EigenLabs, one of the leaders in tailoring scaling solutions on Ethereum, is teaming up with the NEAR Foundation to establish an industry-first collaboration aimed at promoting quicker, more economical transactions for Layer 2 projects constructed on Ethereum. Ethereum rollups, initiatives that execute transactions outside of the main Ethereum blockchain, have been one of the speediest growing sectors on the world’s largest blockchain. Nevertheless, they have consistently encountered challenges around finality and cost, rendering them a costly option for developers seeking to construct on Ethereum. Those impediments vanish with the collaboration with the NEAR Blockchain and NEAR Foundation.
Layer-2 Blockchains: “Swift Finality Layer”
The collaboration, which will have the two teams construct the world’s initial “swift finality layer” for Ethereum layer 2s, will observe transaction times diminish from minutes and hours to 3-4 seconds. The expense of transacting on this new finality layer will become 4,000 times more economical than it is currently, forming the perfect conditions for teams looking to scale on Ethereum.
This advancement will reduce liquidity fragmentation between Layer-2s through heightened efficiency while also enabling them to make individual decisions around the sequencers they utilize to process those transactions, either on-chain or off-chain. The swift finality layer maintains all ETH security guarantees while adding both NEAR and EigenLayer guarantees, making it an appealing option for any team constructing on Ethereum L2s.
“We are excited to partner with the highly innovative team behind the NEAR protocol,” says Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLabs. “This is a mutually beneficial partnership that will leverage both NEAR and EigenLayer’s technologies to make it simpler, quicker, and cheaper for developers to construct on Ethereum.”
Increase Open Web Usability
The collaboration, led by Pagoda, the NEAR ecosystem development team, will aid in transitioning the NEAR-Ethereum Rainbow Bridge to an actively validated service (AVS). “Pagoda is proud to collaborate with Eigen Labs, a world-class team, to build the swift finality layer. This solution enhances composability with Ethereum L2s and decreases liquidity fragmentation within the rollup ecosystem,” says Bowen Wang, Director of Protocol at Pagoda.
The partnership will not only assist projects constructing on ETH but NEAR as well, in creating a better bridging experience between NEAR and ETH, enabling transactions to achieve finality faster, with stronger security guarantees and decentralization. “NEAR Foundation is proud to partner with such an excellent team as Eigen Labs to offer a swift finality layer for ETH rollups,” says Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. “The swift finality layer showcases the strengths of NEAR’s technology while making the Open Web more usable, which has always been the core goal for NEAR. It will also help defragment liquidity for ETH rollups and make all of Web3 more interoperable as a result.”
About NEAR Foundation
The NEAR Foundation’s mission is to aid in ushering in the dawn of the open web, a radically new form of Web3 where infrastructure, application protocols, and access are open to anyone, anywhere. Facilitating the development of ETH by creating a pathway to swift, low-cost, and scalable infrastructure is one the many ways NEAR is aiding in bringing about this radical shift in how the internet operates.
