The Near Foundation and Eigen Labs have partnered to enhance the efficiency and lower the cost of transactions on Ethereum rollups. The Near Foundation, known for its work on the Near protocol, and Eigen Labs, creators of the restaking protocol Eigen Layer, aim to tackle challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Their main goal is to reduce transaction costs and speed up processing times on Ethereum rollups, aiming for transaction times of just three-to-four seconds, which marks a significant improvement over current speeds.
The collaboration also seeks to enable low-latency communication across rollups, aiming to lessen the fragmentation of liquidity among various Layer 2 solutions. A vital part of this partnership is improving the Near-Ethereum Rainbow Bridge, a decentralized bridge that facilitates asset and data transfers between Ethereum and NEAR. The enhancement of this bridge is expected to lead to faster transaction finality, increased security, and better decentralization, thus improving the bridging experience between Near and Ethereum blockchains.
For Eigen Labs, this partnership offers a chance to showcase the effectiveness of restaking in cross-rollup transactions, potentially broadening its use beyond the Ethereum ecosystem. This collaboration also supports Near’s goal of making the open web more accessible and efficient.
Eigen Layer’s unique feature is its ability to enable the restaking of ETH and make adjustments in the consensus layer without the need for a new blockchain.