Jordi Baylina Unveils ZisK to Solve Ethereum’s Issues

- Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina launches independent ZisK project - ZisK to address Ethereum scalability, gas fees via open-source zkEVM stack On June 18, 2025, Cointelegraph reported that Jordi Baylina, Polygon co-founder, launched a new, independent zero-knowledge project named ZisK. This initiative, which spins off from Polygon, will include the core developers from the Polygon zkEVM prover team, consisting of seven developers who have collaborated for over three years. ZisK aims to develop a fully open-source and modular zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkEVM) stack, which was initially developed by Polygon. The project plans to support multiple high-level programming languages, including Rust, and aims to accelerate the adoption of decentralized technologies. Furthermore, one of ZisK's primary goals is to address Ethereum's persistent scalability and gas fee issues by providing low-latency, real-time cryptographic proving. Despite shifting his primary focus to ZisK, Baylina will continue to serve Polygon in an advisory role and retain his title as co-founder. Polygon Labs had incubated the intellectual property and codebases for the zkEVM technology since May 2024. Subsequently, ZisK became fully independent on June 13, 2025, and as a result, SilentSig GmbH, a Swiss company wholly owned by Baylina, received these assets. This development follows shortly after Sandeep Nailwal, another Polygon co-founder, took full executive control of the Polygon Foundation as its first official CEO, a leadership change that is part of a broader strategic shift for Polygon. This shift includes phasing out its zkEVM chain and reallocating resources to enhance the Polygon PoS network and the AggLayer cross-chain aggregation protocol. As of 21:16 UTC on June 18, POL (previously MATIC) traded at $0.189. On June 18, CoinMarketCap reported its 24-hour trading volume decreased by 3.233%.