Why does Polymer, the Ethereum L2 cross-chain protocol, gain support from the head encryption VC?

Polymer Labs recently launched the Polyverse testnet, which is not far away from the launch of the mainnet. Among various projects working on cross-chain interoperability, Polymer Labs chose to focus on interoperability protocols on Ethereum.

In January this year, Polymer Labs completed a $23 million Series A round of financing, led by Blockchain Capital and others, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Placeholder and others. The seed round of financing will be traced back to March 2022. Distributed Global and North Island Ventures jointly led the investment, with participation from Digital Currency Group (DCG), Coinbase Ventures and others.

What is Polymer?

Polymer’s main focus is to implement cross-chain functionality on Layer 2 of Ethereum. It leverages IBC technology as an interoperability bridge in the Ethereum network, enabling applications to achieve composability between Ethereum Rollups. Through Polymer, applications are able to take advantage of the IBC network and features such as inter-chain accounts, application data callbacks, and more.

Polymer co-founders Bo Du and Peter Kim revealed in a recent interview that they had been working on building the Cosmos chain. Nearing completion, they made a change and decided to move to an L2 cross-chain direction. This strategic adjustment demonstrates the team's keen insight into market needs and technology trends, laying a solid foundation for future development.

One reason is that you can directly leverage existing Cosmos SDK code without making large-scale modifications. Another more important reason is that Ethereum has launched many Rollup solutions. As a distribution mechanism for IBC technology, cross-chain interaction between these application chains is not very necessary, because there is already a relationship between Rollup itself and the settlement layer where it is located. interaction mechanism.

How does Polymer solve the problem of Ethereum ecological fragmentation?

With the continuous emergence of Ethereum’s second-layer network protocols, the fragmentation of the ecosystem has become more obvious. Composability and security become issues of great concern. These challenges are not obvious when the size of the Layer 2 network is small, but as the size of the Layer 2 network increases, these problems become more urgent and need to be solved.

Previous different L2 solutions usually focused on building zero-knowledge provers and shared ordering to improve their interoperability. However, these solutions often only apply to their respective frameworks and fail to comprehensively solve the problem. Polymer believes that the fragmentation problem caused by the lack of unified standards can be solved by using the IBC protocol.

Polymer is a form of Ethereum Rollup, including components such as settlement layer, execution layer, data availability and proof. Unlike other Rollups, Polymer's focus is on supporting interoperability with applications on other Rollups, rather than directly executing decentralized applications.

The settlement layer is built by OP Stack, and the execution layer is interoperated by Cosmos SDK and connected Rollups and IBC. Data availability is powered by EigenDA. During the proof process, OP Stack provides modular failure proof while performing interactive fraud detection and ZK validity proof.

Polymer takes a hybrid approach, combining the settlement capabilities of the OP stack with the developer experience and interoperability of the Cosmos SDK, and also leverages the data availability of Eigenlayer to scale the data availability throughput of the Ethereum network by 10 mb/s.

The official explanation for building the settlement layer based on OP Stack is because of its scalability, flexibility and high performance, the prosperity and development of the ecosystem, and its connection with Ethereum. Factors such as workshop security and consistency should be comprehensively considered.

In terms of data availability, EigenLayer was chosen because EigenDA is second only to Ethereum DA in security. EigenDA borrows the security of Ethereum staking and validators themselves. Scalability and cross-chain interoperability also perform well.

Polymer completely outsources the transport layer and partially outsources the state layer. The IBC transport layer runs on Polymer, while the IBC application layer runs on IBC-enabled chains.

In addition, Polymer applications can build their own cross-chain bridges and use an L1 trust layer to control the verification of messages in and out, thus eliminating the need for additional trust assumptions on third parties.

The difference between this method and Wormhole is that Wormhole needs to rely on a majority of 13/19 nodes to verify the message before generating or sending a message. Another cross-chain protocol, Axelar, relies on validators for proof.

Testnet

The testnet will be launched in three phases, called "Basecamp", "Into the Unknown" and "Discovery". The first phase of Basecamp is now live, designed to incentivize developers to enter the testnet. Currently, you need to connect to its Github account on the official website to verify your qualifications.

The second phase will start next week. Polymer will select some decentralized applications to promote to end users, and end users will also be able to receive rewards.

The final stage "Discovery" focuses on improving and optimizing the incentive mechanism to promote user participation.

Summary

It is foreseeable that with the proliferation of Ethereum L2 protocols and the increasing popularity of modularity, the demand for L2 interoperability protocols like Polymer will increase significantly in the future.

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