The crypto industry is deeply trapped in a liquidity crisis. Despite continuous upgrades to infrastructure, especially blockchain scalability, the anticipated traffic growth has not materialized. On the contrary, the surge of emerging chains like L2 blockchains has exacerbated issues of liquidity fragmentation and user disconnection. More critically, differences in consensus mechanisms and underlying architectures between chains have created substantial technical barriers for cross-chain transactions, further hindering the integration of ecosystem liquidity and optimization of user experience.

To enhance user experience and simplify cross-chain interactions, Magic Labs and Polygon Labs have jointly launched the new cross-chain network, Newton, which allows users to seamlessly log into any chain and Dapp with a single wallet. This article will delve into Newton, exploring aspects such as team background, funding, core technologies, and ecosystem development to showcase its potential for future growth.

What is Newton?

Newton is a unified blockchain network with a cross-chain single wallet and balance, allowing users to store and transfer various digital assets across different blockchains through simplified cross-chain transactions, creating a better user experience.

Source: magicnewton.com

By integrating core solutions such as Polygon network aggregation layer AggLayer and Magic crypto wallet Passport, Newton primarily offers three key features:

1) Seamless login and management of any chain and Dapp with a single wallet;

2) Aggregation of multiple chains to achieve liquidity, user, and value sharing while significantly reducing transaction times and gas fees;

3) Significant reduction in network risks by securely authorizing wallets, applications, and AI agents to perform on-chain operations.

Newton was first launched in November 2024 and will initially support EVM chains like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base, with plans to support other ecosystems in the future. Newton has not yet released an official token regarding community incentives, but users can earn points by completing community tasks and other activities.

Team Background and Funding

The development team behind Newton is Magic Labs and Polygon Labs.

Magic, founded in 2018, is a wallet-as-a-service provider and the first to propose the concept of “wallet abstraction.” To date, it has created 40 million wallets and attracted over 200,000 developers, providing high-quality services to Web3 projects like Polymarket, Helium, WalletConnect, Immutable, and traditional enterprises like Forbes and Naver.

Over the past few years, Magic has completed multiple funding rounds, raising over $80 million, with investments from institutions such as PayPal Ventures, Northzone, Placeholder, Lightspeed Venture, SV Angel, Tiger Global, DCG, CoinFund, as well as notable angel investors like Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, and Roham Gharegozlou.

Polygon Labs is responsible for the development and growth of Polygon. Founded in 2017 and initially known as Matic Network, Polygon started as an Ethereum scaling solution. With technological advancements, Polygon shifted toward zero-knowledge proof technologies, launching Polygon zkEVM, the L2 chain development toolkit Polygon CDK (Chain Development Kit), and the aggregation blockchain Agglayer, aiming to simplify blockchain development for developers and unify the entire blockchain ecosystem.

To date, Polygon has also completed several funding rounds, raising over $450 million, with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Peak XV Partners*, Dragonfly, Tiger Global, Republic Capital, Ryze Labs, CoinFund, DCG, and others.

Agglayer: Shared Liquidity, Users, and Value

Newton adopts Polygon’s aggregation layer Agglayer, a lightweight, modular interoperability framework that supports direct message and asset exchanges between blockchains, even if these blockchains have different underlying execution logic. More importantly, Agglayer introduces the innovative concept of a pessimistic proof mechanism, which ensures the security of the entire cross-chain network while allowing each connected chain to maintain sovereign independence.

To better understand Agglayer, it can be likened to a local area network where different blockchains use zero-knowledge proofs to connect to the network and complete data and asset exchanges within it, sharing liquidity and state. To achieve this, Agglayer primarily relies on three key components: Agglayer nodes, shared bridges, and pessimistic proofs.

Source: polygon.technology

• Agglayer Nodes: Primarily responsible for receiving, processing, and verifying zero-knowledge proofs from all connected chains and sending them to L1 for final settlement.
• Unified Bridge: Primarily responsible for direct contract calls between different chains, ensuring that cross-chain transactions are completed on L1 before being claimed on the target chain.

In most cases, cross-chain bridges bridge assets between different chains, such as when transferring assets from Arbitrum to Optimism, which often requires using L1, like Ethereum, as an intermediary transition chain or involves wrapping the assets. However, the Unified Bridge allows users to send and receive native assets across different chains seamlessly. Since it does not involve L1, it can offer faster transaction speeds and lower transaction costs.

• Pessimistic Proof: A novel zero-knowledge proof that ensures cryptographic security of the cross-chain mechanism without the need for trust.

