NEAR goes modular: zkWASM prover, NEAR DA and EigenLayer-based fast finality
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Bullish call$NEAR+214%since this piece, moved with the callHow it played out ↓Analyzes NEAR announcements: a zkWASM prover for Polygon CDK, a cheap DA layer and a fast finality layer with EigenLayer, arguing it positions NEAR for modular rollup season.
Key claims
100kB calldata on NEAR costs USD 0.0033 vs USD 26.22 on Ethereum L1, about 8,000x cheaper (Sept 2023)
Fast finality layer cuts finality to 3 to 4 seconds
Settlement up to 4,000x cheaper than Ethereum
NEAR Protocol is going modular and is coming to Ethereum!
Recently, @NEARProtocol made some big announcements:
🚀 Development of zkWASM prover with @0xPolygon
🚀 NEAR Data Availability layer.
🚀 NEAR Fast Finality layer built with @eigencloud
This is big for NEAR and a win for the Ethereum ecosystem! 🍾
But let's explore in detail what these things mean! 👇
🚀 Development of zkWASM prover with Polygon
The NEAR Foundation is set to become a core contributor to @0xPolygon CDK (Chain Development Kit), which will greatly expand developer options for building custom blockchains on Polygon's open source tech stack. Once finished, the addition of a zkWASM prover will provide even more customizability for developers utilizing Polygon CDK and allow for execution layer designs beyond (zk)EVM.
This means that projects using Polygon CDK will have the option to choose from a variety of provers. This flexibility applies whether they are launching or migrating an EVM chain, or building a WASM chain for closer alignment with Ethereum and access to liquidity.
In a nutshell, the zkWASM prover is a runtime that will generate zero-knowledge proofs to verify the correctness of native WASM VM execution.
This is big as builders could enable broad support for (web2) programming languages that go for beyond Solidity. WASM execution environments are universal. They can support programs written in Rust, C, C++. Typescript & more.
WASM execution goes beyond the contemporary notion of containerized, restricted and limited execution environments that exist as wall-fenced ecosystems with only limited support for languages, app designs and use cases. WASM opens up a limitless design space of software that run on top of a decentralized tech stack.
Application designs will emerge that go beyond the blockchain-on-blockchain model we all have in our heads today. Programms will not just be smart contracts anymore necessarily. The opportunities with WASM are truly limitless.
🚀 NEAR Data Availability (DA) Layer
Part of the NEAR Open Web Stack, NEAR DA is a groundbreaking innovation that offers robust, cost-efficient data availability for rollups and Ethereum developers.
NEAR DA is set to launch with the support of a number of well established players in the modular space that will integrate with NEAR DA. This includes shared sequencers like @MadaraStarknet by StarkNet, RaaS frameworks like @vistaralabs and @dymension but also WASM (@fluentxyz) or Move (@movementlabsxyz) execution layers.
With NEAR DA, ETH rollups and Ethereum developers get cost-effective, reliable data availability. 100kB of calldata on NEAR will cost $0.0033 as of September 2023, while the same calldata on Ethereum L1 will run users $26.22. That’s 8,000 times cheaper!
⚠️ If you want to learn more about DA and its importance in the context of rollups, have a look here: twitter.com/Castle__Cap/status/1717526579109339596
🚀 NEAR Fast Finality layer built with EigenLayer
In partnership with @eigencloud, NEAR is building the world's first fast finality layer for Ethereum L2s. This groundbreaking development will significantly reduce transaction finality from minutes or hours to just 3-4 seconds. Additionally, the cost of settlement on this new finality layer will be up to 4'000 times cheaper than on Ethereum.
Moreover, this advancement will reduce liquidity fragmentation between L2s that share the fast finality layer. As a modular building block, this also doesn't impact other tech stack decisions. Rollups can for example still make individual decisions around the sequencing solution they use.
The collaboration, spearheaded by Pagoda, the NEAR ecosystem development team, will furthermore help transition the NEAR-Ethereum Rainbow Bridge to an actively validated service (AVS) secured by Eigenlayer's restaking mechanism.
This partnership will not only help projects building on Ethereum, but NEAR too, create a better bridging experience between NEAR and Ethereum, allowing transactions to reach finality faster, with stronger security guarantees.
I have written about the idea of a fast finality layer on EigenLayer before. While this is not exactly what I described, it comes pretty close.
High Level Mechanics:
1⃣ Sequencer receives user transaction
2⃣ Sequencer orders transactions
3⃣ Transactions finalized on NEAR
4⃣ EigenLayer-powered AVS reviews transactions
5⃣ Finalization on Ethereum
Remember, the fast UX that rollups provide is thanks to the soft fast finality guarantees by the sequencer. Thus basically equals a promise of a sequencer that a transaction will eventually be included in a block. However, there is no actual guarantee that it will.
With almost instant finalization on NEAR and an additional crypto-economic security layer in the form of the EigenLayer based AVS, this fast finality solution will provide a fast UX but with much higher security guarantees that are reached within seconds, not minutes or hours.
⚠️ Read my original take on EigenLayer based fast finality layers: twitter.com/zerokn0wledge_/status/1703716152441278744
🔍 Conclusion
In my opinion, NEAR is making some really big moves here.
ZK-proven WASM execution is something few understand today but that will melt faces in the future. Also very bullish for Polygon and its CDK to have Near contribute on the zkWASM prover! This will enable entirely new use cases and break down barriers of entry for devs that built with the CDK.
The fast finality layer and the DA solution on the other hand have the potential to become important modular building blocks for rollups (and modular chains more broadly) across multiple ecosystems.
This positions NEAR well for rollup season and the modular narrative. With increasing integration with rollup tech stacks and RaaS frameworks, NEAR adoption will increase, which I'm sure will translate into more ecosystem activity in general.
Additionally, composability & interoperability with Ethereum improves, as the two ecosystems move closer together, creating opportunity for cross-chain applications.
In conclusion, this is definitely a win for everyone involved. Ethereum and the L2 space get one of the strongest tech teams to work on modular infra for L2 scaling and NEAR will likely gain significant adoption and will benefit from improved composability with Ethereum. 🪬✨
QUOTING @zerokn0wledge_
0/ Soft finality guarantees provided by rollup sequencer let us enjoy fast tx confirmations & the L2 UX we love! 🚀 But with hard finality still coming from L1, there are security risks involved. EigenSettle on @eigencloud can fix this. ✨ So, WTF is EigenSettle? (0/30) 🧵👇
0/ Soft finality guarantees provided by rollup sequencer let us enjoy fast tx confirmations & the L2 UX we love! 🚀 But with hard finality still coming from L1, there are security risks involved. EigenSettle on @eigencloud can fix this. ✨ So, WTF is EigenSettle? (0/30) 🧵👇
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How the call played out · since 11 Nov 2023
Prices as of 23 Oct 2026This piece takes a view on $NEAR, so that move is read against the call.
A zkWASM prover with Polygon, a DA layer 8,000x cheaper than Ethereum and fast finality should drive significant NEAR adoption.
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