Polygon Finished A Major Upgrade Napoli Hard Fork

Reported by The Defiant, the Polygon PoS sidechain executed its Napoli hard fork, becoming the first network to support RIP-7212.

Napoli introduced support for three major upgrades included in Ethereum’s recent Dencun hard fork, spanning EIP-1153: Transient Storage, EIP-6780: SELFDESTRUCT, and EIP-5656: memory copying instruction.

EIP-1153 improves the efficiency of block space usage, while EIP-6780 limits the scope of the selfdestruct opcode, and EIP-5656 reduces the technical overhead associated with copying memory.

Polygon is also set to introduce support for EIP-4844, the primary fee-reducing upgrade included in Dencun, as part of its Feijoa upgrade in May.

RIP-7212 paves the way for mainstream interoperability

Polygon emphasized Napoli’s inclusion of the RIP-7212 upgrade, which was incubated by RollCall, a recently formed collective of Layer 2 teams.

RIP-7212 introduced precompile support for the secp256r1 curve — an elliptic curve commonly used for digital signatures across the internet. The upgrade was finalized six weeks ago, with developers describing its adoption as paving the way for greater interoperability with mainstream tech and devices.

“All of tech uses [secp256r1], so having a precompile for it would allow things like storing keys in iPhone secure enclaves,” tweeted Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation.

David Silverman, the VP of product at Polygon Labs, said that RIP-7212 provides “a new native account abstraction method for pass keys, DNS, verification, and more.”

Several other Layer 2s including ZkSync Era and Optimism are working to implement support for RIP-7212 in the coming.

Layer 2s move toward collaborative development

Silverman also emphasized the emergence of RollCall “enshrining” Layer 2s as Ethereum’s core scaling mechanism alongside Dencun, emphasizing that RollCall provides a new vehicle for the Ethereum ecosystem to govern itself.

“All of the rollups, we might fight a lot on Twitter, but we actually sit together in this new kind of committee [and] talk about proposed EVM changes — changes that are never going to actually come to Ethereum itself, but [that] the rollups are implementing to improve user behavior,” Silverman said.

“The Ethereum Foundation and the broader community is looking at L2s as an innovation hub and place where users are going to first onboard, as opposed to just naturally going to Ethereum at first,” Silverman continued. “L2 is where scaling is going to happen in order for us to achieve mass adoption.”

Polygon described RollCall as “helping L2s extend the EVM while remaining committed to the same open standards process that has guided Ethereum since genesis.”