Polygon Labs has teamed up with a hardware manufacturer as part of its AggLayer rollout. On Sept.10, Polygon Labs announced a partnership with Fabric Cryptography, a hardware chip manufacturer, to bring Fabric Cryptography’s Verifiable Processing Units (VPUs) into its ecosystem. Fabric’s VPU chips are custom-built chips designed to maximize the efficiency of cryptographic computational tasks, such as creating zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. ZK proofs are a cryptographic technique that bolsters both performance and security, allowing transaction verification without publicly disclosing sensitive data to counterparties. However, ZK proofs require substantial computation to generate, raising the barriers of entry for validators. Mihailo Bjelic, the co-founder of Polygon Labs, said Frabric’s chips will expedite the development of AggLayer, Polygon’s infrastructure for a unified ecosystem of ZK-powered chains, by lowering the costs and bolstering the speed of ZK-proof generation. “Implementing this tech will massively accelerate the development of the AggLayer, bringing real-time, affordable proofs… and much lower proving costs than previously thought possible in the medium-term,” Bjelic said. Polygon said it has been working with Fabric to design its Plonky2 and Plonky3 libraries for compatibility with Fabric’s VPUs since the start of the year. The Plonky toolkits aim to improve the speed and efficiency of recursive ZK proofs. Fabric will continue to develop software for Plonky2 and Plonky3 moving forward. Polygon Labs is also purchasing $5 million worth of VPU-based server systems from Fabric to accelerate proof generation for AggLayer. “Plonky2 and Plonky3 are among the most widely adopted ZK-proof systems in the world,” said Tina Ju, Fabric’s co-founder and chief strategy officer. Ju added that the partnership will make Plonky2 and Plonky3 the first ZK-proof systems “powered end-to-end by custom silicon.” Fabric Cryptography was founded in 2022. In August, the firm closed a $33 million series A funding round featuring participation from top Ethereum scaling teams, including Polygon Labs, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs. The project has raised $39 million in total. Polygon’s ZK pivot In August 2021, Polygon announced it had created a $1 billion fund for strategic investments into ZK technology. The project has since consolidated its operations to focus on developing and promoting ZK-based Ethereum scaling solutions, including its general-purpose Polygon zkEVM Layer 2, high-throughput Polygon Miden execution layer, and its modular Chain Development Kit (Polygon CDK). In February, Polygon launched AggLayer, its cross-chain interoperability infrastructure facilitating a symbiotic ecosystem of ZK-powered blockchains. AggLayer has attracted integrations from several third-party projects, including Astar Network, Movement Labs, and Union. The price of Polygon’s POL token is up 1.4% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.