Polytope Labs, a Nigerian engineering firm based in Ikoyi, has raised $5.65 million in total funding to scale Hyperbridge, a novel blockchain interoperability protocol. The funding consisted of a $2.5 million seed round and another $2.8 million from an Initial Relayer Offering (IRO) which represents a significant endorsement from international stakeholders, particularly the Polkadot Ecosystem Fund.
Funding Journey and Supporting Stakeholders
The seed round was led by the Polkadot Ecosystem Fund, a joint initiative of the Web3 Foundation and Scytale Digital. This was followed by a public crowd sale (iro) raising $2.8 million bringing the total of $5.65 million raised. Hyperbridge also successfully raised $2.7 million from a crowd loan prior to these raises to position itself as a parachain on the Polkadot network. Hyperbridge is one of the most successful projects in the Polkadot ecosystem in this regard.
What is Hyperbridge?
Hyperbridge is a verifiable multichain blockchain bridge designed for genuine security and scalability. Whereas traditional bridges use centralized off-chain validation systems — known vulnerabilities responsible for many prominent hacks — Hyperbridge is entirely on-chain. It protects cross-chain transactions using light clients, cryptographic proofs of storage, zero-knowledge (zk) techniques, and full consensus verification to set a standard for blockchain interoperability. Deployment, Acceptability, and Real World Use
Hyperbridge launched on Polkadot in November 2024, featuring an astonishing collection of networks including Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, and Gnosis. In the lead-up to launch, Hyperbridge was stress-tested to move over 600,000 cross chains with 66 independent relayers, demonstrating the what is possible with the technology, and was ready for general use.
Since launching, Hyperbridge has bridged over 1,000 DOT tokens demonstrating early signs of usage from developers and users alike. Cost-effective and scalable transactions are available thanks to Polkadot’s modular architecture and efficient consensus proofs, and not comparable interoperable solutions.
How it Works
Hyperbridge is to cross-chain communications what HTTPS is to web communications. Hyperbridge gives developers with on-chain and off-chain SDKs to provide ‘secured, messages’ (POST requests) and ‘guaranteed data’ (GET requests) and as with all bridges, it creates messages, and for connected chains, it can create single proofs and using crypto-economic co-processors, is able to aggregate finalized states from connected chains, allowing any chain to authenticate messages outrightly and without intermediaries.
Hyperbridge supports permissionless relayers, with the possibility for decentralized tooling to be independent actors relay the message, without a verifiable whitelist or staking, other than a user fee. Hyperbridge can “hello world” full node re-execute of blocks (clearly the world’s first application of Proof of Validity bundles), Byzantine fault tolerance, shards other current consensus across cores, attempting to key grow scope and still maintain security.
Community Excitement
On Reddit about Hyperbridge:
“Hyperbridge & Snowbridge are definitely an upgrade on normal bridges with some degree of security primarily due to their chains leverage using light clients & a trust minimized design…”
“Scalability is the secret sauce of Polkadot… not while onboarding new millions of users it seems Polkadot is cruising along.”
“Was pretty sweet and seamless. Took me 5 minutes to make the DOT to Base transfer.”
People are excited about the practicalities of the seamlessness of transfers, trustless validations, inter-chain connectivity, finally!
Global Impacts: Africa and Beyond
For example, Hyperbridge’s impact in Nigeria are putting it towards the top of Web3 innovation cities globally, and showcasing how Africa can be leaders in global tech solutions, rather than conditional consumers. Hyperbridge may provide secure, easy bridge infrastructure to potentially give every person or business in Africa a chance to take part in the blockchain economy, and DeFi, as an example.
And for the relevance of the global blockchain ecosystem, the project generally represents a viable proposition for having secure cross-chain messaging operations, decentralization, integrity via crypto-verification, and developed and intended for developers.
Conclusion: Next Steps
As Polytope Labs ramps Hyperbridge development into production it will be about scaling integrating with other blockchain ecosystems, and expanding decentralization, and performance enhancement. With the ongoing project demonstrating strong institutional commitments and pre-existing user demand, it seems Hyperbridge will be the foundational layer for a growing multichain ecosystem.