Polygon is acquiring the startup Predicate Labs, the developer of the Mir blockchain protocol, for $500 million.

The project will pay $100 million worth of USDC stablecoins and 190 million MATIC tokens, equivalent to just over $400 million at current prices. These MATIC tokens will have a vesting period of three years.

MATIC is a $14.6 billion market cap cryptocurrency, trading above $2, up 11847% YTD. Back in May this year, MATIC hit an all-time high at about $2.62.

This acquisition is part of the company's strategy to lead the ZK-rollups space and become a bigger player among the layer 2 solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Loopring (LRC). Four months back, Polygon committed to investing $1 billion in ZK-rollup-related efforts.

Since then, Polygon has acquired Hermez Network for $250 million in August and recently STARK-based Ethereum-compatible rollup Miden and privacy-focused rollup Nightfall.

“Zero-knowledge is the ultimate frontier for internet-level scale for blockchains,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said.

Founded by Brendan Farmer and Daniel Lubarov, Mir is an Ethereum scaling solution that uses zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof) technology, a cryptographic tool used to create ZK-rollups that enables transactions to be processed without requiring all of their data to be posted on the second largest network.

This technology helps scale Ethereum by reducing the block space and gas fees.

Now, Mir will be integrated into the Polygon ecosystem under the new branding Polygon Zero. Other solutions of the Polygon ecosystem involve Polygon PoS, Polygon Hermez, and Polygon Miden.

The team expects the Polygon Zero ZK-rollup to be ready sometime next year and Polygon Hermez’s zkEVM to launch by mid-next year.

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