Transactions in the block

 Exploring the Block Page

A block is a core concept that can be thought of as a page in a ledger. A block contains transaction data and the hash of the previous block that ensures immutability and security in the blockchain network.

---

Viewing Blocks Page

1. Network Utilization: The average percentage of gas limit used per block based on the blocks listed on the current page.
2. Burnt Fees: Post-London Upgrade, this represents the total sum of fees burned in ETH. You can see more EIP-1559 related data by clicking on the Dashboard label.
3. Block: The block height, also known as block number, indicates the position of a particular block in the blockchain.
4. Age: How long ago a block was mined. Can be toggled with Date Time (UTC) to display the date and time at which the block is mined.
5. Txn: Total number of transactions in the block. Does not include contract internal transactions.
6. Uncles: Number of uncle blocks included in the transaction.
7. Miner: Miner who successfully mined the block.
8. Gas Used: The total gas used in the block. The gas used percentage (out of total gas limit) as well as percentage of gas used over the gas target are also included.
9. Gas Limit: Total gas limit for the block.
10. Base Fee: Post-London Upgrade, this represents the minimum gasUsed multiplier required for a tx to be included in a block.
11. Reward: The total block reward received by the miner for including the block in the blockchain.
12. Burnt Fees (ETH): Post-London Upgrade, this represents the part of the tx fee that is burnt: baseFeePerGas * gasUsed. The burnt fees percentage out of total transaction fees is also displayed.

all Polygon solutions and products

 In the last couple of months, Polygon has been investing significant effort and resources into creating an ecosystem of security expert partners, with the goal of improving the security and robustness of all Polygon solutions and products. We have established relationships with a number of teams and individuals that have already helped us immensely; mainly by providing valuable feedback and helping with vulnerability discovery and resolutions.

Recently, a group of whitehat hackers on the bug bounty platform Immunefi disclosed a vulnerability in the Polygon PoS genesis contract. The Polygon core team engaged with the group and Immunefi’s expert team and immediately introduced a fix. The validator and full node communities were notified, and they rallied behind the core devs to upgrade the network. The upgrade was executed within 24 hours, at block #22156660, on Dec. 5. 

Considering the nature of this upgrade, it had to be executed without disclosing the actual vulnerability and without attracting too much attention. We are still finalizing our vulnerability disclosure policy and procedures, and for now we are trying to follow the “silent patches” policy introduced and used by the Geth team.

The upgrade was executed successfully, without impacting liveness and performance of the network in any major way. The vulnerability was fixed and damage was mitigated, with there being no material harm to the protocol and its end-users. All Polygon contracts and node implementations remain fully open source.

We are still working on closing the final proceedings with Immunefi and the whitehat hacker group, primarily in terms of their rewards and multiple rounds of reviews of the fixed vulnerability. We will post a detailed postmortem once this process is finished, likely by the end of next week. 

In addition to this upgrade, Polygon’s core team has carried out an extensive analysis and identified a number of existing processes that can be improved as well as actions that will make the network and our community more resilient in the future. We will share more details about these efforts and improvements in the future.

protocol for tokenized subscriptions and memberships is now live on Polygon!

 The Drips protocol for tokenized subscriptions and memberships is now live on Polygon!

Since its deployment on the Ethereum mainnet on Feb. 4, a number of prominent projects have already adopted the protocol including the teams behind Solidity, WalletConnect, Ethersjs, Gitcoin, Giveth, Snapshot, Gnosis Safe, and Gnosis Guild. With the launch on Polygon PoS, Drips can now leverage the network's low transaction fees, its eco-friendly consensus mechanism and a massive ecosystem of more than 7,000 decentralized apps (dApps).

 While most payments within crypto networks today are one-time payments, an increasing number of use cases require a recurring approach. Drips is a Web3 protocol for generating recurring income, using non-fungible token (NFT) subscriptions and memberships. 

At its simplest, Drips allows any Polygon user to stream funds periodically to any other user, while also enabling collecting from multiple streams with just a single transaction. DAOs offer a natural use case. The cumbersome and repetitive grant processes are clearly not designed for periodic payments, such as monthly remuneration for regular contributors or recurring infrastructure expenses.

Within Drips, creators and developers can offer memberships by issuing and selling NFTs, potentially giving fans unique benefits in exchange for recurring financial support.

These memberships are available to anyone and can enable benefits across any applications integrated on Polygon.

Finally, Drips makes redistribution a snap. Any address can spread the love every time it gets paid by specifying a percentage of the incoming funds to be automatically Dripped to other users. The recipient could be a charity, a software dependency, or another collective or creator that makes their work possible. Splitting funds through Drips can be a new cultural norm and a major building block for a sustainable creative economy.

Plonky2

Plonky2 is a recursive SNARK that is 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum. It combines PLONK and FRI for the best of STARKs, with fast proofs and no trusted setup, and the best of SNARKs, with support for recursion and low verification cost on Ethereum.

Plonky2 represents the latest step in Polygon’s ongoing commitment to building the future of Ethereum, and we’re proud to share our work with the Ethereum community. 

