Polygon Labs Partners with NEAR Foundation to Bring Zk Proving to WASM Blockchains

According to Blockworks, Polygon Labs has announced a partnership with the NEAR Foundation to introduce zero-knowledge (zk) proving to WebAssembly (WASM) blockchains. This collaboration will allow developers using Polygon's Chain Development Kit (CDK), an open-source codebase, to utilize zkWASM as a prover. In zk technology, a prover aims to demonstrate the accuracy of a claim to a verifier without revealing the information itself, while a verifier confirms the information's accuracy. The integration of a zkWASM prover will simplify the proving process for NEAR layer-1 validators, as they will no longer need to verify individual shards, which are independent unique states of transactions and smart contracts on blockchains. According to a Polygon spokesperson, this development will enable developers to work with programming languages other than Solidity, facilitating the onboarding of new developers into Web3. NEAR is a decentralized cloud computing platform for sharded architecture. This partnership will bring the NEAR protocol closer to Ethereum, allowing its WASM chains to access Ethereum's liquidity, as stated by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. It will also provide an additional layer of customizability for developers using Polygon's CDK. Nailwal explains that projects will have the option to choose from various provers when building with CDK, whether launching or migrating an EVM chain or constructing a WASM chain. An interoperability layer is also being developed to connect WASM chains on NEAR with chains deployed using Polygon's CDK. This will enable networks to access Ethereum liquidity without breaking composability through a shared bridge between CDK chains. Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol, believes that the combined expertise of NEAR and Polygon will expand the zk landscape and defragment liquidity across chains. The zkWASM prover is set to launch next year, along with other provers in the CDK, each offering its own advantages.