Agglayer Secures Cross-Chain Infrastructure With Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Polygon's Agglayer has avoided vulnerabilities that have compromised other cross-chain infrastructure due to its use of zero-knowledge proofs instead of operator committees. The KelpDAO LayerZero bridge, for example, was drained of $292 million in rsETH after a single forged signature was used by an attacker to borrow ETH on Aave, leaving up to $230 million in bad debt. This event triggered a $6.6 billion run on Aave as users exited the protocol within 24 hours.

Most cross-chain infrastructure relies on off-chain committees or multisigs to attest to state changes, which can be compromised by a single signer. In August 2026, an attacker drained 191,156 USDC from Allbridge's CCTP router on Base by redeeming a forged message that sat unused for 24 days.

Agglayer replaces human signers with mathematical proofs, using ZK proofs and pessimistic proofs to enforce security at production scale. This design prevents infinite-mint category of attacks that compromised the Sandbox bridge and the Coreum-XRPL bridge.