Recursion

If zero-knowledge proofs have a superpower, it’s recursion. SNARKs can verify arbitrary computations, and, since verifying a SNARK is a computation, SNARKs can verify other SNARKs.

To see why that’s useful, suppose that we want to prove that a batch of 1,000 transactions are valid. Generating a single proof to verify 1,000 transactions at once would be expensive and time-consuming. 

Instead, we can take 1,000 machines and generate 1,000 proofs in parallel, one for each transaction. Next, we can take these transaction proofs and recursively aggregate them by generating a layer of recursive proofs, with each one verifying two transaction proofs. We repeat this process until we’re left with a single proof that verifies 1,000 transactions. 

The recursive approach is faster, less resource-intensive, and can be more decentralized.

Efficiency

Recursive proofs are critical for blockchain scalability. When we started Mir (now Polygon Zero) in 2019, it took two minutes on a fast computer to generate a single recursive proof. 2020 brought recursive proofs to Ethereum with 60 second proving times, and the invention of Halo delivered faster recursive proofs, but without Ethereum compatibility.

In 2021, we had an audacious goal: sub-1 second recursive proofs on Ethereum. We realized that FRI, the polynomial commitment scheme used in STARKS, could offer a significant performance improvement for recursive SNARKs. At the time, this wasn’t obvious. Fractal, the only existing implementation of recursive FRI, took about 10 minutes to generate a proof.

However, FRI has some exciting properties. It allows us to use 64-bit fields, and our team discovered the Goldilocks Field, whose modulus enables extremely efficient field arithmetic on modern CPUs. When combined with PLONK, FRI allows us to write custom gates with many more wires, so we can write circuits that are optimized for efficient recursion.

This combination of mathematical insight, deep expertise in zero-knowledge cryptography, and amazing low-level optimizations allowed us to make a significant breakthrough. A recursive proof on Plonky2 takes just 170 milliseconds on a Macbook Pro, a 100x improvement over existing alternatives.

Proof Sizes

Plonky2 also allows us to speed up proving times for proofs that don’t involve recursion. With FRI, you can either have fast proofs that are big (so they’re more expensive to verify on Ethereum), or you can have slow proofs that are small. Constructions that use FRI, like the STARKs that Starkware uses in their ZK-rollups, have to choose; they can’t have maximally fast proving times and proof sizes that are small enough to reasonably verify on Ethereum.

Plonky2 eliminates this tradeoff. In cases where proving time matters, we can optimize for maximally fast proofs. When these proofs are recursively aggregated, we’re left with a single proof that can be verified in a small circuit. At this point, we can optimize for proof size. We can shrink our proof sizes down to 45kb with only 20s of proving time (not a big deal since we only generate when we submit to Ethereum), dramatically reducing costs relative to Starkware.

Compatibility

Excitingly, Plonky2 is natively compatible with Ethereum. Plonky2 requires only keccak-256 to verify a proof. We’ve 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.

Conclusion

Last year, Polygon laid out its commitment to supporting ZK scaling. 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. 

Polygon’s first major financing round since the project’s founding in 2017

 Polygon raised about $450 million through a private sale of its native MATIC token in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Galaxy Digital, Galaxy Interactive, Tiger Global, Republic Capital and prominent investors like Alan Howard (co-founder, Brevan Howard) and Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful from ABC's Shark Tank). 

With this warchest, the core team can secure Polygon’s lead in paving the way for mass adoption of Web3 applications, a race that we believe will result in Ethereum prevailing over alternative blockchains. The funds will also allow Polygon to continue investing in cutting-edge zero knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to onboarding the next billion users to Web3.

Polygon’s first major financing round since the project’s founding in 2017 has also attracted contributions from Alameda Research, Transcend Fund, Makers Fund, Animoca Brands, global video game leader and games industry investor Scopely, dune ventures, Union Square Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Elevation Capital, Sino Global Capital, DCG, Standard Crypto, Celsius, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Blue Pool Capital, WorkPlay Ventures (led by Zynga founder Mark Pincus), Third Point, Steadview Capital, Accel, and many more. (See Appendix for a list of VCs participating in this fundraise.)

Community First

Impressive as that roster is, Polygon has always been a community-first project and owes its success to the ecosystem of early believers, developers and stakeholders. This will not change. The core team sees this investment round as the tide that lifts all boats and a testament to the importance of community in making Web3 a reality.

“Web3 builds on the early Internet's open-source ideals, enabling users to create the value, control the network and reap the rewards. Ethereum, scaled by Polygon, will be the bedrock of this next stage in the Web's evolution," said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. "Technological disruption didn't start with Web2, nor is it going to end there. That’s why we are very excited to see some of the same firms that funded the previous round of innovation now being our Web3 vision."

Ethereum’s most pressing question is how to increase the network’s capacity to handle more transactions. The skyrocketing popularity of new applications in decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) brought with it congestion and soaring fees. Polygon has stepped in with a broad range of scaling options and transaction rates that are among the industry’s lowest.

