You’ve probably heard a lot of about interchain token standards, like xERC20 or OFTs. This guide will introduce Warp Tokens, the interchain token standard that enables asset issuers to scale token distribution alongside Hyperlane’s permissionless expansion.
In this guide, you’ll learn what the unique advantages of choosing the Warp Token standard:
- Permissionless bridge expansion to any new chain, including the widest support of alt-VMs.
- Entirely open source, well documented, and without “Labs” vendor lock-in.
- Customizable security and fees for your use case.
- Unique token type support including yield-bearing routes from 4626 vaults.
What are interchain token standards?
So before we dive into Warp Tokens, what is an interchain token standard and why did they emerge?
The current crypto interop experience fragments each token. For example, if you use a classic wrapped lock & mint bridge like Wormhole’s Portal to bridge ETH or SOL, the process requires:
- Wrapping the asset on your origin chain, then unwrapping on the destination chain
- Liquidity on the chain to unwrap by swapping out of the wrapped asset like WETH or Axelar’s axlUSDC
There are a couple problems with this approach. First, the wrapped token contracts are unique to each chain and requires liquidity markets on each chain. Next, they lack any form of programmability: you can’t set rate limits or allow multiple bridges to mint the same asset. Lastly, not all minted assets pairs have liquidity — you can’t take WETH from Base directly to Solana, you have to go from Base to Ethereum to Solana.
As the number of chains and assets have grown, wrapping/unwrapping and liquidity driven approaches have been unable to keep pace. With chain growth continuing to accelerate, sourcing and continuously managing liquidity is not just coordination and capital intensive, but may also be impossible to scale everywhere. Time and capital needlessly lost to BD lobbying could have been spent on building.
Chain Builders need a permissionless way to bootstrap flows into a chain.
Asset Issuers need to seamlessly distribute an asset without the operational burden of coordinating liquidity.
To address this, major interop protocols have converged on the interchain standard token approach.
The lock & mint design pattern is essentially the same: the collateral (the “real” asset) is locked on the origin chain, and a canonical synthetic representation of the asset is minted on the destination chain. In fact, the synthetic token can be seamlessly moved across any of the chains in that protocol’s network — burning the synthetic to withdraw from one chain, minting on the next.
You can orchestrate setting up these Warp Token contracts through Hyperlane’s CLI and the Warp Routes token bridging application. This is achieved with elegant contract surface area. Once deployed, simply call transferRemote with the amount of tokens, destination chain, and recipient’s addresses.
And Warp Routes uses the Hyperlane Router pattern library to constantly manage which chains and addresses a given bridge’s contracts are deployed on. Once the transferRemote call is routed to the intended destination and address, security verification occurs before minting or releasing the token.
Each of the “standards” are generally relayed by their respective interop protocol across their networks:
- Warp Token = Hyperlane
- ITS = Axelar
- OFT = LayerZero
- NTT = Wormhole
- SuperchainERC20 = Optimism Superchain
So think of token standards less as end-all “standards” and more about how effective they are at enabling you to instantly distribute your token across each respective network.
Read on to find out why the Warp Token is the right fit for crypto builders, especially for rollups and asset issuers looking to scale their interchain reach faster than the competition.
Permissionless Scaling
With Hyperlane, you’ll have the widest possible network of chains with no bottlenecks on chain expansion. This is critical when expanding your chain or asset’s token bridging — you don’t need to ask a “Labs” team to add your chain.
No Central Bottlenecks
Wormhole requires all 19 Guardians to agree to support a new chain, and similarly using Axelar’s hub model leverages their core validator set as well. LayerZero doesn’t have a central validator set, but it does have centralized controls about which chains are supported in the network by deploying Endpoints.
By contrast, Hyperlane allows permissionless chain expansion without a central validator set — deploy a Mailbox to the chain, add it to the Hyperlane Registry, and enroll a default validator set for each chain. Any dev can now interact with your chain or even add their own validators and custom security (more on that later).
Self-Serve Tooling
Every interop protocol claims they’re permissionless, but in reality Hyperlane is the only interop protocol you can connect to your chain on your own, right now, today. You can add a new chain in three CLI commands, create a token bridge in just two CLI commands, and then set up a no-code UI in a couple button clicks. It took me 10 minutes in the video, see for yourself:
No exclusive contracts or BD game or DAO lobbying: truly permissionless 🫡
More VMs
Hyperlane is easily extensible and available in more execution environments than any other interop protocol. Currently live on Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana. And additional VMs are on the way, including Starkware, Fuel, Move and more. Warp Routes work across VMs: Injective used Hyperlane to bridge $INJ from Cosmos over as their custom gas token on their EVM rollup.
