Author: 100y.eth, Crypto Researcher
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
On June 13, the NEAR Foundation established Nuffle Labs, changing its name from NEAR Modular to Nuffle Labs, and received $13 million in funding. The fundraising also included external investors such as Electric Capital, Canonical Crypto, Fabric Ventures, Robot Ventures, Caladan, and Lyrik Ventures. NEAR core contributors and Ethereum builders are building two services in Nuffle Labs:
NEAR THAT
Super Fast Finality Layer (SFFL)
How does Nuffle Labs contribute to the modular ecosystem?
Overview
NEAR DA: rollups can leverage NEAR Protocol’s sharding architecture to publish data.
SFFL: AVS is on EigenLayer, which means it relies on the crypto-economic security of EigenLayer. It provides faster block finality for various protocols.
NEAR THAT
Thanks to NEAR Protocol's Nightshade Sharding, NEAR Protocol can act as a scalable DA layer for rollups. Major frameworks and RaaS such as Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK, AltLayer, and Caldera have integrated NEAR DA.
Nightshade Sharding
The Nightshade Sharding architecture is similar to Ethereum's danksharding, where a single network is composed of smaller parts (such as blocks). This novel architecture facilitates cross-shard communication and scalable DA.
NEAR DA Performance
NEAR DA is one of the most scalable data processing layers, providing unparalleled performance and cost efficiency compared to Ethereum, Celestia, etc. If you simulate the cost of Arbitrum DA year to date:
Ethereum: about $20 million
Celestia: about $3,000
NEAR DA: about $45
Fragmentation problem
Here is a brief analysis of Nuffle's next product. Today, there are so many rollups on the market, which means that state and liquidity dispersion are definitely issues that need to be solved. To solve this problem, fast finality is needed.
SFFL
SFFL provides faster block finality for various rollups. The rollup should publish data to NEAR DA, but the relayer (not the sorter) will do this work, so there is no need to modify its sorter.
Since SFFL is AVS, its security level depends on the re-pledged assets on EigenLayer.
Basic Concepts of SFFL
How can SFFL end quickly? It's actually very simple.
SFFL Operators (AVS Operators) check that the data from the rollup full node is identical to the data from NEAR DA and then sign it. If the aggregator reaches the required quorum, finality is completed quickly.
Now the rollup can easily pass the SFFL layer to check the validity of its rollup.
Final Thoughts
In the author's opinion, NEAR Protocol is no longer just an L1 blockchain. NEAR Protocol has evolved into a modular stack that enhances the modularity of the Ethereum ecosystem. Nuffle will provide a benchmark for NEAR x modular integration.
Related reading: Cyber Capital founder: Recognizes the NEAR sharding model. Although it has drawbacks, it represents the future of encryption.