AWS for Web3

Polygon team is building a complete suite of solutions that is similar to what Amazon Web Services offers Web2 developers -- a tool for every possible use case and scaling at a click of a button. For Web3, Polygon PoS already offers an execution layer with low fees and high transaction throughput secured by the Ethereum mainnet. With Polygon Edge, projects are building custom blockchains from scratch. In the near future, Polygon Avail will deliver the general-purpose, scalable data availability piece of the puzzle and ZK solutions will make network congestion a thing of the past first and then tackle applications around privacy.

“The platform of choice to build on the blockchain today is Polygon. Thousands of developers across a range of applications are choosing Polygon and their complete set of scaling solutions for the Ethereum ecosystem,” said Shailesh Lakhani, MD at Sequoia India. “This is an ambitious and aggressive team, one that values innovation at its core. Sequoia Capital India is thrilled to lead this significant financing round.”

Who’s building on Polygon? Oh, only some of the biggest projects in Web3, from DeFi protocols such as lending platform Aave to luxury brands company Dolce & Gabbana and NFT marketplaces including OpenSea and Mark Cuban’s Lazy.com. More than 7,000 decentralized apps (dApps) are currently building on Polygon, making it the main destination for Web3 projects.

Soaring Adoption

Polygon has also emerged as a prime destination for projects looking to build the future of games on Web3. Blockchain gaming and NFT arm Polygon Studios was launched in July 2020 to assist in that mission and has since attracted projects including DraftKings, Upshot, Aavegotchi, Zed Run, Skyweaver by Horizon Games, Decentraland, Megacryptopolis, Neon District, Cometh, Animoca Brands’ The Sandbox and Decentral Games. 

Polygon PoS adoption has soared exponentially, with a billion transactions recorded last year. The network’s more than 130 million unique addresses and over 2.67 million monthly active users now generate some 3 million transactions per day, more than double the volume of Ethereum. Polygon’s native MATIC token has a market capitalization of over $12 billion.

To keep the growth flywheel going, Polygon is making major investments into ZK cryptography, a technology widely seen as the end game for blockchain scaling. The core development team made it a centerpiece of its strategic vision in the Zero Knowledge Thesis published in August. As part of that mission, the team has committed $1 billion, a significant portion of the treasury, to ZK-related efforts.

Polygon is now home to an unrivaled collection of ZK efforts. The portfolio includes a zkEVM being developed by Polygon Hermez, privacy-focused Polygon Nightfall rollup built in collaboration with EY, Polygon Miden’s general purpose STARK-based rollup and Polygon Zero team applying a technique called recursion to ZK proofs.

“Adoption by individual users and enterprises, emergence of real world applications like DeFi and NFTs, involvement from the institutional community -- all of these are indicators that Web3 as a technology has passed a major installation milestone and is here to stay,” Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said. “The excitement about Polygon and Ethereum is that together they are building the base layer for this new Internet.”

Ethereum 2.0 Glossary transaction

 Aggregation Bits

Bit representing validator(s) within the committee participating in the aggregate signature.

Beacon Chain

The beacon chain stores and manages the registry of validators in Phase 0.

Beacon Block Hash

Blockroot hash of the assigned slot.

Beacon Committee Indices
Validators assigned to this committee.

Block Proposers
Validators chosen at random to propose blocks for validation/attestation.

Committee Index
Index of the attesting committee.

Crosslinks
The only reference of the shards in the beacon chain and a summary of the shard’s state.

Deposit Contract
Validator makes a deposit of ETH into the deposit contract on ETH 1.0 in order to register as a validator on the network.

Epoch
A number of slots (currently 64) after which validators are reshuffled in committees.

Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2)
Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) is the next phase of Ethereum shifting from a Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. Eth2 will improve issues from scalability, security, and usability for the network. Phase 0 is the first phase for Eth2.

Finality
A block is declared final and can never be changed after a small period of time. All the transactions in that block and all previous transactions are permanent and immutable.

Phase 0
Phase 0 is the first stage of the Ethereum blockchain upgrade and marks the first stage of Ethereum 2.0. Phase 0 implements the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism by managing the list of validators with the launch of Beacon Chain.

Phase 1
Phase 1 is the second upgrade to ETH 2.0 and involves the integration of shard chains.

Sharding / Shard Chains

Sharding is a form of database partitioning wherein large databases are divided into smaller "partition" to reduce data burden and improve scalability. On ETH 2.0, sharding will take the form of 64 chains running alongside the beacon chain, increasing overall throughput and scalability.

Signature
Aggregate BLS signature of the attestation.

Slashing
Slashing involves the deduction of validator’s stake if a validator is found guilty in breaking the rules in consensus mechanism of the network.

Slot
Slot the beacon committee is assigned to attest.

Source epoch
Last justified checkpoint during the assigned slot.

Target epoch
The checkpoint being justified to be the chain tip.

Validator
A validator stakes 32 ETH into the validator-deposit-contract in ETH 1.0. Validators propose and attest new blocks on the network and participate in maintaining the network. A validator is rewarded in ETH as a percentage of their stake when chosen to attest to the a block.