mir system’s generation of recursive zero-knowledge proofs, it could become one of the fastest and most efficient layer 2 options. With the aim to reduce transaction costs, a layer 2 is a secondary framework that is built on top of an existing blockchain system, and they are growing incredibly fast among blockchain networks.

Mir will be integrated into the Polygon ecosystem under the new name Polygon Zero, alongside existing Polygon solutions such as Polygon PoS, Polygon SDK, Polygon Nightfall, Polygon Hermez, Polygon Avail, and Polygon Miden. 

Sandeep Nailwal is co-founder of Polygon.

“Polygon plans to focus on ZK cryptography as the end game for blockchain scaling,” said Nailwal. “We have made a strategic decision to explore and encourage all meaningful scaling approaches and technologies at this stage. We believe this is the way to establish Polygon as the leading force and contributor in the ZK field and onboard the first billion users to Ethereum.”

The new deal continues the trend of the company rapidly expanding. It is coming off a $250 million merge with Hermez Network back in August, and current reports indicate the company is planning additional future acquisitions.