"Polygon Runaway" Miden: A Truly Technical Fork

Recently, Miden @0xMiden officially spun out from Polygon, and I actually think this matter is more important than most people realize.
This is not just simple team independence, but an irreversible technical fork has occurred in the L2 direction.
Polygon has been very clear in the past two years: fully promoting AggLayer, unifying different chains into a composable settlement layer, allowing the entire ecosystem to interconnect, aggregate, and share liquidity like a modular network.
But Miden is taking a completely opposite direction - it insists on cutting from the execution layer to build a completely redefined ZK-VM (a provable execution machine based on STARK).

These two paths are fundamentally incompatible.
A puzzle on how to connect all L2s into one system;
A pursuit of how to push the performance and expressiveness of the next generation of VMs to the limit.
When Polygon aims to bring everyone into the same framework, Miden chooses a more difficult but "pure" route: not chasing narratives, not spiraling transaction costs, but deeply cultivating underlying innovations in the execution layer.

So behind the spin-out, it is actually that the direction has gone to two different worlds:
Polygon leverages "network effects, aggregation, and ecological scalability";
Miden @0xMiden is pursuing an "execution innovation, verifiable computation, and a truly 0 to 1 VM architecture."

And this divergence itself is the core signal of the next round of L2 competition.

While the market is still discussing TPS, gas halving, and which stack is cheaper, a few projects have already started to move further ahead:
Reshape the execution model, allowing the chain to natively support more complex computations and more authentic applications.

This will bring a new competitive landscape - the rollup framework is not the focus, the real difference lies in:
- Who can make ZK VM the industry default execution layer.
- Who can make complex calculations feasible on-chain for the first time.

Polygon lost a team, but the industry gained a ZK execution faction that insists on underlying innovation.
And teams that break away to continue doing difficult things often become the starting point of the next big narrative.

#Miden #ZKVM #Layer2 #KAITOAI