The Reality Is: Crypto Can't Succeed Without Open Interoperability | Jon Kol - Hyperlane

[Music] all right sorry I'm late uh you know little bit of a difficulties getting in today but we're going to make this the best we can with the time we got left so if you're in crypto 2025 you're probably very aware that Ina presents itself as one of the most material problems the industry has left to solve uh myself I co-founded hyperline at hyperline we working on these things for about 3 years and we were vividly aware uh of this BEC this going to be one of the largest problems faced by the industry and specifically our approach to it is you have to do things in the form of an open framework it has to be open source it has to adhere to uh crypto values when it comes to open source and permissionless not just because of philosophical reasons but also because that is the only way to scale you know our point of view at hyper and how we think of the world and how we think of crypto advancing is you know you're just not going to be able to serve a global internet scale type of demand through blockchains if you're going to have just one of them it does not matter how performant that is right like if you think of uh the internet that we have today there's not like one server somewhere underground in a Ford KNX like structure there's an ungodly large number of servic distributed all over the world and that's what serves the internet that we use today uh we think that there is no way that the same construction what we sometimes call horizontal scaling is not going to materialize for crypto as well now if that's going to make any sense if you're going to have an increasingly large an increasingly uh rapid expansion in the number of chains you need a way to connect those chains permissionless and scalably and that's where something like hyperlane an open framework for interoperability comes in so normally I'd give you a brief on like what hyperlane is uh if you're not familiar with it again open framework for interoperability been operating for a number of years today it does the second most in terms of daily cross-chain messaging volumes um and you can use it today if you want to you can go on the hyperlane docs down load the CLI and give it a shot you could deploy it to any new chain yourself you can um deploy Bridges through it what we called war routs and we'll talk about that in a little bit more length but our goal with hyperlane fitting with this view of there's going to be an increasingly large number of chain is to Simply let any single person connect any single chain and beyond that take it a step further allow the creation of you know sometimes we call them interrupt Zone sometimes we call them trade alliances it's still early in the process so not uh finalized on the naming but we'll talk about just one such of these interupt zones today the first one is super Lane this went live um right around the time of Devcon uh at late late November and represents a joint effort between hyperlane and the vome team to bring a uh seamless interoperability experience between super chains and so why does any of this matter beyond the fact that there's going to be a ton of chains right it's not just that the number of chains is expanding very rapidly the industry is adopting new chain architectures very rapidly as well right if you go back just two years we only had the op stack as pretty much the only other way to build a uh homogenized type of chain in the evm ecosystem two years later you have the op you have arbit room's orbit uh ZK syn and their elastic structure you have polygon and cdk and I'm sure there's many more architectures as are missing out that's just in the evm world then think about the uh Solana world with the svm up until now there's really was only salana but in the last few months uh hyperlane helped several new svm chains launched such as Eclipse another called soon several more launching over the next few weeks and it seems undeniable based on the trajectory that we see that you're going to actually get a Divergence of architectures in the svm as well and all of this and we didn't even get to some of the uh upand cominging VMS like telegram like move and many others coming on so now I think you're you know you're a developer whether you're building an application or you're building a new chain how much complexity do you have to inherit just because you want to be able to communicate between these different architectures and these different chain types it gets pretty untenable pretty fast and that's why there's a sort of interop Crisis that's where an open framework like hyperlane comes in um so we're going to skip some of these parts and so in more detail what is hyperlane really in my view in our protocols in our Frameworks really do three things um and that's how they deliver some value to somebody those three things that they do is first they provide a consistent interface this is the way that you would message between one chain and another think of this as like the onchain API that you as a developer interface with in the case of hyperlane we call this the hyperlane mailbox the second thing these Protocols are meant to do for you is provide some sort of security around the thing that you're sending that communication between a number of chains and the third thing is a guarantee around delivery how do you make sure that you have that message that you're sending through the interface you have a way to secure that message how does it actually get to its destination and so hyperlane gives you all of these and lets you own operate and manage every single part of this so as I mentioned before you can go on the docs right now if you were so inclined you could download the hyperlane CLI you could deploy all of this fairly easily to any chain you'd like never have to talk to me never have to talk to anyone um of the hyperlane core team you can just you can just do things uh as they say today the fact that you get this consistent interface means that now your overhead uh is vastly reduced the complexity you have to inherit just because you want to be operating across a number of chains and maybe a number of chain architectures vastly reduced same interface everywhere you go meanwhile hyperlane takes care of that complexity for you perhaps my favorite thing and where I think this notion of it being an open framework really comes in is on the second item of what these Frameworks do for you when it comes to security you're not tied to any um default setting or any um you're not forced to do anything you don't like hyperlane was the first to decouple uh security from the actual message passing and to modularize this part of the stack and so with hyber Lan anything that provides a state at the station or a state proof so think it could be as simple as like a simple of as a system of several validators to as complex as the state-ofthe-art when it comes to zero knowledge proofs any some anything like that can be turned into a hyperlane module when you use hyperlane you have the option of just running on existing modules that other people have deployed and operated and if you feel comfortable with those you can go ahead or you could bring your own and in that way insulate yourself from taking on any third- party risk when it comes to your interop stack yes you're using code that's been um put you know bit put together by a group that is in yourself but there's a huge advantage that in so far as reducing the time you need to do to get to production you're also using something that's been battle tested that's delivered millions of messages um billions of dollars in volume and has been tried and true and fits on many other chains and applications so super is one example of using a unique uh security module so instead of depending on any existing uh security set the super Lane collaboration is its first of its kind interupt Zone where it has a unique set of validators who secure the message passing they are spread across the super chain and any app on the super chain that wants to use this is able to um now it's the first of these zones but it's uh certainly won't be the last of these zones this type of architecture can be brought to any type of ecosystem or to any type of application right so if you're out here and you're sitting and you're at one of these firms like zync or arbitrum or you're at one of the rup providers actually later today one of the major rollup providers is going to announce their creation of just such a Zone like this you can use all of these building blocks to create a specific Zone uh for your ecosystem and it can use this today so you can give your users state-of-the-art uh interrup experience today and when your native uh experience your native security setting comes live everyone who's already integrated this is able to seamlessly switch without having reinvented the integration and perhaps the best part is you're not limited solely within the bounds of your ecosystem you can connect with any other chain that already has hyperlane so today that's a field of about 140 chains spread across uh many VMS so a lot of other things I would want to talk about today the last one before I go is the open intense framework this is a tool uh created with us in collaboration with the ethereum foundation uh was launched last week and uh basically allows it allows anyone who builds with intents to get to production much faster uh if you have any questions on that feel free to reach out to me and um thanks for your time