A Hands-on Guide to Cross-Chain Interoperability | Kunal Arora, Hyperlane | ETHTaipei 2025

[Music] Hello. Hello. Um, hi this is Kunal working at Hyperlane and Hyperlane is a crosschain permissionless interop protocol across multiple stacks optack orbitum orbit roll-ups every stack you name it. Yeah, I guess the problem statement here I guess I'll be talking more about rollup interop here and the last couple of years we have seen like the blob scaling has kind of worked and we have re reached some kind of scaling in terms of gas prices and also what kind of specific things we do with roll-ups. But as we as these problems have been solved by different teams, they have created its own problem where one rollup ecosystem doesn't talk to another rollup ecosystem and which means as a user you get terrible UX.

Um and rollup teams have tried solving this. OP stack has the super chain. Uh zksync has elastic chain. Arbitum rollup had a blog post like a couple months back trying to solve interoperability. I think scroll and polygon also has their a layer.

They all try to solve it but within their own like world garden. And what happens is this. They try selling you a framework but it turns out to be a vendor lock in inside their own ecosystem and that's not good. And then alongside that you have other general message passing protocols like chain link layer zero wormhole and then asset is issuers like circle or there more u future proof solutions like zk or te which is used by avalanche and there's other solutions like optimistic oracles like across and they're all trying to solve the same problem like the oracle problem how does one chain know what is happening on the other chain. And this when you're trying to go and look for an intro interop protocol, there's like so many options.

It's only like increasing your dilemma as a buyer. And so we made an attempt to solve this and we were like, we'll create the most minimal interface you can. There's just one verify function on all EVM contracts and this is you know not ownable by anyone stateless immutable and easy to compose within different uh different modules and this means that what we we can wrap around other other security modules like what super chain has like if you can see there's like two op stack rollups And they have their own like um infra for uh handling like global global state and then they have the cross cross L2 inbox which I don't know if it's that visible but you have this cross L2 email box and all we need to add is an ISM contract which is interchain security module and that's that doesn't require anything special from you. Um we we have a relayer which runs and picks it up uh automatically and this way you got everything plus super chain. Same with chain link which was one of the uh uh oracles uh which they provided and the same way you could have you could just use Oops.

Yeah. uh you could use their their contract CCIP and use that give the give it access control and the same way you have another ISM security module and this is actually live today between multiple rollups and this is open USDC U USDT then uh another thing is like these things are like kind of like Legos you can build one on top of another on top of another. We have two different ways of doing this where we have aggregation where you have multiple different at the same time. So what Vitalik was talking about like two out of three one is TE one is ZK and then another would be optimistic and then you have uh you could be selective you know between these two chains I only want a optimistic oracle versus between these two chains which maybe you know there's more risk of like reorgs and stuff I I rely on a ZK solution and this way you can like configure which chains you want which kind of security and then you know there's there's a whole bunch of options we have like more than 20 different ISMs like security modules and this means or as a app dev how do you use these ISMs um we have an application called warp routes which is our flavor of token bridging standard like XCRC20 And if all of our infra is already deployed, all you need to do is just deploy the token contract on each chain. So you have ERC20 toku token contract and you have the collateral contract where you lock here and mint here and then burn here and then um and then uh you unlock here.

And how do you as a app how do you pick which ISM you want? You basically just inherit this I specifies ISM contract and just set it here. And now if you set it to zero, you get the latest and greatest Hyperlink has to offer. Or you deploy your own ISM like how I did with Super Chain. And that is it.

Um you can try board routes. There's a link here. And then you know you can also try deploying your own ISMs. This is yeah that's the end. Uh if there's any questions yeah if anyone has any questions we still have some maybe eight minutes before our next session start.

If no then that's thank you Tuno for his time today and let's give him a round of applause as well. Thank you everyone. [Music]