NEAR DA Integrates with Polygon CDK for Developers Building Ethereum ZK Rollups
DEVELOPERS
January 18, 2024
The NEAR Foundation and Polygon Labs announced today that the latest technical integration for NEAR DA’s efficient and highly scalable data availability is now available for Polygon CDK, the tech stack that allows developers to launch their own ZK-powered Layer 2s custom-fitted to their needs.

The NEAR Data Availability layer (NEAR DA) is a highly efficient and robust data availability layer, designed to help Ethereum rollup builders simplify their network and lower costs, while ensuring they can scale like the NEAR Protocol. Polygon CDK is a simple-to-build L2 stack and a scaling solution for Ethereum that lets developers build custom L2 chains with their own configurations. Builders can enjoy customisable features (transaction costs, native token, throughput), while still enjoying familiar EVM-compatibility and trustless security. 

With the latest NEAR DA integration, rollups can benefit from cheaper data availability costs to significantly reduce their overall rollup overheads. This is especially relevant considering data publishing costs are at all-time highs for L2s.

NEAR DA paves the way for modular blockchain development
This integration empowers rollup builders on Polygon CDK to use NEAR DA as a complete, out-of-the-box modular DA solution. 

“We’re excited to make NEAR DA available to Polygon CDK rollup builders and share the benefits of cost-effective, lightning-fast data availability that scales with NEAR’s sharding for the modular Ethereum ecosystem,” said Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol. “This is another exciting collaboration between NEAR Foundation and Polygon Labs to drive Chain Abstraction and create better experiences for developers and users.”

As of December 2023, 231 kB of calldata on NEAR costs $0.0016, while the same calldata on Ethereum L1 costs users $140.54 and on Celestia costs users $0.046.
NEAR DA helps developers reduce costs and enhance their rollup’s reliability, while maintaining the security guarantees provided by Ethereum. Another upside to NEAR DA is that high quality projects launching an app-chain or L2 will be able to get out-of-the-box NEAR DA compatibility and support.

Develop ZK L2s within the Polygon CDK ecosystem enabled by NEAR DA
The NEAR-Polygon CDK integration allows developers building their own rollups to be part of the Polygon ecosystem, a network of blockchains which includes Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM and Polygon CDK-enabled blockchains. This is the first NEAR DA integration with a ZK-based L2 stack, increasing optionality for developers looking for scalable DA solutions. 

This integration also builds upon the NEAR-Polygon research collaboration to build zkWASM, a new type of prover for WASM blockchains. In the future, builders could even create zkWASM chains built on NEAR DA. Together, NEAR DA and zkWASM technology will play significant roles in scaling EVM and Wasm ecosystems in parallel while maximizing interoperability for a multi-chain future. 

Interested teams who want to work with NEAR DA are invited to fill out this form, with information about your project and how you would like to integrate with NEAR DA.