Digital currencies of every stripe—cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and even the central-bank varieties—are often hyped as tools that will change how finance works. Yet any seasoned crypto user quickly learns an uncomfortable reality: in a multi-chain world, value does not move easily. Blockchains behave like isolated islands; assets become stranded, users juggle multiple wallets and bridging apps, and simple transfers carry an edge of anxiety that something might go wrong.
The blockchain “bridges” created to solve this problem—the connective tissue meant to move assets across these islands—have repeatedly failed. Nowhere was this clearer than in 2022, when billions were wiped from some of the industry’s big-name “trusted” bridges. Wormhole lost $320 million; Ronin was drained of more than $600 million; Binance’s blockchain got hit with a $570 million loss; Harmony’s Horizon bridge lost another $100 million. In 2023, Multichain followed with another high-profile breach, as attackers exploited security and process gaps to steal money from its reserves. While crypto bridge hacks have slowed in 2025—Force Bridge, Shibarium, and Cetus are the only notable hacks so far—the risk has not disappeared.
“Regardless of how those funds are stored, locked up in a smart contract or with a centralised custodian, storage points [become] targets,” said Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, in its 2022 crypto vulnerability report.
The paradox does not hide itself: crypto is global, composable, and digital at its core, yet moving value or messages from one blockchain to another often feels like threading a needle underwater.
Seun Lanlege, CEO and co-founder of Polytope Labs, a Lagos-based blockchain research lab building Hyperbridge, believes this bottleneck must end. The startup is building a “trustless” bridge that does not rely on multisignatories for value confirmation, reducing the exposure to hacks from human points of failure. But can smart contract validation be trusted when it comes to moving people’s money?
This is a deconstruction of the product, the strategy, the philosophy, and why Hyperbridge is positioning itself as the interoperability standard of the global blockchain industry.
The flaw that birthed Hyperbridge
Lanlege describes Hyperbridge as a “different kind of trustless bridge.” He argues that the major flaw of existing bridges is their reliance on multisignatories.
A multisignatory system is a small group of people or entities that collectively approve a transaction. When a user sends tokens across a typical bridge, the assets are handed to this group, who hold special private keys that can “mint” or release the corresponding assets on the other side. It works the way a shared safe works: if enough key-holders agree, they can open the door. But if those keys are stolen, corrupted or misused, as we witnessed repeatedly in 2022, the entire system collapses, along with users’ funds.
The mechanics of bridges are not complicated. At their simplest, they watch for a transaction on one blockchain, capture proof of it, and trigger the matching action on another chain. The real difficulty is deciding who or what performs that verification. Most bridges rely on humans, multisignature committees or small validator groups rather than allowing blockchains to verify each other directly. This design decision is where Hyperbridge deviates from the norm.
The Difference: Standard bridges rely on a “middleman” committee to tell the truth. Hyperbridge removes the committee, letting the blockchains verify each other directly using cryptography.
Crypto today resembles the early internet: dozens of emerging blockchains, but no shared highways. Each blockchain—Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Gnosis, and others—operates its own execution environment, finality model, validator set, and consensus rules.
For users and developers, this fragmentation presents three recurring problems: moving assets requires risky multisignatory bridges, most popular bridges are controlled by small groups of key-holders, and networks cannot “talk” to each other natively.
Smart contracts on one chain cannot verify the origin or correctness of messages from another blockchain without someone “in the middle.”
“A multi-chain world has created fragmentation for everyone,” said Lanlege. “Users have their assets spread across multiple blockchains. We’re thinking about ways of consolidating this experience, kind of like how Google consolidated the internet. If you want to go to any web page, you just go to Google and enter a URL. We think there’s a gap in the industry for this sort of product for Web3.”
The foundational question, as Lanlege puts it, became: how do you build a bridge that cannot be hacked unless the underlying blockchains themselves collapse?
To answer that, he needed a trust base stronger than any one protocol.
Hyperbridge is a full blockchain (parachain) powered by Polkadot’s $2.6 billion worth of crypto-economic security, which covers its network security. The parachain is designed to verify other blockchains cryptographically rather than relying on intermediaries, Lanlege said.
He saw another issue: developers, not users, bear the highest cost of insecure bridges. A single exploit can vaporise liquidity, derail other projects tied to a compromised bridge, and even kill entire ecosystems.
