Polygon Labs Acquires Third ZK Startup, Taking Its ZK Investments to over $1 Billion

Polygon Labs has acquired Toposware, a Zero-Knowledge (ZK) startup, which has been working on its type 1 prover technology for some time now. The acquisition comes as Polygon Labs’ third one – it has acquired Mir Protocol and Hermez Network. It paid over $650 million in total for both those projects. With the Toposware acquisition, Polygon Labs’ investments in the ZK ecosystem go beyond the billion-dollar mark.

The company has focused on delivering scalable technologies to improve the user experience on the Ethereum network, enabling users to witness faster transactions and pay lesser gas fees. Developers, too, benefit from its scalability solutions by way of deploying high-execution dApps (decentralized applications) and bringing innovation. Polygon has brought a scalable environment with its sidechain that has witnessed massive usage and popularity.

More recently, it has shifted to developing a layer 2 rollup network – the Polygon zkEVM, which works differently than a sidechain and can provide much higher throughputs. The zkEVM chain is powered by ZK-rollups, a technology that allows transactions to get executed on its layer 2 network in split seconds and settled on the Ethereum mainchain for robust confirmation.

The ZK prover technology helps the zkEVM prove the validity of transactions to Ethereum nodes without revealing too much data, making transaction settlements faster on the layer 1 network. This withholding of data also ensures transactions remain private, offering privacy use cases to zkEVM’s users.

Polygon Labs’ investment in Toposware will further the development of its ZK prover mechanism, making its rollup utility secure and push scalability to new heights. With that, Polygon’s zkEVM can grow past present-day layer 2 favorites like Arbitrum and Optimism – two rollup chains relying on the optimistic rollup technology.

Unlike ZK-rollups, these chains do not require fraud proofs generated by ZK provers and are much easier to implement. However, with Polygon Labs investing massively in the ZK space, that can change and push ZK-rollups ahead of their optimistic counterparts.

Source: Polygon