NEAR Foundation and Eigen Labs Partner to Enable Faster, Cheaper Web3 Transactions for Ethereum Rollups via EigenLayer

EigenLabs, one of the leaders in building scaling solutions on Ethereum, is partnering with the NEAR Foundation to create an industry first partnership designed to foster faster, cheaper transactions for Layer 2 projects building on Ethereum. 

Ethereum rollups, projects that perform transaction execution outside of the main Ethereum blockchain, have been one of the fastest growing sectors on the world’s largest blockchain. However, they have consistently faced challenges around finality and cost, making them an expensive option for developers looking to build on Ethereum. With the partnership with the NEAR Blockchain and NEAR Foundation, those roadblocks disappear. 

The world’s first ‘fast finality layer’ for Ethereum layer 2s

The partnership, which will have the two teams build the world’s first “fast finality layer” for Ethereum layer 2s, will see transaction times shrink from minutes and hours to 3-4 seconds. The cost of transacting on this new finality layer will become 4,000 times cheaper than it is currently, creating the perfect conditions for teams looking to scale on Ethereum. 

This advancement will reduce liquidity fragmentation between Layer-2s through increased efficiency while also allowing them to make individual decisions around the sequencers they use to process those transactions, either on-chain or off-chain. The fast finality layer retains all Ethereum security guarantees while adding both NEAR and EigenLayer guarantees, making it an attractive option for any team building on Ethereum L2s.

“We are thrilled to partner with the highly innovative team behind the NEAR protocol,” says Sreeram Kannan, founder of EigenLabs. “This is a mutually beneficial partnership that will leverage both NEAR and EigenLayer’s technologies to make it easier, faster, and cheaper for developers to build on Ethereum.”

Making the Open Web more usable 

The collaboration, spearheaded by Pagoda, the NEAR ecosystem development team, will help transition the NEAR-Ethereum Rainbow Bridge to an actively validated service (AVS). 

“Pagoda is proud to work with Eigen Labs, a world-class team, to cobuild the fast finality layer. This solution improves the composability with Ethereum L2s and reduces liquidity fragmentation within the rollup ecosystem,” says Bowen Wang, Director of Protocol at Pagoda.

The partnership will not only help projects building on Ethereum, but NEAR too, create a better bridging experience between NEAR and Ethereum, allowing transactions to reach finality faster, with stronger security guarantees and decentralization. 

“NEAR Foundation is proud to partner with such an excellent team as Eigen Labs to offer a fast finality layer for ETH rollups,” says Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. 

“The fast finality layer showcases the strengths of NEAR’s technology while making the Open Web more usable, which has always been the core goal for NEAR. It will also help defragment liquidity for Ethereum rollups and make all of Web3 more interoperable as a result.” 

The NEAR Foundation’s mission is to help usher in the dawn of the open web, a radically new form of Web3 where infrastructure, application protocols, and access is open to anyone, anywhere. Facilitating the development of Ethereum by creating a pathway to fast, low-cost, and scalable infrastructure is one the many ways NEAR is helping bring about this radical shift in how the internet works. 

A testnet is expected to launch in Q1 2024, and more details will be shared around that time.