Polygon Business Development Manager Antoni Martin delivered a keynote speech at the 2022 EY Global Blockchain Summit, where he introduced Polygon Nightfall. Nightfall, the company's new zero-knowledge (ZKP) solution, aims to provide privacy to companies that want to use Ethereum.
According to Martin's keynote, Polygon Nightfall leverages eight times faster speeds than Ethereum base layers, transfers non-private ERC20s six times cheaper, and is entirely public.
Nightfall is one of four Polygon scalability solutions. The remaining three solutions are Polygon Hermez, Polygon Miden, and Polygon Zero. Polygon Nightfall is the only solution with enhanced privacy.
Polygon Nightfall combines ZKP and rollups to reduce transaction fees and provide privacy. Rollup only reveals the time of the transaction; the rest of the information is confidential. On the other hand, rollups assume that all transactions are valid but still allow validators to object to a transaction if they consider it incorrect.
In his keynote, Martin said Nightfall could be used in businesses such as supply chain management, private NFT transactions, and blockchain mixer.
Ernst & Young (EY) started the Nightfall project in 2019 to allow its customers to use Ethereum privately. However, the project was halted in September 2021 due to Ethereum's high gas fees. To cut the cost of private transactions, EY has partnered with Polygon.
Two EY blockchain services, EY OpsChain and EY Blockchain Analyzer, have been connected to Polygon Nightfall. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said:
"EY's commitment to the Ethereum ecosystem is a big driver in developing common ideas. No other organization has committed the same scale to open ecosystems and systems or delivers the technological depth that EY has."
According to the announcement, Polygon and EY will continue to innovate business-friendly solutions that prioritize privacy to grow their ecosystems.
According to a report from the Mina Foundation, ZKP has recently played an essential role in the crypto space. According to the survey, improved privacy and scalability are two things that make ZKP so appealing. Nearly all those surveyed (90.1%) find cryptocurrencies with the ZKP solution more attractive. Additionally, 52.1% also said they are more likely to use a dApp that integrates ZKP.