Electron Labs, a zero-knowledge protocol that is building ZK tech products on NEAR, has launched its flagship product Bolt on NEAR.
“Bolt is an open-source suite of tools that enables developers to build ZK-based products on the NEAR blockchain.” said Garvit, CEO Electron Labs.
Bolt SDK includes a zk-prover for NEAR’s signatures and (a)symmetric encryption (Bolt.js) and a zk-verifier, which is a ready-to-deploy smart contract toolkit for verifying zk-snarks on-chain (Bolt.rs). Bolt enables the generation of zk-proofs for up to 99 ed25519 signatures. Proofs can be generated using a javascript-based library to generate proofs in the browser itself, OR using a C++ based prover with very fast proof generation times for backend servers.
Bolt is already in the process of getting integrated with the Rainbow bridge. “Electron Bolt will enable Rainbow to upgrade from the current Optimistic approach to a Validity Proofs-based approach. This will bring down the transaction time from 6 hrs on average to 8 minutes,” mentioned Alex Shevchenko, CEO of Aurora Labs. This is part of the same grant that Electron received in Nov, 2021 from NEAR foundation.
“With the advent of Electron Bolt, we’re looking at an entire range of privacy products that leverage NEAR’s speed and affordability to deliver an unparalleled set of features to users” said Rahul, Tech Lead at Electron. Electron has opened the Bolt SDK for developers to build privacy-enabled products for the NEAR ecosystem. This includes private transactions, private DeFi for institutions, MEV protection, cross-chain privacy for users, private identity solutions, etc. Electron has also launched a grants programme to fund developers building on Electron Bolt SDK.
Electron recently also contributed to the stabilization of altbn128 host functions in the NEARCore. These functions, once live on Mainnet will further reduce the gas cost of Bolt.rs and on-chain zk-SNARK verification.
Electron looks forward to building a private and scalable future on NEAR.