DeFi
Polygon Labs Reaches $1 Billion in Zero-Knowledge Investment with Latest Toposware Acquisition – DL News
- Polygon Labs has acquired long-time collaborator Toposware.
- The two companies have developed a new type 1 standard.
- Polygon claims that the Prover will allow EVM networks to easily become ZK-based chains.
Polygon Labs announced another acquisition today, adding the 11-person team, intellectual property and technology stack of technology company Toposware to its ranks.
In total, Polygon Labs spent $1 billion on zero-knowledge technology investments.
Zero-knowledge technology is a type of cryptographic proof system that can confirm the validity of blockchain transactions without revealing all their details. This is one way to ensure the scalability of Layer 2 blockchains, an area of focus for Polygon Labs and its family of networks.
The Toposware deal marks the third team based on similar zero-knowledge technology to Polygon Labs – the company previously acquired Hermez and Mir in 2021.
The zero-knowledge technology competes with another technology called optimistic rollups, but prominent blockchain figures such as Ethereum Vitalik Buterin favor ZK as the better solution because it is faster and cheaper.
“ZK is simpler, not only from a development perspective, but also for users and their user experience,” a Polygon spokesperson said. DL News.
Zero-knowledge scaling
The Toposware acquisition isn’t just a bet on zero-knowledge crypto. It is also a bet on scalability and the possibility for all blockchains to interact with each other.
Indeed, a blockchain ecosystem the size of the Internet would likely require multiple chains, introducing another problem, fragmentation – where information is siled in different networks, and it is non-trivial to migrate data across these chains.
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Polygon Labs claims to be working towards interoperability – what the industry calls networks that can interact with each other – for ZK-based channels.
Part of this effort is to enable any blockchain using the Ethereum Virtual Machine to become a layer 2 blockchain using zero-knowledge technology.
ZK-based technology is not easily compatible with EVM networks, which are popular among blockchain developers.
EVM blockchains are similar to Ethereum in that they run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine and use the same smart contract logic.
For an EVM chain to become a ZK-based network and connect to Ethereum, it requires a type 1 prover, which convinces a blockchain that a transaction is valid.
Toposware and Polygon Labs were development such a prover.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our DeFi correspondent based in Nigeria. He covers DeFi and technology. To share tips or story information, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.