- The Astar network announced the recent rollout of the Astar zkEVM Testnet which has now gone live.
- They credited the newly attained achievement to Polygon CDK as a necessary Blockchain environment.
In a recent announcement, the Astar network has revealed that the zkEVM Testnet has gone live. Recognizing the significance of the new development, Polygon responded to the announcement, noting that Astar’s ZK powered layer-2 chain was created using Polygon CDK.
Dubbed zKatana, the testnet is in line with Astar’s Japanese roots, which references swords with a curved, single-edged blade, most known for their use by Japanese Samurai in battle.
They designed the recent rollout to help businesses implement new and innovative web3 strategies to speed up adoption for their respective institutions.
Besides this, the rollout promises to serve businesses with much-needed security, privacy, and scalability.
Astar zkEVM Testnet is now live.@AstarNetwork's ZK powered L2 chain – created with Polygon CDK – helps businesses implement web3 strategies while guaranteeing security, privacy, and scalability.https://t.co/HkIcQfhQyC
— Polygon Devs (@0xPolygonDevs) October 23, 2023
The launch remains significant to the network, as it attempts to expand its journey to offer the most holistic tech stack while serving and empowering builders and institutions looking to dive into the Web3 ecosystem securely.
Along with many other benefits, zKatana will enable developers to test-run their ideas. The network will confirm functionality and verify hypotheses on gas usage and other parameters.
In an official blogspot, the network details the structure of the zKatana, including some of its benefits such as; Security inherited from Ethereum, high EVM equivalence, speed, scalability, reduced transaction costs and interoperability with existing EVM tools and chains.
Highlighting the relevance of the Polygon network in the recent development, the blog post explained that Polygon CDK was the most fitting blockchain environment to develop on. Polygon CDK was branded as the most supported, technically advanced zk roll up solution.
As the blog post explains;
“Building on the Ethereum mainnet is expensive; ZK-rollups perform off-chain computations on Layer 2, enabling faster and cheaper transactions while still maintaining Ethereum’s security.” The blog post read.
The future of the Astar Network; everything to watch out for
After positioning itself as a leading smart contract chain in the Polkadot ecosystem, Astar Network, revealed that it is now turning its gears towards a different route. Going forward, the network will be solely focused on facilitating EVM development. It also seeks to guarantee privacy, security, and scalability as a platform.
Notably, Astar began its journey as Plasm, focusing majorly on strictly building and scaling technologies for the Polkadot network. Although the network has since evolved, it affirms that Poldakot still provides it with the understanding of scalability solutions to run the Layer 2 network.
Conclusively, the network refers to the recently launched Astar zkEVM testnet as “a new addition to the existing Astar Tech Stack. It comprises a variety of tools and products to offer companies and developers the most suitable tech to build their products.”
