8000x Cheaper Than Ethereum: Polygon's (MATIC) Nailwal on Near Protocol (NEAR) Integration

A new integration between two major altcoin ecosystems kicks off, paving the way for more second-layer networks powered by ZK proofs. With such networks, customers will be able to save on transactional costs and infrastructure resources.

Near DA layer now fuels Polygon CDK: Why is this important?

With the integration between Polygon CDK, an open-source L2 development kit, and Near's Data Availability platform, users can transact 8,000 times cheaper than on the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet. This was shared by Polygon's founder Sandeep Nailwal with his 273,000 followers on X.

The NEAR Data Availability layer (NEAR DA) is now available for all customers of Polygon CDK, which allows third-party developers to develop and launch their own zk-powered layer 2s for various use cases.

Builders can set customizable features (transaction costs, native token, throughput) with no EVM-compatibility, security and developer experience tradeoffs. 

Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of NEAR Protocol, stressed the importance of this integration for the tech capability of dApps in the future and for cross-network interoperability in Web3:

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. This is another exciting collaboration between NEAR Foundation and Polygon Labs to drive Chain Abstraction and create better experiences for developers and users.

The Alsom Near Protocol (NEAR) team calculated that 231 kB of calldata on NEAR costs $0.0016, while the same calldata on Ethereum L1 costs users $140.54.

More zk-powered L2s to come?

Even with Proto-Danksharding activated on Ethereum (ETH), this results in massive resource cost reductions and transactional bandwidth increases.

Also, Polygon (MATIC) and Near (NEAR) kickstarted a long-term technical collaboration to build zkWASM, a new type of prover for WASM blockchains. 

It is set to allow Web3 devs to create zkWASM chains built on NEAR DA. As a result, the products of this collab will be meaningful for both the EVM and WASM scenes.