Polymer Labs announced the official launch of Polymer Hub, a protocol that provides real-time interoperability for all Ethereum rollups. By streaming messages, states, and logs, and based on IBC primitives (similar to TCP/IP for Web2), Polymer Hub is able to verify and store block headers of all connected rollups, allowing applications to verify arbitrary states between different rollups with lower overhead.
In the past, Rollup/L2 ecosystems can usually only be interconnected in their own independent environments; Polymer breaks this limitation, allowing Rollups to communicate and coordinate in real time across the ecosystem at a speed that is almost as fast as the block generation speed. . The protocol provides significant improvements in latency, bandwidth, and cost of cross-chain communication compared to existing solutions, especially in usage scenarios for all on-chain primitives.
Polymer's goal is to make cross-chain interoperability as fast, efficient, and cost-effective as blockspace itself, helping Ethereum applications scale to millions of users.
Improve bandwidth and reduce latency
Real-time, high-throughput Rollups are coming, but existing interoperability protocols such as peer-to-peer mode and star network mode are not sufficient to support heavy network traffic between hundreds of rollups. The Polymer team pointed out that existing solutions are too slow and expensive for the next generation of Ethereum applications. As technology advances, interoperability protocols must be able to match the speed and efficiency requirements of real-time applications. Future application scenarios require real-time interoperability.
Polymer aims to build the fastest and most efficient interoperability protocol for the next generation of Rollups, such as MegaETH. Through the pre-confirmation mechanism of the block sorter, the Polymer Hub enables real-time message delivery, ensuring that cross-chain communication latency can keep up with the millisecond block speed of these Rollups. In addition, Polymer also uses EigenDA to expand the bandwidth across Rollups to support on-chain data-intensive application scenarios.
“Real-time, the ability to react to inputs with ultra-low latency at scale, will lay the foundation for the breakthrough development of decentralized applications. Getting the relevant infrastructure ready will be a common task for the entire industry, and the real-time interoperability provided by Polymer will be key.” - Lei Yang (MegaETH co-founder and CTO)
Currently, as Ethereum is divided into multiple rollup clusters due to the expansion of shared sorters and interoperable networks, these clusters can interoperate in minutes instead of months through Polymer Hub's "one-to-many" architecture. In addition, Polymer Hub is the first interoperable solution to provide re-org protection, which enables token bridges and solver networks to securely settle cross-chain transactions at milliseconds and automatically roll back when these transactions do not match the history of Ethereum L1.
Looking ahead
The architecture of the next generation of on-chain applications will be similar to cloud applications: Rollups will become the new microservices, and AVS will be the new infrastructure service. In order to achieve horizontal expansion on the chain, the cross-chain infrastructure must have low latency, high bandwidth, and cost-effectiveness.
The Polymer team is committed to improving interoperability to support the emergence of more high-throughput applications, such as innovative applications such as on-chain e-commerce and ride-hailing.
“Building interoperable applications with low cost and latency is key to making cryptocurrencies usable again. For scaled applications, this connection layer needs to be as robust and secure as Ethereum’s base layer, and Polymer has made great efforts to achieve this goal.” - Vikram Arun (Co-founder and CEO of Superform Labs)
Starting with the OP stack, the Polymer project will extend real-time interoperability to the entire Ethereum Rollup ecosystem, enabling applications to scale quickly and cost-effectively.
Developers interested in trying out the Polymer Hub mainnet can visit the Polymer Labs website for more information or follow X (@Polymer_Labs) for the latest updates.
About Polymer Labs
Polymer Labs provides real-time, high-throughput interoperability for Ethereum Rollups, building the underlying network architecture for the next generation of internet-scale applications (such as Uber) on the chain.
