Introduction

Polygon’s zkEVM mission is to bring Ethereum to the masses. As an EVM equivalent ZK rollup, zkEVM promises fast network finality of 2 seconds, cheap transactions, and Ethereum security. 

ZettaBlock gives developers access to on-chain data and institutional-grade infrastructure. Now, developers can actualize zkEVM’s mission, bringing Ethereum to industries across finance, media, supply chain management, gaming, healthcare and more.

"ZettaBlock has been a crucial addition to the Polygon zkEVM ecosystem. Their fully managed backend solutions have provided unparalleled access to on-chain data and institution-grade infrastructure. We hope that this will allow Polygon zkEVM to bring Ethereum to a wide range of industries and help set the standard for cloud data platform vendors.” 

 

- Osman Sarman, Ecosystem Partnerships at Polygon Labs

Challenges. Solutions.

Polygon zkEVM aims to replicate the developer experience on par with Ethereum, including making zkEVM data integration effortless from day 0. Polygon works across both consumer and enterprise stakeholders. Enterprise clients, particularly those in highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, have distinct security, privacy and reliability needs.

While strong solutions exist for writing smart contracts, accessing and utilizing zkEVM data in applications remains a challenge.

Developers face significant data and infrastructure challenges:

• zkEVM data is encrypted, requiring both domain knowledge and multiple transforms.

• Siloed on and off chain data require creating and maintaining pipelines to move data.

• Fast block times and reorgs mandate robust data quality checks and processes.

• DIY solutions are expensive, easily exceeding $1M. Significant expertise and engineering resources are needed to build and maintain systems.

• Existing indexing solution lacks the customization to turn business logic into user APIs.

• And many more, such as limited native query patterns, multiple data vendors, high latency, bad data freshness, slow indexing speed, etc.

To complicate matters, zkEVM is a flexible solution that appeals to three types of applications, each with their own requirements:

• Real time applications: That capitalize on zkEVM’s fast finality and showcase the latest data. For example, wallets that want to display real time user balances. 

• Analytical applications: That leverage zkEVM’s public ledger and EVM equivalency to do complex computations and analysis. For example, NFT discovery platforms that want to display historical sales.

• Enterprise applications: That take advantage fo zkEVM’s immutability but have strong privacy and access concerns. For example, tracking product movements across the supply chain.

Polygon chose to collaborate closely with ZettaBlock before launching to address developer and enterprise challenges from day 0. Developers have easy access to on-chain data and institutional-grade data infrastructure to build on.

Real Time Application Challenges and Solutions

Real time applications require real time data.

Polygon’s original blockchain, PoS, unlocked the possibility of real time applications on the blockchain with fast block finality and cheap transactions. zkEVM extends these characteristics. 

Examples of real-time applications that are built using zkEVM include wallets, messaging, payments, gaming, and more. 

To build real time applications on zkEVM , developers must:

• Remove latency across ingestion, transformation, and serving layers.

• Handle block reorgs with sophisticated logic to prevent data loss and misinformation.

• Maintain 100% uptime to ensure accurate and reliable data.

• Create triggers and notifications to capitalize on real time data.

• Support complex logic in real time, to go beyond basic insights.
   

ZettaBlock’s fully managed, real time backend solves these challenges while removing 95% of developer time. 

First, zkEVM data is available at second freshness of 1-2 seconds post block finality. Moreover, solution providers, protocols, and creators can create production grade (custom) zkEVM GraphQL endpoints in one click with 100ms response time. Meanwhile, developers have the option to index multiple columns based on expected use, select required data freshness, and generate APIs in seconds.

Real Time App Example: Wallets Asset Balances

Wallets are fundamental solution providers in any blockchain ecosystem. They serve as the interface between consumers and blockchain data. 

One key requirement is the ability to show users what assets they currently own. However, getting real time balances has a number of challenges. Developers must:

• Generate accurate price data: Across all ERC-20 and NFT tokens.

• Handle off-chain interest: To account for interest accrued overtime before claiming.

• Access data across chains: to build a complete picture. 

• Build super-low-latency APIs: to ensure a smooth user experience on the app. 

   

Developing in-house infra with these capabilities can easily exceed $1M in engineering and maintenance. Fortunately, ZettaBlock's platform offers zkEVM developers immediate access.

Beyond asset balances, advanced user behavior analysis such as active frequency and interactions with DeFi protocols could in turn help wallets to perform detailed user segmentation and gain insights into its user pools.

Figure: A flow-diagram displaying how the information is processed to help the growth of a wallet ecosystem.

Analytics Application Challenges and Solutions

Analytical applications require applying complex logic to big data. 

Currently, Polygon partners with a variety of analytical applications to make data available to non-technical users, media, and institutions. Examples include 3rd party dashboards, NFT discovery sites, dApp portals, and marketplaces.

To build analytical applications, developers must:

• Build and maintain complex infrastructure, including data warehouse, ETL pipelines, staging environment, monitoring, cost optimizations, etc.

• Manage multiple on-/off-chain data sources with additional data modelling, schema maintenance, data quality checks, auto recovery etc. 

ZettaBlock provides a fully-managed environment as a single backend that handles all of these processes. Developers can interact directly with the data via SQL or Python to generate insights. For more complex transform logic, ZettaBlock integrates directly with developers own dbt repos.

Similar to real time applications, the resulting datasets and metrics can be consumed via flexible APIs. ZettaBlock powers analytical applications with:

• Direct integration with dbt repos for data transformations.

• 96% decoded trace and log data, making on chain events human readable.

• Complex query pattern support. N number of tables, cross chains, on- and off-chain data.

• Fast query speeds. One billion rows scanned will return within two seconds.

• SQL and Python interfaces for flexible access.

   

Enterprise Application Challenges and Solutions

Polygon PoS has incredible success onboarding enterprises onto Web3, with big names like Nike, Disney, Reddit, Starbucks. 

As an institutional grade data platform, ZettaBlock is uniquely able to support Polygon’s enterprise motions. As zkEVM is adopted across highly regulated industries such as Finance, Healthcare, and Energy Infrastructure, enterprise’s unique challenges must be addressed.

Enterprise applications must:

• Offer superior performance, in scalability, cost and speed.

• Protect customer data with security and disaster recovery measures.

• Guarantee SLAs to both chain data and platform.

   

ZettaBlock offers a best-in-class architecture with a clear focus on enterprise needs, enabling easy, secure, collaborative, and reliable interaction with zkEVM data, such as:

• Data unification: Seamlessly connect off and on-chain data with petabyte-scale joins.

• Safeguard data and workloads: via security measures such as remote VPC deployment for institutions who want the power of ZettaBlock deployed in their internal systems.

• Reliability: Near-perfect uptimes (99.95%).

Internal BI Support. Community Access.

Public and free access to zkEVM nodes still presents a technical barrier for users to access and understand zkEVM data. 

“The Community is our Backbone” is a core belief of Polygon. It is fundamentally important that:

• The Community has access to zkEVM data

• Has an independent source of truth that does not require technical expertise to understand

To address these needs, zkEVM partnered with ZettaBlock to create a core metric dashboard, freely sharing zkEVM data Polygon’s extensive community.

Revolutionize Web3 development with ZettaBlock

In summary, ZettaBlock helps developers build faster. Infrastructure and middleware are hard and expensive. By providing a fully-managed backend with zero overhead and institutional-grade performance, and enriched, decoded chain datasets, teams building on Polygon are free to focus on creating stunning web3 experiences and applications. 

Learn more at www.zettablock.com.