Polygon Labs Acquires Toposware, Leading ZK Engineering Startup, to Help Pioneer Next Wave of ZK Technology

Earlier this year, developers at Toposware and Polygon Labs announced a Type 1 ZKEVM prover, part of the next generation of zero-knowledge (ZK) proving technology. It was an industry-wide, public good breakthrough that wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of the team at Toposware, a blockchain research and engineering company.

Today, a big follow up: Toposware is joining Polygon Labs in an acquisition that will help push the entire ZK community forward. 

The Toposware team is integrating with the existing Polygon ZK development teams to further drive innovation across all technological fronts, including the AggLayer, Polygon CDK, Polygon zkEVM, and eventually Polygon PoS, pending community approval, to an upgrade as a ZK validium. That means bringing their collective ZK talent, knowledge, and engineering to advance  Polygon.

As leaders in ZK research, Toposware was instrumental in helping to develop a Type 1 prover, a highly performant upgrade and open-source contribution to the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Any EVM chain can use the Type 1 prover to become a ZK proof-based chain, and connect to Ethereum. 

Existing chains may leverage the Type 1 prover for better security guarantees or to connect to the AggLayer, a service enabling a neutral and interoperable network of sovereign blockchains.

Additionally, the Type 1 prover demonstrated low-costs for proving Ethereum itself: At the time of the announcement in February, there was an average per-transaction cost of $0.0029 and a total cost of $0.534 to prove an Ethereum block. 

Onboarding Toposoware will have significant downstream effects across all Polygon protocols. With community consensus, there is ongoing research for connecting the Polygon PoS network to the AggLayer in the coming months; thereafter, it’ll be upgraded to a ZK-secured chain. 

Toposoware will be instrumental in this process. With this acquisition, Polygon Labs continues to lead in ZK research and development, moving the industry from theory to reality over the last few years. 

As the adoption of Plonky3 continues at break-neck speed—SP1 was built using this open source technology—other ZK teams continue to rely on Polygon Labs’ research for their development work.  

We’re excited to see what new insights Toposware will bring not only to the team, but to the entire ZK space.

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