He recalls the collapse of the Fantom chain’s ecosystem after the Multichain hack, noting that many developers have been “waiting for a proper solution” since then.
The founder: From Rust hobbyist to core blockchain engineer
After leaving a software engineering job he found unfulfilling in 2017, Lanlege taught himself Rust, a systems programming language now popular in blockchain development, and began contributing to open-source projects.
Those contributions put him on Parity Technologies’ radar in 2018. Parity, the engineering braintrust built by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, was the kind of place where ambitious protocol engineers wanted to be. Lanlege joined the team working on Parity Ethereum and found himself inside the engine room of one of the most technically sophisticated projects in the space.
Parity was building Polkadot at the time, initially positioned as Ethereum’s successor (Ethereum 2.0); the team was trying to “shard” Ethereum, a way of scaling the underlying blockchain. For Lanlege, the role was exactly what he had been preparing himself for: implementing node clients, debugging consensus issues and touching the metal of the world’s most ambitious blockchain experiments.
“It was my dream job,” he said. “Parity was building the only serious attempt at a sharded, multi-core blockchain network.”
He spent three years on core protocol engineering. But infrastructure work, he admitted, becomes “boring very quickly.” The long stretches of debugging, edge-case testing and performance benchmarking, with little interaction with end users, eventually convinced him it was time to leave.
By 2021, convinced that Polkadot’s application layer would explode during the bull market, he joined Composable Finance as a principal engineer. There, he worked on a Polkadot–Cosmos bridge, an experience he credits as his deepest technical exposure to how bridging mechanisms function and fail.
When it was publicly revealed that Composable’s CEO Omar Zaki had previously faced US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fraud charges in 2019, Lanlege walked away immediately, citing that he knew the project would not survive.
Around the same time, the industry’s biggest bridge hacks were unfolding.
“There were over a billion dollars in bridge hacks,” said Lanlege. “The pattern was obvious: too many teams were cutting corners, relying on multisignatories or committees instead of cryptographic verification.”
With savings from buying and holding cryptocurrencies during the bull market run and roughly two years of runway from their savings, he and his equally technical co-founder, David Salami, another former Composable Finance blockchain engineer, began building Hyperbridge in December 2022.
Why Hyperbridge needed to be a blockchain, not just a bridge
Lanlege explained that bridges in the crypto ecosystem fall into two broad categories. The first are middleman bridges, usually centralised or based on multisignature committees. A few people or companies hold private keys, and nothing moves across chains unless they sign off. Their approvals carry no real cost, and they lose nothing if they act badly or collude to cheat the system. This model is cheap to run, but also fragile because the process depends on trusting a handful of people. This is how most bridges work.
The second group, cryptographic bridges, work very differently. These bridges don’t trust people; they trust math. They use light clients: smart contracts that check whether a block carrying a transaction on another chain is final and cannot be reversed (blockchain finality). This method is safer because the verification happens on-chain, where everyone can inspect it.
Yet there is a problem with this model: several blockchains have thousands of validators—computer nodes which verify transactions on a blockchain—and checking all the signatures on a busy blockchain like Ethereum—which has nearly 1 million validators—is very expensive.
Due to this cost, many protocols take the easy road. They shrink a large validator set down to a simple three-out-of-five multisignature group and call it a day. The problem with that is it reduces the security of an entire chain to the decisions of just a few entities.
It’s like walking into a classroom with 10,000 students (validators) and trying to check every homework to ensure it’s correct. This process is slow and painstaking, especially on blockchains with many validators. To save time and cost, many protocols instead check a few students rather than all 10,000. This is cheaper, but it effectively returns to trusting a small group, like the first model.
Hyperbridge was built on the opposite idea. Instead of cutting corners, it tries to verify everything. It treats each blockchain’s finality as a mathematical fact that can be checked, not a choice made by a committee. To do this, Hyperbridge runs as a full blockchain in its own right. It stores and processes data on its network, relies on Polkadot’s large validator set for security, and uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), so Ethereum-compatible (EVM) chains can verify Polkadot’s consensus without high computational costs.
Hyperbridge works like a cryptographic interpreter between blockchains. It does not hold funds, act as an escrow service, or operate through a multisignature group. It translates one chain’s finality into a proof that another chain can understand. There is no point where a human decision replaces cryptographic verification, according to Lanlege.
