NEAR Foundation Establishes Nuffle Labs With $13 Million Funding

According to PANews, the NEAR Foundation has established Nuffle Labs, formerly known as NEAR Modular, with a funding of $13 million. The funding round included external investors such as Electric Capital, Canonical Crypto, Fabric Ventures, Robot Ventures, Caladan, and Lyrik Ventures. Core contributors of NEAR and Ethereum builders are constructing two services within Nuffle Labs: NEAR DA and Super Fast Finality Layer (SFFL).

NEAR DA, thanks to NEAR Protocol's Nightshade Sharding, can act as a scalable DA layer for rollups. Major frameworks and RaaS like Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon CDK, AltLayer, and Caldera have already integrated NEAR DA. The Nightshade Sharding architecture is similar to Ethereum's danksharding, where a single network is composed of smaller parts, such as blocks. This innovative architecture facilitates cross-shard communication and scalable DA.

Compared to Ethereum and Celestia, NEAR DA is one of the most scalable data processing layers, offering unparalleled performance and cost efficiency. If the cost of Arbitrum DA from the beginning of the year to now is simulated, Ethereum would cost about $20 million, Celestia about $3,000, and NEAR DA about $45.

The next product from Nuffle aims to address the fragmentation issue. With so many rollups in the market today, the dispersion of state and liquidity is a problem that needs to be solved. To solve this, fast finality is required.

SFFL provides faster block finality for various rollups. Rollups should publish data to NEAR DA, but relayers, not sorters, will complete this task, so there is no need to modify their sorters. As SFFL is AVS, its security level depends on the re-pledged assets on EigenLayer.

SFFL Operators (AVS Operators) check whether the data from rollup full nodes is the same as the data from NEAR DA, and then sign it. If the aggregator reaches the required legal number, the finality is quickly completed. Now, rollups can easily check the validity of their rollups through the SFFL layer.

In the author's view, NEAR Protocol is no longer just an L1 blockchain. NEAR Protocol has evolved into a modular stack, enhancing the modularity of the Ethereum ecosystem. Nuffle will provide a benchmark for NEAR x modular fusion.