Unlike Optimistic Proof, Pessimistic Proof assumes that all connected chains are insecure and incompatible. This cautious approach ensures that even if a malicious chain exists, the independent security of other connected chains is maintained. Additionally, it enables a comprehensive understanding of all assets and message transmissions across connected chains to ensure that no chain can withdraw more from the Unified Bridge than the amount it has deposited.

Based on this modular framework, Agglayer aims to build an ecosystem that truly realizes the sharing of liquidity, users, and value. In early February of this year, Agglayer officially launched its v0.2 mainnet, introducing the pessimistic proof mechanism. However, at this stage, Agglayer only supports integration with CDK chains, with plans to support all EVM chains and achieve multi-stack functionality in the next phase.

CDK is a modular, open-source software toolkit launched by Polygon that supports the installation and configuration of zero-knowledge-driven, Ethereum-compatible L2 blockchains, offering lower transaction fees, faster finality, and seamless cross-chain interoperability.

Passport: Single Wallet for Multi-Chain Access

While AggLayer provides Newton with smoother cross-chain interoperability and multi-chain liquidity, the Passport solution offers users a single wallet entry for accessing multiple chains, completely eliminating the interaction barriers between users and the multi-chain ecosystem as well as Dapps.

Source: magic.link

Passport, officially launched by Magic Labs in November last year, is currently in internal testing. As the first chain abstraction smart wallet, Passport’s key features include:

1) User Experience Focused
Passport supports email, SMS, and social account-based creation and login, significantly lowering the entry barriers for traditional users into the Web3 world. In addition to Web2-like authentication methods, Passport also simplifies on-chain transactions, transaction signing, cross-chain exchanges, and more, greatly enhancing the user experience.

2) Lower Development Barriers
Passport provides developers with an easy-to-install and free SDK that helps them deploy multi-chain support for their applications within minutes.

3) Cross-Chain Compatibility and Liquidity
Passport is a parent smart contract account that automatically generates child smart contract accounts on each chain during creation to ensure secure cross-chain compatibility. At the same time, Passport fully leverages cross-chain liquidity, allowing users to automatically exchange assets in the wallet to facilitate cross-chain interactions on supported chains.

For example, if a user needs to pay 100 POL on the Polygon network, they can seamlessly use an equivalent amount of ETH from Ethereum to complete the cross-chain transaction, providing more flexible options for users.

Ecosystem Development and Challenges

Currently, Newton focuses on product development and has not released any official tokens, nor has it disclosed any related information. However, Newton has introduced the Ethereal points reward mechanism to attract and incentivize user participation. Users can participate through the following two methods:

1)Newton Portal: Supports login via email, X account, Google account, wallet, etc. Users can earn points by completing various tasks, such as social tasks, partner tasks, inviting friends, and participating in luck-based mini-games like dice rolls.

Source: magicnewton.com

2) Newton Guild: Supports login via wallet, X, and Discord accounts. Users can earn points by completing tasks. Notably, the official team also periodically releases NFT minting activities, where users can receive NFTs by completing related tasks.

Newton encountered a trust crisis regarding token issuance in December last year. Two Memecoins, $h2w6gm6jz and $NEWTON, suddenly appeared in the official community. Coincidentally, some misleading actions were taken by Newton team members, such as retweeting and following, which, although later deleted and clarified multiple times, sparked strong criticism from the community due to the controversial behavior. Furthermore, the team did not take any corrective actions afterward, which led to significant dissatisfaction among community members. To avoid being embroiled in similar controversies in the future, the team needs to learn from this and act with caution.

Overall, Newton has shown great development potential in achieving its vision of chain unification through integrating the Passport wallet solution and the Agglayer interoperability framework. However, being in the early stages of development, Newton inevitably faces some challenges.

For example, zero-knowledge proof technology, especially the pessimistic proof mechanism, has yet to be widely validated and adopted in the market, and its stability and security remain to be observed. Additionally, regarding community building, incentives, and governance, the Newton team has made little progress so far and needs to think deeply about these areas and quickly formulate specific strategies and details. Furthermore, technology must be put into practice, and the value creation of chain unification still depends on ecosystem users and applications. Newton cannot afford to slack off in user acquisition, developer education, and ecosystem application development.

Conclusion

As the first chain unification network, Newton has demonstrated significant potential in addressing liquidity fragmentation and optimizing cross-chain interaction experiences by integrating the modular protocol framework Agglayer and the chain abstraction wallet solution Passport.

However, since Newton is still in the early stages of development, has not yet launched its product, and has made relatively limited progress in areas such as community incentive mechanisms and governance models, its ability to successfully achieve its set goals remains uncertain.