Polymer launches real-time interoperability protocol for Ethereum rollups

From theblock by James Hunt

Blockchain infrastructure firm Polymer Labs has launched Polymer Hub on mainnet, a real-time interoperability protocol designed for connecting Ethereum rollups.

The project argues that rollup ecosystems have historically only connected within their own walled gardens, creating an interoperability bottleneck. While real-time, high-throughput rollups are near, current interoperability protocols aren't built to handle dense traffic across hundreds of rollups, the team said in a statement shared with The Block.

Polymer Hub aims to make cross-chain interoperability as fast, efficient and affordable as blockspace itself, starting with the OP Stack ecosystem — which includes Layer 2s such as OP Mainnet, World Chain and the Coinbase-incubated Base network. 

Next-generation rollups like MegaETH have also shown support for the project. "Real-timeness, the ability to react to inputs with ultra-low latency at massive scale, will enable truly ground-breaking decentralized applications,” MegaETH co-founder and CTO Lei Yang said. “Readying the infra stack for this revolution will be a joint effort, in which real-time interoperability from Polymer will be crucial."

The launch comes after  Polymer Labs raised $23 million  in a Series A funding round announced in January, nearly two years after it raised $3.6 million in seed funding to build its Ethereum interoperability hub. Blockchain Capital, Maven 11 and Distributed Global co-led the Series A round, with Coinbase Ventures, Placeholder, Digital Currency Group, North Island Ventures and Figment Capital participating.

How Polymer Hub works

Polymer Hub leverages IBC, a protocol developed by the Cosmos ecosystem that enables secure communication between blockchains. This allows applications to prove any arbitrary state across rollups with less overhead, improving cross-chain communication speed, bandwidth and cost compared to current solutions.

It uses sequencer pre-confirmations for real-time messaging — matching the near-instant block times of next-generation rollups. Polymer also uses EigenDA to boost cross-rollup bandwidth for data-intensive on-chain use cases.

Additionally, Polymer Hub claims to be the first interoperability solution to provide re-org protection, helping token bridges and solver networks to settle cross-chain transactions in milliseconds and automatically revert if they deviate from Ethereum’s Layer 1 history.

Ultimately, Polymer plans to bring real-time interoperability to all rollup ecosystems on Ethereum, enabling swift and cost-effective application scaling for use cases like high throughout e-commerce and ride-sharing to be built with cloud architecture onchain.

"Building interoperable applications that don’t trade off cost or latency is a requirement to make crypto usable again. At scale, this connective layer needs to be as robust and secure as the Ethereum base layer itself, and Polymer has been uncompromising in achieving this vision,” Superform Labs co-founder and CEO Vikram Arun said.