The Flaw in Existing Blockchain Bridges

Seun Lanlege and David Salami, the co-founders of Polytope Labs, have gained global attention for their blockchain infrastructure project, Hyperbridge. While many African crypto startups concentrate on local payment systems, Polytope Labs is building a foundational technology to solve one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: interoperability.

The problem lies in the difficulty of transferring assets between separate networks, like moving funds from Ethereum to Solana. Current solutions, known as bridges, have processed billions of dollars in transactions but often share a critical security vulnerability. Most are secured by a multi-signature (multisig) architecture, which relies on a small, trusted group of people or servers to approve transactions.

This reliance on trust contradicts the core principle of decentralized technology. If the keys held by this small group are compromised, the entire bridge and all user funds are at risk. This exact scenario led to the catastrophic $600 million Poly Network hack. Furthermore, most bridges don’t actually move assets; they lock tokens on the original chain and issue a representative IOU token on the destination chain, creating a massive honeypot for hackers.

A New Approach Through Trustless Verification

After years of intensive research, Polytope Labs developed Hyperbridge, a protocol valued at $200 million that replaces the vulnerable human-controlled system with a decentralized bridge secured by mathematics and smart contracts. Instead of human signers, Hyperbridge employs a network of relayers that verify finality proofs—cryptographic evidence that a transaction is permanent and irreversible on its originating blockchain.

The core innovation is its bidirectional verification process. Hyperbridge not only verifies proofs from other chains but also generates its own proofs that must be validated externally. This creates a secure, mathematical feedback loop that guarantees the validity of every cross-chain transfer on both ends without needing a trusted multisig committee.

To manage the immense computational power required to securely verify millions of transactions, Hyperbridge leverages the Polkadot network. By renting dedicated computational power, known as Coretime, from Polkadot, the project gains the robust validation support necessary for scalable and secure interoperability.

Industry Adoption and Key Milestones

Hyperbridge has already demonstrated significant traction, having raised over $5 million in seed and public sales while processing $92.4 million in transaction volume. The project received a major industry endorsement when the Polkadot DAO voted to adopt Hyperbridge as the native bridge for its entire network.

Currently, the platform supports 14 major blockchains, including prominent networks like Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche, positioning it as a key piece of infrastructure for a more connected and secure multi-chain future.