Get Early Access
You're in! We received your sign-up successfully. 🥳
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Please, refresh the page and try again.
Please, refresh the page and try again.
Polymer Hub is the first Rollup built for interoperability.
Rollups help Ethereum scale, dramatically lowering execution costs and taking load away from the L1. Not without flaws, today’s rollups face a critical problem - bootstrapping connectivity.
A juxtaposition to rollups are AppChains. In the Cosmos ecosystem, appchains face a security bootstrapping challenge rather than a connectivity challenge. Cosmos solved connectivity issues with the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.
Now imagine the best of the Cosmos tech meeting the best of Ethereum. IBC across Ethereum rollups, brought to you by a specialized rollup purpose built for interop.
Today there’s 50+ rollups live in production - launching a rollup is easier than launching your own memecoin. Rewind to 2020, when Ethereum laid out its vision for a rollup centric roadmap, it took the space 2 years to reach 4 rollups.
Only a handful, around 20%, of rollups today are well connected. Existing interop solutions are not in the position to scale, partly due to their infrastructure overheads.
Present interop solutions can charge up to $1m to add a new chain because of their infrastructure overheads. This is the bootstrapping problem for the interconnected world.
Polymer Hub: solving the rollup scalability problem.
Ethereum is the global source of truth for all rollups. Rollups move the execution environment off-chain and settle back to Ethereum, retaining decentralization while keeping both environments in sync.
The Polymer Hub, being a rollup, has direct access to any information present on Ethereum (technically the native bridge which acts as the L1 light client). Since Polymer Hub has access to all of this rollup state, it can validate any request sent between them.
All rollups settle on Ethereum, since Polymer is also a rollup, it has access to the rollup state, allowing validation of any request sent between them. This is in contrast to existing interop protocols that connect fragmented rollup environments with off-chain infrastructure and verification schemes.
Example of how this works with a tx sent from Optimism to Base:
The Polymer Hub does not directly pass messages or information to communicate between chains but only deals with the state of various execution environments. This allows an open market of relayers, who can actually service a 1000+ chains VS Polymer maintaining all the infra.
Why can’t other interop protocols do this?
y → number of P2P connections required to service all chains
x → number of rollups
green = connections with Polymer hub (y = x)
orange = connections with point to point systems (y = x*(x-1))
y → cost of sending one message
x → number of transactions on a given rollup
green = connections with point to point systems (y = x)
red = connections with Polymer Hub (y = 1/x)
The Polymer Hub benefits many actors in the ecosystem such as:
We’re exploring several features for application developers, including rate limiting for specific application routes and implementing firewall concepts to manage transactions from outside the app cluster. Additionally, we’re considering app-specific settlement options. We are actively scoping and exploring various use cases with different teams in the space. If you have an innovative idea, please reach out to us!
We are excited to share more details as we roll out new features. Keep up to date by following us on Twitter.
We’re always looking for talented individuals interested in working on problems in web3 interoperability infrastructure. Click the link below to get in touch.