Here is how the process unfolds: if a user bridges their crypto tokens from Polygon, a layer-2 blockchain, to Ethereum, a layer-1 blockchain, the process begins the moment Polygon finalises the block containing that user’s transaction. When Polygon finalises a block, its validators produce a certificate proving the block can no longer be reversed. That certificate cannot be faked without risking slashing—this causes validators to lose a portion of the tokens locked up as collateral, which keeps them honest. Messengers called relayers then carry this signed information over to Hyperbridge, but they are not trusted themselves; they just move data around.
Hyperbridge checks that the information is valid and really comes from Polygon. Once it is satisfied, it records this information on its own chain, which relies on Polkadot’s validator network for economic security. Hyperbridge then packages these updates into a compact cryptographic proof that Ethereum can check without much cost. Finally, relayers—simple couriers in the system—send the user’s transaction plus a small proof of inclusion (Merkle proof) to Ethereum, so Ethereum can safely confirm that the transaction really happened.
How it works: The Relayers (red arrows) move the data, but they cannot fake it because Hyperbridge generates a cryptographic proof (ZKP) that Ethereum verifies mathematically.
At no point is there a committee managing funds, a server sitting in the middle, or a small group with special permissions, Lanlege explained. The system runs on cryptography, economic incentives, and verifiable computation. Unless the cryptographic libraries themselves have backdoors, the system cannot be forged.
The Hyperbridge architecture
Hyperbridge relies on two types of relayers, neither of which is trusted, according to Lanlege. Consensus relayers carry block-finality certificates from source chains to Hyperbridge, while messaging relayers deliver the actual transaction proofs contained within those finalised blocks.
Once the relayers deliver the certificates, Hyperbridge verifies them and produces proofs that allow destination chains to confirm block and transaction inclusion without trusting anyone.
“Anyone can run relayers,” Lanlege said. “You don’t have to be staked, and you don’t have to stake any tokens. You don’t have to be whitelisted. People can join relaying permissionlessly. I think this is really a testament to the fact that Hyperbridge is fully trustless.”
When asked about potential attacks, Lanlege said Hyperbridge was designed to prevent leak-offs from humans, and the logic can only be broken if there’s a problem with the cryptographic code.
“The only scenario where we could be attacked is if there’s a bug in our cryptographic libraries—the libraries we use to verify these proofs,” said Lanlege. “Maybe through a backdoor—God forbid—but luckily, we use well-audited, industry-standard libraries to perform cryptographic verification. We have our audit reports in our monorepo, which is open-source on GitHub. If anyone’s concerned about that, they can go read it.”
Yet Lanlege acknowledged a technical bottleneck. Confirming ZKPs for EVM blockchains remains the slowest part of the system, adding several minutes to cross-chain operations.
Hyperbridge is slower than bridges that take shortcuts, said Lanlege. But this, according to him, was a fundamental security trade-off they had to make. Generating ZKPs of the Polkadot consensus adds four to five minutes. Transactions originating from Ethereum incur an additional 20–25 minutes due to Ethereum’s slow finality time. Reducing this delay would mean compromising the system’s trustless design.
To simplify user experience, Hyperbridge launched a swap product, known as Intent Gateway, in October, allowing users to bridge stable tokens across networks. It separates Hyperbridge’s process into two tracks: a safe path using the traditional burn-and-mint bridge, and a fast path powered by liquidity-filled swaps. On Swap, liquidity providers front-load the user’s target-chain tokens instantly, then settle the slower trustless bridge later.
Hyperbridge’s system is reversible. If the settlement fails, users receive an automatic refund. In effect, swaps act like a trustless escrow for users: if a fast-track swap fails, they receive an automatic refund, all enforced cryptographically. Hyperbridge itself never holds funds, Lanlege claimed.
“With HyperBridge, [your] funds are entirely in your control,” said Lanlege. “And it’s either we give you those funds on the other side [of the bridged transaction] or you get your money back. This is what we mean by fully trustless and fully sovereign systems.”
On the bridging side, the ex-Parity engineer said the overhead for EVM chains is expected to drop from 4–5 minutes to about 30 seconds after an upcoming Polkadot upgrade.
Hyperbridge benefits from Polkadot’s multi-core scalability. Polkadot reaches up to 150,000 transactions per second (TPS) across cores, and future upgrades will allow chains to rent additional cores—blockchain computing power—dynamically.
