Polygon Labs and NEAR announce ZK prover for WASM integration

The developers of the NEAR and Polygon networks are teaming up to make a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for Web Assembly (WASM) blockchains, according to a associated announcement connected Nov. 8. The caller prover, called “zkWASM,” volition for the archetypal clip let WASM-based networks to articulation the Polygon ecosystem.

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WASM is simply a binary acquisition format that was developed for usage successful web browsers. Some blockchain networks besides usage it arsenic a computation motor alternatively of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). For example, NEAR, Stellar, Polkadot, and Internet Computer each usage WASM alternatively of EVM.

Related: Stellar joins Bytecode confederation to assistance make EVM alternate WASM

According to the announcement, the caller zkWASM prover is “in progressive improvement and should beryllium disposable adjacent year.” Once completed, it volition beryllium integrated into Polygon’s concatenation improvement kit (CDK), which allows developers to rotation up customized blockchain networks based connected the archetypal parameters they set. This means that developers volition person the enactment to usage the CDK to make WASM networks and integrate them into the broader Polygon ecosystem, including the Ethereum mainnet itself.

According to Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, the zkWASM prover volition let the web to integrate much with Ethereum, improving liquidity for users:

“NEAR is integrating much with Ethereum by innovating successful caller probe frontiers, and the shared expertise of NEAR and Polygon volition grow the ZK scenery and defragment liquidity crossed chains,” helium said.

The announcement besides stated that zkWASM volition beryllium utilized to amended validator ratio connected the NEAR web itself, arsenic the zero-knowledge impervious process volition chopped down connected computational overhead compared to the existent enactment of validating a shard. This means that the NEAR web volition get “better scalability and accrued decentralization,” it stated.

Polygon is attempting to build a multi-chain ecosystem, which it calls “Polygon 2.0.” The caller strategy volition diagnostic bridges that usage zero-knowledge proofs to transportation assets from 1 concatenation to the other. In September, the developer unveiled plans to replace the Polygon network's existent autochthonal coin, MATIC, with a caller 1 called “POL.”