Vitalik Buterin Sends Hidden Message in First Polygon zkEVM Transaction

Polygon launched the long-awaited mainnet for its new Polygon zkEVM network today, and to mark the occasion, the core developers of the sidechain invited Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin to send out the very first transaction—and he included a hidden message.

Buterin appeared on a livestreamed event to mark the occasion, and while building the transaction, he included the following message converted into hex code: “A few million constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind.”

Furthermore, Buterin repeatedly set the Ethereum network transaction gas limit to 69,042, potentially referencing one meme number (69) and nearly another one (420) as well. Polygon Labs Head of Growth Sanket Shah tweeted that the gas limit number made the Ethereum creator a “man of culture.”

“And just like that, Vitalik Buterin has completed the first transaction on the newly deployed Polygon zkEVM chain,” Polygon Labs President Ryan Wyatt tweeted this morning. “This is a big moment for scaling decentralized protocols to handle our growth.”

Polygon zkEVM is billed as a next-generation blockchain network that enables faster and cheaper transactions that Ethereum’s own mainnet can handle.

Unlike previous layer-2 and sidechain networks, a zkEVM pairs zero-knowledge rollups—which bundle together loads of transactions and execute those proofs onto Ethereum—with full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. That means that it’s a native complement to Ethereum and that smart contracts, which contain the code that powers decentralized protocols and software, can be easily moved over to the zkEVM network.

“zkEVM can be recognized as the ‘holy grail’ of blockchain scaling,” Polygon’s co-founder Mihailo Bjelic told Decrypt ahead of today’s launch.

It’s not the only zkEVM network out there, however: others are in development, and rival zkSync launched its own mainnet last week ahead of Polygon’s previously-announced move.