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In this article I outline a path for dApp developers to gain fast time-to-market and progressively leverage Ethereum security as scaling solutions mature.
Over the past few years, many blockchain developers have faced a predicament. Here’s the common case:
A developer is aligned with Ethereum values and wants Ethereum security, yet her top priorities (like any startup operator) are finding product-market fit and gaining customer traction. To satisfy customers, her application must also be performant and affordable. Unfortunately, for her application use case, Ethereum is too slow and expensive.
Thankfully, solutions have come to the rescue! The best example is Polygon PoS, which maintains three of the four properties mentioned above: high performance, low cost, and Ethereum alignment. This has made it a very popular option for developers bringing products to market.
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However, many developers still want to leverage Ethereum security — even if it’s on a longer time horizon. Teams are making great progress toward enabling this, but questions remain:
- Which solutions offer full Ethereum security?
- When will these solutions technically be ready?
- When should I realistically use them for production?
- Where should I deploy my application in the meantime?
The rest of this article will explain how developers can leverage Polygon solutions on a path toward full Ethereum security.
While you’re reading, keep a few things in mind:
- Not all applications require full Ethereum security. There are always tradeoffs.
- I highlight one of many potential paths. This is not the “right” path for everyone.
- I’m guesstimating dates for when solutions will be sufficiently mature.
This article should not be used as a prescription but rather as a guide for thinking through your own journey.
Polygon has numerous scaling solutions, so we’ll frame our exploration by where they fall on the security spectrum (the graphic needs updating but you get the idea). Solutions on the left are not secured by Ethereum, and solutions on the right are fully secured by Ethereum.
This graphic can also help us roughly gauge the maturity of solutions. Polygon Edge and Polygon PoS are production-ready, while all other solutions are either in development, testnet, or beta.
Let’s walk a reasonable path from left to right.
Polygon PoS is a great place to start.
You can build and deploy your application as a smart contract very easily (the chain saw almost 800k smart contracts deployed this year), making use of mature tooling and infrastructure. The EVM network effects and composability also make this an attractive option.
Let’s assume you get your MVP to market to start the year 2023.
By now, let’s assume you’ve iterated your way to product-market fit. You have meaningful customer traction and millions of dollars of total value locked (TVL).
At the same time, let’s assume Polygon zkEVM has been live on mainnet for a year (starting in January 2023). Developers have fixed enough bugs and have removed enough training wheels to give you confidence that it is production-ready.
You can now migrate your smart contracts from Polygon PoS, and your application can fully inherit Ethereum security.
But wait — will fees still be too high? Great question.
Rollups like zkEVM inherit security by posting blocks and proofs on Ethereum. Since posting block transaction data can be expensive and take away from the rollup value proposition, the Ethereum community has proposed an upgrade (there are actually several upgrades, but we’ll save that for another article).
The upgrade is called EIP-4844 and is expected to make posting data 100x cheaper.
However, EIP-4844 did not make it into the next major Ethereum upgrade (Shanghai) in March, and instead will ship “relatively quickly” after. While this sounds quite soon, we should acknowledge the risks:
- Uncertainty around the date. Does relatively quickly mean weeks or months?
- Dependent on the Shanghai upgrade. What if Shanghai gets delayed?
- Robustness. How robust will it be from the start? Should developers wait?
Let’s consider two scenarios.
Consider an optimistic scenario where EIP-4844 ships in Q3 2023.
You can give it the rest of the year to mature — to be confident there are no major issues — and migrate your smart contracts to Polygon zkEVM in Q1 2024.
This aligns with our previous timeline.
Now consider a less optimistic scenario where EIP-4844 is delayed (for any number of reasons) and ships in Q2 2024.
This does not align with our previous timeline. What should you do in the meantime?
Earlier, we mentioned how rollups inherit security from settlement layers by posting blocks and proofs.
While you wait for EIP-4844, you can actually still leverage Polygon zkEVM! You can use it in hybrid mode where ZK proofs get posted on Ethereum but transaction data gets posted elsewhere — keeping costs low while maintaining a very high degree of Ethereum security.
Where should you put the data? There will be a number of good options by then!
Polygon Avail, EigenDA and Celestia are data availability solutions perfect for this use case. They are currently in testnet but should all be production-ready by then.
You can deploy your smart contracts on Polygon zkEVM as a validium to start the 2024 year and transition into full rollup mode in Q3.
Either way, you end up at the same destination — a decentralized app fully secured by Ethereum!
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