Nil Foundation Plans New Ethereum Rollup With Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Sharding

Ethereum research and development firm Nil Foundation announced Tuesday that it's coming out with its own rollup network, called “=nil;.”

The foundation says the new network will be Ethereum's first ZK rollup to enable sharding – an alchemy that combines two popular scaling technologies, zero-knowledge proofs and sharding. The combination should enable composability without compromising the security of the network, according to a press release.

The rollup will leverage zero-knowledge proofs – a type of cryptography that's become one of 2023's hottest trends in blockchain technology – to validate transactions from these shards, before those proofs get submitted to the primary Ethereum network.

“We’re trying to bring that long-promised sharding, which has been on the roadmap for a while, but to try to bring it in a non-invasive way, ” Misha Komarov, the CEO and co-founder of Nil Foundation, told CoinDesk in an interview.

Read more: Much Ado About =Nil;

Correction (November 7, 16:04 UTC): Corrects name of rollup to "=nil;"