A SNARK implementation based on techniques from PLONK and FRI. It is the successor of Plonky, which was based on PLONK and Halo. Was developed by Polygon Zero (formerly Mir).
Plonky2 is the latest step in Polygon's quest to build the future of Ethereum.
Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives. It combines PLONK and FRI for the best of STARK, with fast proofs and no robust setup, and the best of SNARK with recursion support and low cost verification on Ethereum.
Plonky2 requires only keccak-256 to verify a proof. It's been estimated that the gas cost to verify a plonky2 size-optimized proof on Ethereum will be approximately 1 million gas.
However, this cost is dominated by the CALLDATA costs to publish the proof on Ethereum. If CALLDATA is repriced in EIP-4488, the verification cost of a plonky2 proof will drop to between 170-200k gas, which could make it not only the fastest proving system, but also the cheapest to verify on Ethereum, the creators claim.
Plonky2 can generate recursive proofs in an incredible 170 milliseconds on a laptop. This is so far the fastest recursive prover implementation available today. Plonky2’s excellent performance makes it ideal for building an Ethereum-compatible ZK virtual machine. Most importantly, plonky2 is practical to use on Ethereum, with 45kb proofs in size-optimized mode.
Building
Plonky2 requires a recent nightly toolchain.
Comments
Polygon laid out its commitment to supporting ZK scaling in 2021. This represented an important transition, as Polygon moved from providing an essential solution for the present to building the future of Ethereum scaling. Plonky2 is an important step on this journey, and a major breakthrough for the entire space.
ZK L2s have benefited from a lot of hype, but current solutions rely on cryptographic primitives that are inefficient and limit scalability. Ultimately, L2’s will compete on throughput and cost, and Plonky2 gives the Polygon ecosystem the opportunity to build the most performant and scalable L2s.
