Polymer Launches Real-Time Interoperability Protocol for Ethereum Rollups

Polymer Labs has officially announced the launch of Polymer Hub, a protocol that provides real-time interoperability for all Ethereum rollups. Through streaming messages, state, and logs, and based on IBC primitives (similar to Web2's TCP/IP), Polymer Hub is able to validate and store the block headers of all connected rollups, enabling applications to verify arbitrary state across different rollups at a lower cost.

Previously, the Rollup/L2 ecosystem could only interconnect within their own isolated environments; however, Polymer breaks this barrier, allowing Rollups to engage in real-time communication and coordination across ecosystems, nearly synchronizing with block generation speed. Compared to existing solutions, the protocol offers significant improvements in cross-chain communication latency, bandwidth, and cost, especially in scenarios involving all on-chain primitives.

Polymer aims to make cross-chain interoperability as fast, efficient, and economical as block space itself, enabling Ethereum applications to scale to millions of users.

Boosting Bandwidth, Reducing Latency

Real-time, high-throughput Rollups are on the horizon, but existing interoperability protocols (such as point-to-point and hub-and-spoke network models) are insufficient to support heavy network traffic among hundreds of rollups. The Polymer team notes that current solutions are too slow and expensive for the next generation of Ethereum applications. As technology progresses, interoperability protocols must match the demands of real-time applications for speed and efficiency. 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 a block proposer's pre-commit mechanism, Polymer Hub achieves real-time message delivery, ensuring that cross-chain communication latency can keep up with the millisecond block speeds of these Rollups. Furthermore, Polymer leverages EigenDA to expand cross-Rollup bandwidth to support on-chain data-intensive application scenarios.

“Real-time capability, the ability to react to inputs at ultra-low latency in a large-scale environment, will lay the foundation for breakthrough development in decentralized applications. Being prepared with the relevant infrastructure will be a collective industry task, and the real-time interoperability provided by Polymer will be key.” — Lei Yang (Co-Founder and CTO of MegaETH)

Currently, as Ethereum is segmented into multiple rollup clusters due to the scalability provided by the shared sequencer and interoperability network, these clusters can achieve interoperability within minutes through Polymer Hub's "one-to-many" architecture, eliminating the need for months-long processes. Additionally, Polymer Hub is the first interoperability solution to offer re-org protection, enabling token bridges and settlement networks to securely settle cross-chain transactions in milliseconds and automatically roll back these transactions if they do not align with Ethereum L1's history.

Future Outlook

The architecture of the next-generation on-chain applications will resemble cloud applications: Rollups will become the new microservices, with AVS being the new infrastructure service. To achieve on-chain horizontal scaling, cross-chain infrastructure must possess low latency, high bandwidth, and cost-effectiveness.

The Polymer team is committed to enhancing interoperability performance to support the emergence of more high-throughput applications, such as on-chain e-commerce and ride-sharing, and other innovative applications.

“Building interoperable applications with both low cost and low latency is key to restoring usability to cryptocurrency. In scalable applications, this connectivity layer needs to be as robust and secure as Ethereum's base layer, and Polymer has made significant efforts to achieve this goal.” — Vikram Arun (Co-Founder and CEO of Superform Labs)

Starting from the OP stack, Polymer plans to extend real-time interoperability to all Ethereum Rollup ecosystems, empowering applications to achieve rapid, low-cost scaling.

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 foundational network architecture for next-generation internet-scale applications (such as Uber) on-chain.

Contact Information

Head of Marketing

Harry Lam

Polymer Labs

hlam@polymerlabs.org