Building together > Building Alone: Meet the AggLayer’s Core Contributors

This post was updated on September 18th, 2024.

The AggLayer is designed to be a net-positive solution for any chain that connects. It sets aside zero-sum competition and replaces it with collaboration in order to give chains, developers, and users access to deep, unified liquidity and better UX. 

Big claim: Interoperability is better when value isn’t extracted from connected chains. 

What does that look like in practice?

As an open-source, neutral public good, the AggLayer connects chains together to create a multichain ecosystem that feels like using a single chain. The AggLayer unifies isolated, siloed liquidity and blockspace in a positive-sum tradeoff: Interoperability across chains that create a flywheel of mutual success. 

This post highlights key AggLayer contributors, including core infra builders, AggChains, and Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) providers.

Core Infra Builders: Laying the AggLayer’s Foundation

In addition to Polygon Labs developers and researchers, there’s a rich network of builders devoted to core AggLayer functionality.

Dapdap: Dapdap is focused on tooling for chain abstraction by building a custom, unified, user-centric interface for the AggLayer as part of its Decentralised Front-ends as a Service (DFaaS). 

Espresso: This team is building a sequencing marketplace that will address some ongoing challenges of rollup interoperability. This solution will make the AggLayer the ideal environment for multiple Ethereum L2s to interact and cooperate, enabling users to execute synchronous, atomic transactions.

Fabric: Fabric is building custom VPUs (Verifiable Processing Units) to accelerate ZK adoption and support the AggLayer. As the world’s first massively parallel, general-purpose processors for cryptography, Fabric’s VPUs will also offer vastly superior performance compared to widely used general-purpose CPUs or GPUs, with out-of-the-box support of dozens of cryptographic primitives, from the generalized Merkle tree to Plonky2 and Polygon Plonky3, and more. 

Gateway: Bringing a high-performance execution client to Polygon zkEVM and Polygon CDK. The cdk-erigon sequencer will be a major performance boost for all chains built using Polygon CDK—and make maintaining compatibility with future Ethereum upgrades significantly easier.

Irreducible: Working alongside researchers at Polygon Labs, Irreducible is building a production-grade, Binius-based ZK virtual machine for the AggLayer. The product of a research effort driven by Irreducible, Binius achieves computational efficiency by applying the properties of binary fields to the problem of verifiable computing. Where exactly in the AggLayer this zkVM may be put to use is still a question that remains undetermined, but there are potentially additional efficiencies for the existing ZK rollup stack: Irreducible’s FPGA cluster modules accelerated proof generation time for Polygon zkEVM.

Movement Labs: Bridging the gap between the EVM and MoveVM by integrating with the AggLayer—as well as allowing all MoveVM L2s to connect to the AggLayer. This is a major step forward in the AggLayer mission to unify crypto.

Nodekit’s Composable Network: Brings synchronous composability to the AggLayer and CDK chains. This will make the AggLayer a central part of restoring composability to Ethereum—further reducing the accumulated frictions of crypto and Web3.

OKX: Building a blockchain search and analytics platform for better UX.

Succinct Labs: Harnessed the power of the Polygon Plonky3 proving system to build SP1, a zkVM which will generate the pessimistic proof. This is a particularly cool example of core Polygon tech being adapted and amplified by an innovative collaborator. 

Toposware: This team was responsible for helping build the Type-1 ZKEVM prover—and was recently acquired by Polygon Labs to accelerate the growth timeline for the AggLayer.

Union: Union is bringing Cosmos to the AggLayer. As a leading developer of a sovereign interoperability layer associated with Cosmos, Union brings wide experience with bridging, giving Cosmos users, devs, and projects a point of entry to an aggregated environment.

AggChains: Unifying liquidity and users for secure, cross-chain interoperability

The AggLayer aims to be as minimal as possible, to allow any chain, regardless of execution environment or VM, to connect. That is its end state.

This is only possible via the pessimistic proof, a novel ZK security proof that means no single chain can withdraw more funds than have been deposited onto the unified bridge. 

Ultimately, what the AggLayer enables is an ever-growing network of aggregated chains, or AggChains, where liquidity is natively unified and interoperable, state is shared, and users can easily transact across chains. Far from the current fragmented ecosystem in crypto right now, the AggLayer sees a way forward that is positive-sum and more like the internet we know today. 

A number of chains have either already connected to AggLayer v0.1, the unified bridge, or have committed to connect in the future. Here they are:

• Polygon PoS: One of the most popular chains, current community consensus would see Polygon PoS join the AggLayer and unlock $2.7B of unified liquidity
• Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta: An EVM-equivalent rollup that will allow for secure, robust DeFi applications
• X Layer: Built by OKX, one of the largest crypto global exchanges, X Layer will enable 50M+ OKX users to natively interop with every AggChain
• TON Applications Chain (TAC): Building a ZK-powered L2 with Polygon CDK that will connect to the AggLayer, enabling seamless interop and unified liquidity for the TON blockchain ecosystem
• Movement Labs: Movement Labs brings unified liquidity to MoveVM chains, with $160M in committed TVL
• Swell: Built with Polygon CDK, Swell is a native restaking platform meant to attract and retain liquidity, and connect AggLayer projects together
• IoTeX: Connecting to the AggLayer to build the DePIN layer for all chains.
• Bethel: Bethel will help to bring to the AggLayer the next generation of decentralized, ZKP-protected data security and storage
• Moonveil: A Web3 gaming chain, built with Polygon CDK, that will leverage the AggLayer for cross-game interoperability
• GPT Protocol: Building the internet of AI, integrating with the AggLayer with a Polygon CDK-built L2
• Haust Network: Integrating Haust with the AggLayer to simplify yield farming across multiple blockchains
• Sentient: Sentient is building a platform for AGI development, built with Polygon CDK
• Silicon: A new social network for hyper-personalization, for communities to thrive and grow, with an aggregated future via the AggLayer
• Lumia Protocol: A hyper-liquid staking chain, built with Polygon CDK
• Wirex: Wirex combines traditional and decentralized finance to bring the forefront of payment systems to the AggLayer
• Witness Chain: Establishing a consensus and verification protocol for the physical state of DePINs, Witness Chain is building the DePIN Coordination Layer (DCL) and connecting to the AggLayer to unify DePIN economies on Ethereum‍
• Wilder World: Bringing an immersive, open-world metaverse via Meowchain and Polygon CDK to the AggLayer

RaaS providers, to help AggChains connect

In addition to core collaborators, a number of other key RaaS providers are collaborating to make the AggLayer even bigger. 

• Gateway
• Zeeve
• Gelato
• AltLayer
• Lumoz
• IntellectEU
• Nodeinfra
• iGreenData

If you’re working on something that could contribute to the AggLayer, hit up the Polygon community Discord or check out the Github to ideate on how the AggLayer can help you innovate. 

*NOTE* This list will be updated. As the number of contributors evolve and grow, expect to see that in this list. Updated September 12, 2024

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