Key Takeaways
- Agents are evolving, and they need interop to thrive in an agentic economy.
- It’s critical to ensure that the underlying rails connecting agents across chains are open, transparent, and permissionless.
- Hyperlane is the open framework for connecting the agentic economy.
The Days Of Single-Chain Agents Are Over
As AI agents continue to evolve in the world of crypto, one thing becomes clear: agents need interop. Today, there’s agents creating content on Twitter, trading memecoins, competing in autonomous games, and more. In the future, there’s a good chance they’ll be swapping, bridging, and managing our funds for us.
However, these agents face one main issue in their current state — they’re limited to a single chain. As we recently covered, interop empowers agents to:
- Reach more users: Agents can grow their userbase if they are accessible on multiple chains. For example, an agent that lives on Base AND Solana can reach more users than an agent that only lives on Base.
- Access more products and services: Agents can try out more apps, trade more assets, and play more games if they can operate on multiple chains. This is especially relevant with the rise of altVMs designed to serve to the next generation of high-performance applications onchain. Whether its a new tap-to-earn game on Eclipse, a new perps DEX on Berachain, or a new DePIN project on Movement, interop empowers agents to access the latest hottest thing wherever it’s built.
- Be resilient to surges in activity and degraded chain performance: When a major event happens in the world of crypto and there’s a surge in onchain activity, such as the recent $TRUMP launch on Solana, chain performance is often degraded. Trades may revert or fail to land. Interop empowers agents to be resilient to these surges: if an agent can’t perform a task on Solana, they may be able to do it on Arbitrum instead.
In a flourishing agentic economy, an agent can trade memecoins on Solana, mint NFTs on Base, borrow ETH on Ethereum and restake it on Arbitrum, all without breaking a sweat. To get there, however, we first need to make sure the right foundational rails are in place.
Agents Need An Open Interop Framework
As we empower agents to operate across chains, it’s critical to ensure the underlying infrastructure is open, transparent, and permissionless.
There are several key reasons:
- Trustlessness and Verifiability: When agents manage user funds and perform actions on their behalf, it’s critical to ensure their actions — and the infrastructure they rely on- can be easily verifiable. An open framework eliminates the need to blindly trust agents or their developers. Instead, users can verify everything for themselves.
- Permissionless Deployments: Agents are designed to operate with minimal human intervention. If an agent needs to expand to a new chain or VM, it won’t be able to navigate through offchain BD processes, and it won’t have time for exclusivity contracts and roadmap optimizations.
- Avoiding Vendor Lock-In: Given the rapid rate of development around agents, there’s no reason for agents to be locked in to using a single, closed interop provider. With an open framework, agents have the flexibility to switch between interop solutions as needed, avoid unnecessary intermediaries, and to own their interop stack.
Naturally, the question that follows is what solution solves agents’ cross-chain needs and is actually available to use today?
This is where Hyperlane comes in.
Hyperlane: The Open Framework For Connecting The Agentic Economy
Hyperlane is the open interoperability framework empowering anyone to connect anywhere onchain. Developers can easily and securely communicate across different chains, while maintaining full control over their interop stack.
Initially built to support the rapidly evolving multichain landscape, Hyperlane’s core design makes it uniquely positioned to empower the agentic economy:
- Permissionless: Any agent or agent developer can build their own interop solution with Hyperlane. No permissions, no BD required. Just build it and ship it. If agents start to deploy their own bridges one day, there’s no easier way for them to do so than with Hyperlane.
- Open Source: Just like the leading agent frameworks today, the Hyperlane protocol is open-source. This means agents can access any part of the code and even contribute to it.
- Modular: Hyperlane’s architecture is designed to be fully modular, meaning agents can mix and match different components suited to their specific needs. Whether its the messaging layer, the transport layer, or the security relayer, any part of Hyperlane can be taken apart and customized. This means Hyperlane is modular enough to be adopted by any of the different agent frameworks currently live.
- Future-Proof: Thanks to Hyperlane’s modularity, developers can always switch out existing parts of their interop stack with new ones. For instance, with Hyperlane ISMs, the smart contracts specifying how cross-chain messages on Hyperlane are verified, developers can adopt new security models without having to rewrite their entire codebase. This simple but critical design lets agent developers keep their agents future-proof and open to future innovation.
- Streamlined DevEx: Mixing and matching different parts isn’t as scary or complicated as it sounds. Hyperlane was built for developers by developers, and the builder experience speaks for itself. Hyperlane provides a unified interface, CLI, and pre-built libraries to make building an interop solution as simple as possible, for humans and agents alike.
Driving Real, Permissionless Interoperability
As great as these features are, actions speak louder than words, and there’s no better way to demonstrate the power of Hyperlane than previous builders’ journeys:
- The Mitosis team brought Hyperlane to the CosmWasm
- The Pragma team brought Hyperlane to Starknet and the CairoVM.
- The LogX team built their own Hyperlane implementation to help aggregate liquidity across multiple chains for a seamless trading experience.
- The KYVE team is bringing Hyperlane to the Cosmos SDK.
- The Velodrome team built Superlane, a custom interop zone with a distinct validator set that can be accessed by any Superchain rollup today.
And now, Cod3x is bringing Hyperlane to the world of agents.
Empowering Agents With Hyperlane
Cod3x, an AI-powered DeFi platform for building custom agents, is integrating Hyperlane into the Cod3x SDK. This integration empowers agents built on Cod3x to easily move assets across different chains, marking the beginning of a new chapter for Hyperlane: connecting the agentic economy.
The first step was bringing Big Tony, the first in-house Cod3x agent, over to Solana. Today, users can bridge $TONY between Base and Solana on Nexus.
The next step: empowering all Cod3x agents to move assets to any network in seconds. Soon, anyone will be able to spin up a custom agent on Cod3x with day-one interoperability, with no coding required.
What’s Next?
As the agentic economy approaches and agents start to manage more funds and drive more onchain activity, it’s critical to ask: do we want these agents to run on closed, permissioned rails, or open and permissionless ones?
Connecting agents across different chains through an open interop framework will be critical to unlocking a flourishing agentic economy. Agents don’t just need interop: they need Hyperlane.
- Calling All Builders: There’s currently $5000 up for grabs to integrate the ElizaOS framework into Hyperlane. See the bounty details ⏩ here.
- Want to take your agent cross-chain? We’d love to learn more!
More about Hyperlane
Hyperlane is the open interoperability framework. It empowers developers to connect anywhere onchain and build applications that can easily and securely communicate between multiple blockchains. Importantly, Hyperlane is fully open-source and always permissionless to build with.
