Hack VC Leads 20 Million Funding Round How Aligned Builds ZK Verification Layer

Aligned has launched a simple testnet based on Cosmos SDK in March and will migrate to the EigenLayer testnet.
Authored by 1912212.eth, Foresight News
The ZK infrastructure continues to attract venture capital, with Aligned Layer completing a $2.6 million seed round financing in April and a $20 million Series A round just under two months later. The speed at which this was achieved is quite rare. The seed round was led by Lemniscap with participation from StarkWare, O(1)Labs, and the Series A round was led by Hack VC with participation from dao5 and others.
What features of Aligned attract so much investment frenzy?
Introduction to Aligned
Aligned believes that the future bottleneck in “proof generation” will not be in the industry, but in proof verification on the chain. Currently, due to the high cost of verification, ZK-based applications cannot operate efficiently on Ethereum.
Aligned is a verification and aggregation layer built on EigenLayer, which efficiently verifies any SNARK proof by utilizing the security of Ethereum validators. Aligned can have more applications outside of Ethereum and help other chains verify data. The Aligned Layer was developed by the Ethereum infrastructure startup Yet Another Company, which completed a $1 million financing in January of this year.
From the overview diagram, it can be seen that Layer 0 consists of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the DA layer, Aligned is the Layer 1 verification layer, and Layer 2 consists of other layers such as application chains, zkML, and zkEVM Rollup.
How Aligned Works
In the wave of modular design, splitting multiple processes into dedicated layers is a common practice. From a single layer responsible for executing verification, settlement, and consensus to DA, the modular design after splitting increases efficiency and reduces costs.
Aligned mainly consists of four core elements, with Aligned primarily receiving proofs from different proof systems for verification, which can be generated using different proof systems. They have different proof sizes, verification times, and different verification logics. However, all proofs share a common feature: they are verified quickly.
Aligned has specialized validators for checking the validity of each validator and publishing the results to Ethereum. Proofs are stored in the data availability layer, which provides an economically efficient storage strategy. Operators in Aligned fetch proof data from this layer.
Ethereum receives verification results from Aligned. However, Ethereum itself cannot verify proofs due to the high cost. Instead, a general Rust prover generates verification proofs for all proofs contained within a given time period.
To aggregate all proofs, in the first step, all proofs are converted into proofs executed by a virtual machine to achieve uniformity of proofs. Then, we can reduce the proof size through recursive proof aggregation, as shown in the tree diagram.
Application Scenarios
Aligned states that possible application directions include various categories such as soft finality for Rollups and application chains, fast bridging, SNARK-based P2P protocols such as payment systems and social networks, interoperable public chains with Ethereum, machine learning, ZK oracles, identity verification protocols, blockchain games, and more.
Currently, Aligned supports Cairo STARK’s Platinum Prover, gnark’s Plonk, Mina’s Kimchi, SuccintLabs’s SP1, and a16z’s Jolt. The verification cost depends on the type and size of the proof.
Moreover, Aligned has launched a simple testnet based on Cosmos SDK in March and will migrate to the EigenLayer testnet.
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Aligned
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Ethereum
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Financing
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Note: The content of this article represents the author’s views and does not constitute investment advice.