Polygon x IMX: everything you need to know

The recently announced partnership between ImmutableX and Polygon will mark a significant step forward for the emerging web3 economy, with their combined tech stack offering a wide variety of opportunities to further reduce user entrance friction coupled with an impressive existing slate of brands and titles already available to them. With ZK EVM in its beta phase and its adoption to the IMX tech coming soon, it’s only a matter of time until we get to see the benefits of this partnership.

Polygon x IMX – the teams behind the deal

Last year, the games built on the two platforms received around $2 billion combined in investment funds as leading Ethereum Immutable X onboarded brands and IP's like GameStop, DC Comics, Marvel, and Disney. Last June, it also introduced a $500 million fund to boost the adoption of web3 gaming, investing in existing success stories like Cross the Ages, Guild of Guardians, and Gods Unchained.

https://twitter.com/Immutable/status/1637877711346753536

On the other side of this deal, Polygon’s existing partnership with blue chip brands like Starbucks (and the NFT projects of companies like Prada and Adidas relying on their technology), coupled with their involvement with major publishers like Ubisoft and Atari, plus their involvement with native projects like Decentraland, makes them another giant in the space. Their joining forces will unlock significant latent potential, and the emergence of new technologies following in the deal’s wake will be a major move in helping user adoption to the ecosystem.

New technologies and new benefits – a rundown

The key element of this partnership is zkEVM, a new scaling technology based on layer 1 Ethereum. This new EVM-compatible zk-rollup – an EVM-compatible virtual machine using zero-knowledge proofs – to execute smart contracts – will be powered by Polygon’s technology while incorporating full Immutable platform support. It will feature the same 2% platform fee as Immutable X does.

This kind of tech is used to compress and organise data more accurately inside the block, increasing the scalability and security of the network. The zkEVM will be $Matic stacked (polygon consensus) and use IMX to pay gas fees. The tech, once fully realised, will also make it much easier for developers to create web3 games and for users to interact with the technology in an indirect form, making it easier to onboard new users.

The zkEVM tech is still in development, and it is expected to be available in testnet version form sometime late in the second quarter of 2023.