- Hyperbridge, a Polkadot-backed project, intends to connect all blockchains.
- The project promises to take blockchain bridge security to the next level.
- Beyond interoperability, the project promises to unlock new possibilities, particularly for Ethereum projects.
With the evolution of blockchain technology, more and more projects continue to emerge with unique and promising value propositions. Amid this Cambrian explosion, the siloed nature of blockchains continues to pose a user experience hurdle, underscoring the need for interoperability.
So far, however, developed interoperability solutions have been vulnerability-prone, becoming easy and ideal targets for bad actors due to the substantial funds they typically process.
Enter Hyperbridge, a solution developed by a Nigerian duo with development experience at Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos that promises to take the security of interoperable solutions to the next level.
What Is Hyperbridge?
Hyperbridge is a cross-chain interoperability solution that, at the basic level, will allow users to transfer data and assets between standalone blockchains.
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The project is the brainchild of Polytope Labs, a blockchain development firm founded by Seun Lanlege and David Salami, former Composable Finance engineers who worked on bridging technology to Cosmos, NEAR, and Ethereum. Before Composable Finance, Lanlege had a nearly three-year stint as a core Rust developer at Polkadot-linked Parity Technologies.
Unlike other cross-chain interoperability solutions, Polytope Labs claims that Hyperbridge will offer greater security guarantees through cryptographic proofs.
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“What we’ve built is a blockchain that does the cryptography verification on behalf of other blockchains. It is connected to all the chains and does all the verification that needs to happen so that secure messages can be passed between each chain,” Lanlege asserted in an interview with Techpoint Africa, tipping Hyperbridge’s architecture as the first of its kind.
How Does Hyperbridge Work?
According to Polytope Labs, a secure connection between blockchains requires verification of consensus, consensus faults, state proofs, and state transitions. However, they maintain that these processes have, till now, proven capital and computationally intensive, leading to the proliferation of systems secured by multichain signature committees that attest to the state of the counterparty chain, a system prone to centralization risks and exploits due to human error.
Polytopes Labs claims to have found a way to surmount the cost hurdle with a coprocessor model only made possible by Polkadot’s Parachains architecture.
In the Hyperbridge coprocessor model, the computational load is taken off-chain with only the cryptographic proofs of the execution brought on-chain. While this method would have still caused bottlenecks, developers assert that they can share the workload across multiple Parachains using Polkadot as the computation layer.
At the same time, they suggest that Hyperbridge benefits from the security of Polkadot’s consensus layer and the efficiency of the network’s in-house bridging technology.
With this model, Polytope Labs asserts that they can bundle verified cross-chain messages into a single proof that can be cheaply verified on any chain. Developers also claim that the bridge achieves Byzantine fault tolerance with the help of consensus fault proofs.
“All of this culminates in what is undoubtedly the holy grail of interoperability: a single proof that aggregates multiple sub-proofs to facilitate the most secure and scalable cross-chain message passing,” Polytope’s Seun Lanlege wrote in November 2023.
Unlocking a World of Possibilities
Polytopes asserts that Hyperbridge’s security guarantees enable the creation of mint-and-burn bridges, which they argue are more capital-efficient than lock-and-release bridges but have been avoided because hackers could dilute the value of a token in the event of an exploit.
Beyond facilitating inter-blockchain communication, developers assert that Hyperbridge can make withdrawals from Optimistic rollups faster by serving as a validity prover. As explained by the developers, the challenge period for Optimistic rollups only exists because Ethereum does not check Layer 2 blocks, creating the need for a validity prover like Hyperbridge.
At the same time, developers contend that Hyperbridge allows Polkadot to become a data availability layer for Ethereum.
On Thursday, February 22, Polytopes announced an incentive program for relayers while hinting at the near testnet v2 launch of Hyperbridge. The project has received up to $130,000 in funding from Polkadot and the Web3 Foundation.
On the Flipside
- Hyperbridge faces steep competition from projects like Chainlink’s CCIP.
- Hyperbridge has yet to face rigorous testing.
Why This Matters
At the time of writing, Defi Llama data suggests that over $2.8 billion has been lost in blockchain bridge hacks. Hyperbridge now stands among promising projects that look set to plug the drain.
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