As of November 2025, Hyperbridge claims to have processed over $180 million in transactions and sent about 53,000 cross-chain messages on mainnet.
Hyperbridge’s product strategy
When it comes to product strategy, Lanlege is acutely aware that Hyperbridge is a highly technical product, limiting its market to developer teams. To broaden adoption, the team introduced consumer-facing products as a way to unbundle the protocol’s capabilities, following a modular approach often seen in multi-purpose SaaS products.
The first wedge of Hyperbridge’s strategy targets developer teams. The team engages the developer community through conferences, talks, workshops, and hackathons, guiding them on how to build secure, cross-chain user experiences.
Lanlege said these efforts have been successful at multiple events, including the most recent hackathon at Token2049, the world’s largest blockchain event held in Dubai this year, where participants used Hyperbridge to facilitate payments for live projects. The approach focuses on onboarding developers and educating them about the risks of insecure bridges, ensuring early adopters can scale their products safely.
This developer-first strategy has already produced tangible traction. Hyperbridge powers major projects such as Gnosis, which uses it for secure cross-chain messaging; Polkadot itself, which relies on it to make its DOT tokens a multi-chain asset; Bifrost, which sends price feeds and liquid staking derivatives across chains; and Hydration, Polkadot’s largest decentralised exchange (DEX) protocol, which integrated Hyperbridge to expand its assets and enable more complex cross-chain experiences.
To support developers, Hyperbridge ships with comprehensive tooling. It offers a Solidity software developer kit (SDK) for smart contracts and a TypeScript SDK for front-end and back-end applications, with an upcoming Rust SDK in the pipeline. These tools allow developers to test and deploy arbitrary message passing, token swaps, mints and burns, refunds, and timeouts locally before going live, making it easier to integrate Hyperbridge into applications without deep knowledge of its underlying cryptography.
Hyperbridge has integrated with major EVM blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, and Gnosis.
“We’ve integrated these chains because these are the most decentralised EVM chains [in the world],” said Lanlege. “They produce these certificates of transactions and transaction validity [critical to Hyperbridge’s verification process]. Not a lot of blockchains produce these certificates. For instance, Solana doesn’t produce a certificate at all. You’re just supposed to trust whatever the blockchain claims to do. Same thing with blockchains like Tron and Avalanche.”
On the consumer-facing side, Hyperbridge offers a bridge and a liquidity-filled stable token swap product. These products were designed with usage patterns in mind: stablecoins are widely used digital assets in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the bridge and swap engine provides fast, reliable access to these tokens across multiple chains.
Building with a small, efficient team with low burn
Polytope Labs runs Hyperbridge with a lean team of just 10 people, evenly split between engineers and business-facing roles. After raising a $5.3 million seed round in April, Lanlege claims the startup maintains a deliberately low burn rate and now has close to four years of runway.
The goal, he explains, is to scale through partnerships rather than headcount. Hyperbridge expects to integrate with major wallets over the next three years and believes large stablecoin and token issuers will eventually go multi-chain through its rails. It also expects its swap product to drive strong transaction volume from EVM chain users.
Hyperbridge generates revenue through transaction fees on its blockchain. Every cross-chain transaction is paid for using its native token, BRIDGE, and those fees flow into the project’s treasury. That treasury funds block producers and relayers, and could eventually cover the core development budget as the network matures. For now, Lanlege says “there’s not much” in the way of revenue, but the focus is firmly on usage and expansion.
Security is Hyperbridge’s core obsession. The parachain’s audits are handled by Security Research Labs (SR Labs), the same team that audits the Polkadot chain. The last audit was in 2024, publicly available on GitHub.
He even joked that if the competition is the Lazarus Group—the alleged North Korean state-sponsored hacker group responsible for several major blockchain breaches, including the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February—system resilience cannot be trifled with. Lanlege claimed his team set up bounty offers worth $250,000 across bounty platforms Immunefi, Cantina, and Hacken, to reward anyone who finds flaws on Hyperbridge. No “critical vulnerabilities” have been reported so far, according to him.
The future of crypto payments is interoperable. Users may not care about blockchain finality certificates or who the validators are, but they care about not losing their money. And developers care about not being the next Fantom project.
According to Lanlege, Hyperbridge’s toughest goal is to build a bridge that can survive even if the founders are no longer at the helm—a “hyperstructure” as he describes it—not a startup.
