Fabric and Polygon Labs Collaborate to Accelerate the AggLayer

We’re excited to announce a strategic collaboration between Fabric and Polygon Labs. The collaboration focuses on developing real-time zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs for the AggLayer, or Aggregation Layer, with our Verifiable Processing Units (VPUs). This cutting-edge hardware solution aims to significantly boost both performance and scalability of developer-facing blockchain infrastructure.

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Key Collaborations

• Polygon Labs is investing $5 million in VPU-based server systems. This marks the first protocol powered by our hardware.
• Fabric and Polygon Labs have collaborated on hardware-software co-design to natively support Plonky2 and Plonky3 on the VPU, and will be deploying Plonky2 and Plonky3 end-to-end on our custom chips.
• Polygon Labs and Fabric will jointly accelerate ZK proof generation for the AggLayer and the full suite of ZK-powered projects, including Polygon zkEVM, Polygon Miden, Polygon CDK projects, and beyond.

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The AggLayer: TCP/IP for Blockchains

Today’s blockchain ecosystem faces a fundamental challenge: fragmentation. The current landscape closely resembles the pre-Internet era – a collection of isolated networks faced with interoperability, scalability, and user experience challenges. The fragmentation results in siloed liquidity, inefficient bridging mechanisms, and confusing multi-chain experience for users.

Polygon Labs addresses these challenges with the AggLayer, a seamless network of blockchains that feels like a single, highly scalable environment. The AggLayer enables default communication and resource sharing, akin to the TCP/IP protocols that enabled the interconnect internet we know today.

At its core, the AggLayer is a decentralized protocol that aggregates proofs from all connected chains, ensuring secure, near-instant cross-chain transactions while preserving individual chain sovereignty. This approach offers unified liquidity for L1s and L2s, expanded reach for dApps developers, and an abstracted experience for end users – without sacrificing the benefits of a diverse blockchain ecosystem.

Our collaboration with Polygon Labs focuses on addressing the technical challenges of implementing the AggLayer, particularly in accelerating proof generation to make this vision a reality.

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Performance for ZK Adoption

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are fundamental to the AggLayer's security and efficiency. They enable chains to verify the validity of transactions and state updates from other chains without revealing sensitive information, creating a secure, trustless environment for cross-chain interactions. Simultaneously, by compressing large amounts of transaction data into succinct proofs, ZK technology allows for more efficient and secure bridging between chains, eliminating the need for trusted intermediaries and reducing the attack surface for cross-chain transactions.

However, the adoption of ZK technology faces a significant hurdle: performance.  Generating these proofs is computationally intensive, leading to issues with cost and speed. This mirrors the early days of internet routers when packet processing speeds and router affordability were limiting factors for mass adoption.

Polygon Labs has been at the forefront of advancing ZK performance. Their widely adopted Plonky2 and remarkably performant, modular Plonky3 have achieved over 100x performance improvements to ZK proving. Teams worldwide have leveraged Plonky2 and Plonky3 to deploy ZK infrastructure and applications, including Polygon zkEVM, Polygon Miden, Lita, Succinct and beyond.

Despite these software innovations, the next quantum leap in ZK capabilities requires purpose-built hardware. This is where our collaboration becomes crucial.  Enter Fabric's Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU), a custom-designed instruction set processor built to accelerate advanced cryptographic operations.

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The VPU: Powering Next-Generation Cryptography

Fabric takes a unique approach to hardware acceleration. We’ve designed a complete system-on-chip from the ground up, optimized for end-to-end ZK proof systems and general programmable cryptography. Our VPU offers:

1. Unparalleled Performance: Vastly superior to CPUs or GPUs for cryptographic operations. We achieve this by combining GPU-like reconfigurable "glue" logic with ASIC-like specialized "coprocessor" components on a single chip, all driven by our cryptography-native instruction set.
2. General Purpose Flexibility: Reconfigurable across various prime fields, elliptic curves, and hash functions, unlike fixed-function ASICs.
3. Easy Programmability: Fully programmable with a complete compiler stack and IR, adaptable to evolving ZK proof systems.
4. Scalability: Designed for mass production and affordability, with parallelizable workloads across chips, cards, and servers.

This translates to faster proof generation and lower operational costs, potentially accelerating zero-knowledge technology adoption from years to months.

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Powering the AggLayer and Beyond

Our collaboration with Polygon Labs aims to bring revolutionary improvements to the AggLayer:

• Lightning-Fast Finality: Reducing cross-chain transaction times from hours or minutes to mere seconds, enabling near real-time interoperability.
• Unprecedented Affordability: Dramatically lowering computational costs, making cross-chain transactions and ZK applications economically viable at scale.
• Enhanced Scalability: Supporting parallel processing of workloads across a growing ecosystem of interconnected blockchains, handling increased transaction volumes without compromising speed or security.

Together, we'll accelerate:

• ZK "pessimistic proofs" and proof aggregation for the AggLayer
• ZK proving for Polygon zkEVM
• ZK proving for Polygon Miden
• ZK infrastructure for Polygon CDK

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Collaboration and Co-Design

Our collaboration with Polygon Labs is built on three co-design elements:

1. Software Optimization: Full-stack software support for Plonky2 and Plonky3 libraries, optimized for the VPU's architecture.
2. Hardware-Software Feedback Loops: Since the start of this year, Fabric and Polygon Labs have worked closely together to co-design the Fabric instruction set to support Plonky2 and Plonky3 natively. These feedback loops are ongoing, as Fabric expands it’s ISA and seeks to support and ensure continued compatibility with the AggLayer and future Polygon proof systems.
3. Performance Metrics: Upcoming release of technically-specific case studies and technical reports on VPU integration.

As new algorithms and proof systems are developed, the VPU architecture will adapt to maximize their efficiency. This is comparable to early internet company investment in specialized routing hardware to support the most widely-adopted networking protocols – that continuous integration informed what high-speed internet hardware looks like today.

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What’s Next

The current roadmap aims to deliver a prototype of Plonky2 and Plonky3 accelerated end-to-end on the VPU within 6-12 months. This milestone will significantly reduce proof generation times and costs, opening up new possibilities for real-time ZK applications on the AggLayer.

While our initial focus is the AggLayer, our technology is poised to revolutionize the full rollup ecosystem. Efficient, real-time proof generation means Layer 2 blockchains can now consider ZK-integrated systems, in addition to existing paradigms in optimistic, side-chain, based, and other rollups – without compromising on speed or cost.

This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of ZK technology and blockchain infrastructure. By combining Polygon’s technology and proof systems with Fabric's VPU hardware, we're laying the groundwork for a new era of blockchain scalability, interoperability, and performance.

Stay tuned for updates as we work together to bring this vision to reality. The future of Web3 is not just aggregated – it's accelerated.