According to Foresight News, ZK infrastructure continues to be favored by venture capital. Aligned Layer, which completed a $2.6 million seed round in April this year, completed a $20 million Series A round less than two months later, which is quite rare. Aligned is a verification and aggregation layer built on EigenLayer that can cost-effectively verify any SNARK proof by leveraging the security of Ethereum validators. Aligned can have more applications outside of Ethereum and help other chains verify data.
Aligned mainly receives and verifies proofs from different proof systems, which can be generated using different proof systems. Aligned has a dedicated verifier that can be used to check the validity of each verifier and publish the results to Ethereum. Ethereum receives the verification results from Aligned, but Ethereum itself cannot verify the proofs due to the high cost.
Aligned said that its possible applications include a variety of categories, such as soft finality of Rollups and application chains, fast bridging, SNARK-based P2P protocols, such as payment systems and social networks, public chains interoperable with Ethereum, machine learning, ZK oracles, identity verification protocols, on-chain games, etc. Aligned launched a simple testnet based on the Cosmos SDK in March and will migrate to the EigenLayer testnet.
