Zero-knowledge proofs are a powerful tool to protect user privacy and first became widely used in blockchains to verify the validity of private transactions (e.g., Zcash). A similarly important and emerging application of zero-knowledge proofs is compressing computation, where running a short verification on chain can prove that a long…

The flexibility in the design of modular blockchains and rollups motivates flexibility in the design of IBC as well. IBC network topology is changing from a homogenous and densely connected network to a heterogenous and sparsely connected network. Modular IBC adapts the IBC protocol to this dynamic environment. Previously, we…

Thinking in Modular: Interoperability Edition Thinking in Modular Modular is currently a popular term in web3 that a number of protocols and projects are using to describe themselves. Celestia popularized the term by introducing the concept of modular blockchains. Our goal is to narrow the focus and usage of the term on a…

In our post back in October, we shared our commitment to furthering open-source ZK research. Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress on 2 major fronts: zkTree and… today, we’re excited to introduce zkMint, Polymer’s solution that optimizes IBC across all major chains. Context and Background In our most recent article, we demonstrated how…

The State of Interoperability is Broken Blockchain interoperability is broken across the ecosystem. Protocol fragmentation, multi-sig bridging, and centralized oracles are all key issues that have yet to be effectively addressed. Since 2020 DeFi Summer, the industry has further fragmented and increased developer friction with an ever increasing number of competing standards and solutions. Comparing interoperability…

A deeper dive into plonky2 and recursion. — This is the second part in our series on how to write proofs using plonky2. In part I, we went over some basics and a toy non-recursive example of how to provide a mathematical mfunction. Today we’ll cover how to write your own circuit and recursively compose individual plonky2 proofs…

Prerequisites: you should have a basic understanding of zero-knowledge proofs and zkSNARKs. It’s helpful to have a general understanding of how they work so that you understand bottlenecks such as proof generating time. If you don’t know much about how zk-proofs/SNARKs work, there’s some great lectures from Dan Boneh here. About Recursive zk proofs …

As Polymer Labs grows, we are evermore dedicated to our vision of an interconnected and trust-minimized future. We believe that the best way to achieve this is through Zero Knowledge proofs (ZK-IBC). Following continuous research and development, our team has found the qualities inherent to ZKPs to be the best…

Overview of IBC After covering the basics of IBC in our previous article, this piece will take a deeper dive into the protocol. The following images show a high-level representation of how the IBC core module forms the IBC-Go module.