Crypto news: Polygon Labs acquires Toposware, bringing its total investment in ZK technology to 1 billion dollars.
The company has stated that this acquisition raises Polygon’s cumulative investment in zero-knowledge technology to over 1 billion dollars. The Toposware team is responsible for Polygon’s Type 1 Prover technology.
Furthermore, Avail, a spinoff of Polygon specialized in data availability, has raised 43 million dollars in series A funding. This news follows by three months the announcement of Avail’s 27 million dollar seed funding round.
Let’s see all the details below.
Summary
Crypto news: the team of Toposware behind the innovative Type 1 Prover technology of Polygon
As anticipated, Polygon Labs has acquired Toposware, a company specialized in blockchain research and engineering, marking its third investment in zero-knowledge (ZK) startups in the last three years.
Toposware has collaborated with Polygon Labs to develop its Type 1 Prover, which allows blockchain compatible with Ethereum to implement zero-knowledge proofs without requiring significant modifications.
With this acquisition, eleven engineers from Toposware will join the existing ZK development teams at Polygon. Polygon has stated that this agreement brings its total investment in ZK technology to over 1 billion dollars.
In 2021, Polygon had acquired two other companies focused on the scalability and privacy of Ethereum, Mir and Hermez, for a total of 650 million dollars through multiple transactions.
Technology ZK allows one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing additional information. In the blockchain field, this improves privacy by allowing the validation of transactions without revealing their details.
A spokesperson for Polygon stated the following regarding this:
“We are constantly looking for potential acquisitions to strengthen our research and development efforts in the field of ZK. At the moment there are no other operations under consideration. ZK technology is pushing our efforts on multiple fronts.”
Forecast on ZK-Proof by 2030 as the controversy over the ‘ZK’ trademark rages
Furthermore, it is expected that only Web3 services will require about 90 billion ZK-proof by 2030, equivalent to 83,000 transactions per second. Several cryptocurrency companies, including StarkWare and Matter Labs, are working on this technology.
Recently, a controversia has emerged regarding the trademark on ZK technology, as Matter Labs, the company behind the layer-2 solution zkSync, has attempted to obtain intellectual property rights for the term “ZK”.
Matter Labs withdrew the request shortly after, following protests from researchers and the crypto community. For Polygon, the action was intended to “appropriate” a common good:
“This is a serious problem. They are essentially trying to steal people’s hard work. We believe that ZK is a common good […] We will explore legal action, if necessary. We are pleased that they have decided to abandon the ‘ZK’ trademark; however, they are still trying to register other trademarks related to ZK, which we consider highly problematic.”
Avail, the blockchain of the future: $43 million for its global growth
Avail, a renowned blockchain platform known for its data availability network, has announced that it has secured $43 million in a Series A funding round.
This round was led by prominent investors such as Founders Fund, Dragonfly, and Cyber Fund. The news comes three months after Avail announced that it had raised 27 million dollars in initial funding.
The platform, created by Polygon in March 2023, has as its main objective the creation of data availability networks, which help blockchains to store information in an economical and accessible way.
This type of technology proves particularly useful in the context of blockchain scalability, as it helps level 2 “rollup” networks manage transaction data and other information.
All this without overloading the main level of the blockchain, thus reducing costs for end users.
The funds raised will be directed towards the construction of the Unification Layer di Avail, an advanced modular technology stack that combines data availability, aggregation, and shared security.
Allowing modular blockchains to scale and interact without permissions and securely. The Avail team stated that a portion of the funds will also be allocated to the development of the “Fusion Security” layer, expected to go live at the beginning of 2025.
Which will bring criptovalute like Ether (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) to contribute to the security of the Avail ecosystem. The co-founder of Avail, Anurag Arjun, has expressed his satisfaction with the new capital raised.
In particular, emphasizing the willingness to accelerate the development of the platform, expand the global presence, and address the critical challenges of Web3, such as blockchain fragmentation, insufficient data availability, and limited scalability.
