Polygon and Immutable partner to help onboard more gamers and developers into web3

techcrunch.com:

Web3 gaming firm Immutable and layer-2 blockchain Polygon hope that a new strategic alliance will accelerate innovation and adoption in the nascent crypto gaming space, the two companies announced at the Game Developer Conference on Monday.

“For us this is a pretty obvious play,” Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of Immutable, said. “We realized very quickly the scaling limitations of Ethereum, but we never wanted to compete with it.” Polygon could help Immutable avoid Ethereum congestion and costs without having to build its own alternative.

The alliance will focus on making web3-enabled games faster, easier and less risky for larger gaming studios and independent developers to get involved.

Last year, games building on both platforms received about $2 billion in investor funding, Ferguson and Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, shared with TechCrunch.

“For me, this is like the next evolution of mainstream adoption,” Wyatt said. “You’re already starting to see blockchain games with higher fidelity.”

Immutable’s new zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) — fancy terminology for virtual machines that compress data to improve scaling and security on the blockchain — will be powered by Polygon technology and supported on its platform. Polygon’s zkEVM scaling technology aims to lower transaction costs while remaining compatible and secure with the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum, which is critical for the long-term growth of the blockchain and its ecosystem.

Polygon is “a very clean, well-polished end-to-end solution and market for game developers and gamers,” Wyatt said. “There’s been some skepticism about where this can go and what is it going to look like […] now you’re going to see it go into overdrive these