Vitalik Buterin and Polygon Co-founder Dispute Verkle Trees Integration

• Their argument on X raises questions about Ethereum and its data storage capabilities.
• Bjelic questioned if moving Ethereum to Verkle Trees was the best course of action.

It seems that Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), and Mihailo Bjelic, co-founder of Polygon (MATIC), are arguing over whether or not Verkle Trees should be available on Ethereum. Bjelic appears to be opposed to the notion.

Their argument on X platform raises questions about Ethereum and its data storage capabilities, which might hinder its ideal performance.

Best Course of Action

It all began when Bjelic questioned if moving Ethereum to Verkle Trees was the best course of action. He presented his case by pointing out that the present Ethereum network will most certainly be zk-ficated soon.

Quickly after, Buterin replied, stating, “ZK-ifying keccak merkle patricia trees with worst case 300 MB witness sizes is a non-starter.” While Ethereum’s existing Merkle tree lacks this functionality, he continued by explaining how the Verkle Trees were built to be zk-friendly.

Typically, Merkle Patricia trees provide the basis for the main data structure used by the Ethereum blockchain network. A replacement using Verkle Trees, which have shorter proofs and greater bandwidth, is being considered because of its limitations.

Moreover, Polygon zkEVM’s capacity led Bjelic to claim that the present architecture can support the 300MB benchmark proposed by the Ethereum co-founder. To top it all off, Bjelic claimed it could do all of this in only 12 seconds of total block time. Probably the only real obstacle is that it would need around ten server-class CPUs.

Bjelic’s discussion about the Polygon zkEVM follows the protocol’s earlier-year transformation into a Type 2 ZK-EVM, which moves it closer to the Ethereum mainnet.

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