Bjelic and Buterin, co-founders of Polygon and Ethereum respectively, are engaged in a debate regarding the implementation of Verkle Trees on the Ethereum platform. Bjelic seems to be against the idea, raising concerns about Ethereum’s data storage capabilities and its potential impact on performance.
The discussion began when Bjelic questioned whether transitioning Ethereum to Verkle Trees was the most suitable approach. He argued that the current Ethereum network would soon be zk-ficated. In response, Buterin stated that zk-fying keccak merkle patricia trees with 300 MB witness sizes is not feasible. He explained that Verkle Trees were specifically designed to be zk-friendly, unlike Ethereum’s existing Merkle tree.
The Ethereum blockchain network primarily relies on Merkle Patricia trees as its main data structure. However, due to its limitations, there is consideration for replacing it with Verkle Trees, which offer shorter proofs and greater bandwidth.
Bjelic further claimed that the present architecture of Polygon’s zkEVM could support the proposed 300MB benchmark by Buterin. He stated that it could achieve this within a total block time of 12 seconds, albeit requiring around ten server-class CPUs.
Bjelic’s discussion on the Polygon zkEVM follows the protocol’s transformation into a Type 2 ZK-EVM earlier this year, bringing it closer to the Ethereum mainnet.
