Thread by @hmalviya9

They're saying Polygon Miden is the next big thing?

Is it really true??

Let's find out... my unfiltered thoughts on Polygon Miden and its potential 🧵

Before I start explaining what Miden is all about, let's imagine for a moment that every single post you do on X should be processed only after a bunch of nodes recompute and reach a consensus that your tweet is valid and it's following the set policies by Twitter.

In that scenario, even if Elon decided to buy and use all H100s as nodes, your tweet will still take a couple of seconds to appear on the feed, and you're gonna get so frustrated and move to some other platforms which provide you the instant processing of information you're supposed to share on the internet.

On technical grounds, the information could be processed instantly when you decide to use local and concurrent processing like what Twitter and other social media platforms do in actual reality.

They use a computer science design called the actor model to enable that superior UX for end users.

What is an actor model design?

Actor model is a mathematical model of concurrent computation which enables actors (end users) to make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received... and they could also make state changes locally.

Now imagine using the same actor model design in blockchain on an executional level.. Game changer, right?

It'll enable faster transaction processing, and state changes could also be managed locally.

Polygon Miden is doing exactly the same thing.. they're using actor model design to perform concurrent computation on transactions and state changes... and they're also using zero-knowledge proofs to validate the accuracy of transactions which are executed locally.

There are 4 important players in the Polygon Miden Architecture

- Accounts
- Notes
- Transactions
- States

Accounts

Accounts are like wallets which hold assets and define rules on how you could use those assets.

There are two types of accounts: regular accounts and smart contract-based accounts.

Now users have options to choose account privacy.

They could use public wallets like we all usually use, or they could choose to use a private account where only the hash of the account will be stored on-chain.

Once you set up an account, and if you want to send an asset to another account, in that case, you're gonna create notes and receive nodes, and verify it using a nullifier, then the amount will be credited to the receiver's end.

Now, what are notes?

Notes are like cheques. In traditional banking, you deposit cheques with a couple of details around the receiving party and all... notes operate in the same way. You could provide a description whenever you decide to send an asset to another party

When you initiate a transaction, a note will be created.. now you also have the option to make this note private or public.. if the note is public, you could send it to any valid account, and they could nullify it, store it on the database, and get the asset on their account.

But when you choose to go private, you could create notes with additional data which should only be nullified by the account you really want to send the asset to.

Now the current state of all accounts and notes will be stored off-chain. Polygon Miden aims for private and parallel transaction execution and state bloat minimization.

At its core, the idea is simple: Instead of storing the full state data with the operators, the users store their data, and the rollup only keeps track of commitments to the data. At least for private accounts, some smart contracts need to be publicly visible.

Now you all understand the inner workings of Miden, the next question you should ask is it an L1/L2/L3 or anything else?

It's a zk-rollup L2 with its own VM which supports client-side proving and high throughput, and you could write code in TypeScript and Rust and deploy on it.

Also, Polygon Miden is not EVM compatible.

The whole idea of building Miden VM is to support the development of privacy-focused use cases like private DeFi, Web3 gaming, etc.

examples: @Aze_Cards @Keom_Research

In conclusion, I think Polygon Miden is pretty cool, and they're using a hybrid UTXO model to enable parallel processing of transactions.

That's great too, as I am particularly bullish on hybrid UTXO model designs for scalability.

Also, I'm excited for the Miden testnet release in Q4.

Here are some of the best people you should follow for the research driven content
- @zerokn0wledge_
- @stacy_muur
- @DefiIgnas
- @TheDeFISaint
- @0xMughal
- @ViktorDefi
- @RubiksWeb3hub
- @poopmandefi
- @0xSalazar
- @Only1temmy
- @CryptoKoryo
- @0xTindorr
- @eli5_defi
- @tombheads
- @DistilledCrypto

I hope you enjoyed reading this thread.

If you appreciate my work, please like, share, and repost the tweet below

https://x.com/hmalviya9/status/1796545845384384627