NEAR Foundation and Polygon Labs collaborate to create zkWASM, a zero-knowledge system that improves security and interoperability for WASM chains.
Polygon Labs and the NEAR Foundation, well-known for their contributions to the NEAR protocol’s ecosystem, have announced a ground-breaking partnership to develop zkWASM, a zero-knowledge-proof technology designed specifically for WASM-based blockchains.
This joint venture was presented during NEARCON, the yearly premier gathering for the NEAR community, which was held in Lisbon. Through this strategic alliance, NEAR’s expertise in WASM runtime and Polygon’s mastery of zero-knowledge scaling technologies should be combined.
The project aims to connect Ethereum and NEAR Protocol, giving WASM networks access to Ethereum’s abundant liquidity. Additionally, it establishes the foundation for an interoperability layer that is being developed, which will allow a shared liquidity pool to exist across different blockchain environments, such as other layer-1s and EVM layer-2s.
The customization that the zkWASM prover will provide to developers, boosting the flexibility and options available when constructing or converting EVM or WASM chains, was noted by Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon.
For NEAR validators, the zkWASM prover has the potential to simplify the validation procedure greatly. Scalability and a more decentralized NEAR Protocol are enhanced when validators avoid the laborious process of shard validation by producing a solitary zero-knowledge proof.
Illia Polosukhin, a co-founder of NEAR Protocol, expressed excitement for the partnership and emphasized the advantages zero-knowledge proofs will provide for web3.
In addition to improving NEAR’s capabilities, he believes that working with Polygon Labs on this project will significantly broaden the field of zero-knowledge proofing.