- Polygon has acquired another ZK team.
- The newly acquired team boasts a wealth of talent and experience.
- The two teams will already boast a good working relationship.
The first signs of Polygon’s interest in zero-knowledge technology came in 2021, when the company shelled out big money to acquire Hermez Network and Mir Protocol in quick succession. Nearly three years later, it’s clear that the company isn’t just interested in the technology, but sees it as the endgame for scaling Ethereum, as it makes this technology central to its new multichain vision.
As the project progresses along this expanded and refocused roadmap, Polygon Labs has taken another step to strengthen the ZK team by acquiring Toposware, a ZK research company.
What does this new acquisition bring?
talented team
On Tuesday, June 4, Polygon Labs announced that Toposware had joined the company’s ZK team as part of its recent acquisition.
Toposware is the ZK research company behind Topos, a project described as the “first zkEcosystem” that enables developers to deploy execution layers and dApps with native interoperability.
According to the company’s team page, it currently consists of 18 people, including David Palm, the company’s director of engineering. Palm boasts five years of experience at Parity Technologies, founded by Gavin Wood, where he also served as Head of Engineering.
The company’s CEO, Theo Gauthier, and lead cryptographers Robin Salen and Alonso Gonzalez have also authored several papers on cryptography. Salen’s most recent paper seeks to make Tip-5, the cryptographic hash function used on the TON blockchain, more efficient for common use cases.
Polygon Labs plans to leverage all of this experience and talent to further strengthen its ZK arsenal and products such as AggLayer, Polygon CDK, Polygon zkEVM and PoS chains, which it also plans to transition to the ZK validium chain.
Interestingly, the two teams are likely already collaborating, as they collaborated on Type 1 proofs for AggLayer, Polygon’s interoperability protocol.
Technological innovation?
Polygon and Toposware Type 1 provers have been praised for their innovation in zero-knowledge technology.
A prover is an entity in a blockchain network that proves to other entities, called verifiers, that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data.
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s August 2022 classification of zkEVMs, Type 1 zkEVMs provide the highest level of equivalence to Ethereum. This high EVM parity offers advantages in terms of ease of deploying dApps, but this ease comes at a significant cost, as the EVM was not designed with ZK affinity in mind. The lack of ZK affinity means that proving network equivalence with Ethereum is more complicated and impractical. But Polygon and Toposware Type 1 provers promise to change the narrative.
The companies submitted results showing that provers can prove Ethereum blocks at an average total cost of $0.20 to $0.50, about 36 times faster than competitors. These numbers are expected to improve with the launch of the Plonky 3 proof system in late 2024.
According to Polygon Labs, any EVM chain, including Layer 1, can, with a few modifications to its code, become a ZK-based Layer 2 chain that leverages open source proof codes to prove data to Ethereum. The team explains that rather than building Layer 2 from scratch or making significant modifications, chains that follow this path can still connect to the AggLayer and share liquidity with other Polygon-based chains and Ethereum.
On the flip side
- Polygon’s acquisition of ZK involved a significant cost of over $1 billion.
- Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal was an early investor in Toposware.
Why This Matters
The Ethereum Layer 2 space has become increasingly competitive over the past year. Polygon’s recent acquisition of Toposware has further strengthened the project’s prospects of taking the lead, with several experts suggesting that ZK provide the endgame for expansion.
To learn more about Polygon, read:
Why Polygon (MATIC) Prefers Distrust Chain for AggLayer Security
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