The recent Big Bang explosion of alternative layer 1 blockchains, rollups, and appchains sparked rapid expansion in crypto, opening up rifts between every chain and birthing a new frontier: The Interchain. Early explorers of The Interchain built and navigated precarious bridges to uncharted ecosystems, fighting through fragmented liquidity and intimidating user experiences to harvest yield and experiment with new protocols. Many bridges fell to interchain pirate attacks along the way, stranding explorers and shaking belief in whether The Interchain could be connected at all. A new approach was needed.
Hyperlane was founded with the belief that the interchain singularity is inevitable, and empowering applications with customizable interchain capabilities is key to reaching it.
Opening the Interchain
Current interchain user and developer experiences are intimidating and significant barriers to adoption. Dozens of chains all with different ecosystems make it difficult to navigate The Interchain and even harder to build in. User-level bridging fragments liquidity and creates another skill barrier for users.
Hyperlane brings interchain interoperability to the application-level instead of user-level. With interchain messaging at the app-level, users can now focus on just using your app instead of worrying about bridging and keeping track of a million different chains. Hyperlane’s messaging API and SDK empower you to build interchain applications with ease, while its Interchain Accounts enable developers to perform actions on remote chains without the need to even deploy on those chains. With Hyperlane the Interchain becomes more accessible than ever before.
Power to the App
The myriad of bridge hacks in recent months exposed the dangers of a one-size-fits-all approach to interchain security and the lack of control participants had over their risk exposure. One weakness shouldn’t compromise all users. Users should be able to control their risk parameters.
Hyperlane’s Modular Security stack empowers applications to customize their interchain security as they see fit. Developers can choose the default configuration secured by proof-of-stake, choose from a menu of out-of-the-box security models such as optimistic security, proof of authority, a multi-sig configuration, or customize new models and even combine existing ones.
Modular Security allows the injection of any security model to your application. It also offers the ability to have dynamic security based on message contents. You can set configurations to filter out certain messages or even route different messages through different security models. You can shut down interchain hacks before they ever happen.
With Modular Security, the power is in the hands of the application, not the platform.
Expansion
While early builders of the interchain had to start from scratch, increasingly new chains can be assembled out of an assortment of out-of-the-box building blocks. The increasing acceleration of chain development has created a scaling challenge for interoperability protocols, which struggle to keep pace. These protocols typically require approval by centralized gatekeepers (in the form of protocol developers, validators, or governance) to integrate new chains.
Hyperlane’s modular and chain-agnostic architecture allows anyone to connect a new chain to the interchain highway, no approval necessary. Decentralizing access and expansion of the Interchain should accelerate development and network effects across the blockchain universe.
Onwards
The current crypto landscape is a collection of mostly isolated chains, planetary civilizations confined to their own ecosystems with minimal ability to communicate, much less conduct commerce. Hyperlane’s mission is to make interchain capabilities accessible to blockchain applications, to bring these planetary civilizations the tech to level up to galactic, space-faring civilizations. Hyperlane envisions an interchain highway so interconnected between every chain and application that it merges towards an interchain singularity (the ultimate merge?).
We are still in the early stages of interchain exploration and experimentation. Interchain pioneers are needed to continue pushing the frontier. Conquering the Interchain will unlock new network effects, open new lanes of growth, and unbound the possibilities for your application. Hyperlane gives you the power to take your application to the next level, to The Interchain and beyond.
Go Interchain with Hyperlane.