Scaling Gives Network Effects Edge
Hyperlane helped Renzo scale ezETH to over $1B in bridging volume by enabling them to move fast and be live on day 1 of launches. Ultimately this helped Renzo be the first to gain incentives as new chains and campaigns emerged, leading to greater LRT market share. In fact, the ease of bridging ezETH between chains led it to become the de facto method of withdrawing from Blast, with $150M in volume in a two day period following Blast’s campaign completion.
Open Source Framework without Lock In
Hyperlane is the open interop framework: fully open source, well documented, and self serve. Beyond using the CLI to deploy a token bridge or add a new chain, you can own and run the entire stack yourself including the security configuration and Relayer.
Own Your Relayer and Fees
They say when you marry someone, you really marry their family. When it comes to settling down with an interchain token standard, you’re actually marrying not just their protocol or their network of chains — but the underlying relayer infra that’s passing the messages offchain.
This is the least understood “gotcha” that teams find out too late. If you’re locked in to their network of chains and the relayers used to bridge between them, you’re at the mercy of not only their chain expansion roadmap but also their fee structure. It’s less TCP/IP and more like your expensive ISP.
Because Hyperlane is fully open, you can run your own Relayer. It’s a Rust binary you can pull from Docker and run on AWS for ~$50/mo. And you can update your contract onchain to collect fees or even subsidize bridging costs for your users. Stride, Forma, Pragma, Skip, Mitosis, Everclear, Arthera and more dev teams have run a Relayer.
pro tip: just because you can run infra doesn’t mean you need to. core dev teams like Abacus Works and Stride operate Relayers as a public good, onboarding new batches of chains every two weeks. use the CLI to create a mainnet chain request PR to the Hyperlane Registry and indicate if you’d like production infra to be run for you.
Security
Verifiable Fraud Proofs on Each Chain
Each interop protocol has its own security mechanism to avoid being tricked about when to unlock collateral. Managing state between chains — even across VMs — is where Hyperlane shines by providing verifiable fraud proofs.
Each unique message passed by Mailbox is inserted into a leaf of a merkle tree stored on the Mailbox. This Merkle Tree is what each origin chain’s Validators observe and attest to, and then provide signed proof to the destination chain. And it’ll also be the basis of what Hyperlane’s proof of stake protocol and Economic Security will leverage.
Modular Security for Your Use Case
Hyperlane is the first interop protocol to introduce modular security through Interchain Security Modules, back in November 2022. Hyperlane is built from the ground up to make it easy to plug and play modular security components to give you control over the trust assumptions of your assets.
This includes application-specific validator sets — like how Renzo leveraged their EigenLayer operators to secure ezETH onchain, ZK light clients like Succinct, or even rollup or other third party bridges. The controls can be highly granular per route, for example setting rate limits or triggering additional security measures above a certain transaction size.
Many Bridging Types
Warp Routes support an abundance bridging types — you can use them in many ways:
- Lock a Collateral on one chain and Mint a Synthetic on other chains
- Use the Native (gas token) type to create a fast ETH bridge between Mainnet and your rollup
- Set up a Yield Route, with yield reflecting the underlying ERC-4626 yield-bearing vault
- Bring Circle-compliant Bridged USDC to your rollup — lock the native USDC and mint FiatToken on your chain
- Mint xERC20 tokens through Warp Routes
- Bridge over a Custom Gas Token on your ARB or OP rollup
- Multi Collateral Warp Routes, where collateral assets can be deposited/withdrawn from more than one chain, e.g. USDC from ETH and ARB
- ERC-721 NFTs
Warp Routes are extensible, neutral, and open source — new token standards can easily be added with a PR and audit https://github.com/hyperlane-xyz/hyperlane-monorepo/issues/3486
See for Yourself
Warp Routes securely enable permissionless distribution across Hyperlane’s ever-expanding network, without lock in.
It’s your turn to try Warp Routes — get a working UI in 10 minutes by following this guide https://medium.com/hyperlane/how-to-launch-a-token-bridge-with-hyperlane-warp-routes-befaf91217b5
And if you’re an asset issuer or chain and want to learn more, get in touch.
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.
