Luxury brand blockchain infrastructure provider Arianee has developed a new layer 2 built on Polygon to scale its digital product passport platform used by various luxury brands and companies.
Arianee has been developing the optimized layer 2 since early 2023, using Polygon’s zero-knowledge proof (ZK-proof)-powered Chain Development Kit (CDK). Arianee co-founder and CEO Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel spoke to Cointelegraph about its reengineered infrastructure, allowing brands and developers to design highly customizable, cost-effective and performant digital passports and tokens linked to real-world products and assets.
“We exclusively build on EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine], catering to enterprise and scalable use cases. When striving to deliver a service that operates seamlessly, universally and with predictable costs, it remains hard and risky to build on L1 or even on Polygon mainnet,” Hurstel explains.
The Arianee CEO said the company is focused on supporting brands engaged in scalable, high-performance and evolutive projects, which “demand an environment allowing precise control over efficiency in terms of both costs and energy consumption.”
Arianee’s native protocol token will be used for payments within the Polygon CDK application-specific chain (appchain), which is bridged to the Aria20 ERC-20 token on the Ethereum mainnet. Launching the layer-2 appchain will allow brands to launch and manage their digital product passport and loyalty tokens.
Arianee is currently the infrastructure provider to more than 40 brands, including Breitling, Moncler, Yves Saint Laurent and Lacoste. Luxury watch brands like Breitling issue digital product passports on the protocol to give owners blockchain-based proof of ownership.
These digital passports are nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that provide customizable utility for their real-world counterparts. Owners own and control their data and can interact with manufacturers to organize and manage product repairs, warranties, insurance and other services.
Polygon’s CDK is expected to deliver increased scalability and performance driven by ZK-proof technology. Brands using Ethereum’s ERC-721 token standard to issue NFTs and digital passports can also integrate existing infrastructure to Arianee’s protocol using the Polygon CDK.
Another drawcard of the new layer-2 functionality is the provision of block space dedicated to individual applications on the protocol. This is touted to reduce the impact on user experience as a result of high network activity. Polygon’s scaling infrastructure also reduces the operational costs of applications and services associated with gas fees and smart contract execution.
Polygon released a new Type 1 prover in February, allowing ecosystem chains like optimistic rollups to unlock ZK-proofs’ layer-2 functionality. The open-source technology unlocks the ability to generate ZK-proofs for mainnet Ethereum blocks at near-zero cost.