The Near Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Near Protocol, has announced a partnership with Polygon Labs, an Ethereum scaling solutions company, in an effort to improve interoperability between chains.
The deal brings the Near protocol closer to one of the largest blockchain networks, Ethereum, and allows blockchains with WebAssembly (WASM) technology to use Ethereum’s liquidity, according to a press release.
The partnership aims to build zkWASM, a zero-knowledge prover for WebAssembly (WASM) blockchains. The zkWASM maximizes developer customizability, allowing users to choose from a number of provers at build time.
“In the future, through an evolving interoperability layer, chains will also be able to access shared liquidity across a unified ecosystem of CDK-deployed chains, including alternative layer-1s, EVM layer-2s and WASM chains,” the report said . press release.
The new development will be more efficient for Near validators as they will no longer have to do the hard work of validating a shard, the press release said. Instead, validators can generate a zero-knowledge proof, simplifying the process and improving scalability.
Zero-knowledge technology is a form of cryptography that has been identified as a hot trend for the digital asset industry this year because it eliminates the need for individuals to routinely provide personal information to various websites or online applications.
“We are proud to partner with Near on this exciting research initiative to further drive the development and adoption of ZK technology,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. The zkWASM prover maximizes developer customizability, meaning projects can choose from a number of provers when building with Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), whether that’s launching or migrating an EVM chain, or building a WASM chain for closer Ethereum alignment and access to liquidity.”
The zkWASM prover is currently in active development and is expected to be launched next year, according to a press release.