Trustless ZK light client between NEAR and Ethereum — selected through the Wormhole Foundation contributor grant. Plus MultiGov's Solana implementation, as contract engineering.
Zpoken's NEAR work sits inside the cryptography practice. The substantive contribution is a ZK light client that proves NEAR consensus state on Ethereum — and the reverse path — without trusting any intermediate party. The work is part of Wormhole's broader ZK roadmap toward replacing trusted validators with zero-knowledge proofs of source-chain consensus state.
NEAR's consensus is BFT-style with deterministic finality, which is structurally different from Ethereum's delayed-finality model. ZK light clients between the two chains have to handle this asymmetry without leaking the asymmetry into the trust model.
NEAR's block production uses a small validator set with deterministic finality — a NEAR block is final after one round of attestation. The on-chain verifier on Ethereum has to verify this attestation cryptographically, which means the circuit has to encode NEAR's signature scheme (Ed25519) and the validator-set updates that change over epochs. Ed25519 in-circuit has well-known cost characteristics that influence which proof system makes economic sense for the verifier.
The reverse direction is harder. Ethereum reaches finality on a delay — checkpoints finalize after two epochs of attestation supermajorities, well behind the chain head. The light client on NEAR has to verify Ethereum sync-committee signatures and handle the gap between Ethereum optimistic confirmations and Ethereum finalized state. The engineering call is where to set the cutoff — too aggressive on confirmation count and the bridge is unsafe; too conservative and the bridge is unusably slow.
Both light clients have to handle validator-set rotation — NEAR's epoch-based validator rotation and Ethereum's sync-committee rotation each invalidate the prior circuit's witness assumptions. The light client design has to ingest validator updates without requiring full re-bootstrap.
Engagements at this intersection led by Mike Yezhov and Anton Yezhov. Cryptography practice in-house — see /founders for the bench credentials and Anton's peer-reviewed research on ZK proof systems.
If you're building cross-chain ZK on NEAR or in adjacent territory and need senior cryptography engineering, the engagement starts with a 30-minute call.
That call is with a founder. Shapes, discovery, and terms → /engagement