Polymer Labs has just launched Polymer Hub, a new real-time interoperability protocol for Ethereum rollups. This protocol lets different rollups communicate seamlessly. It streams messages, states, and logs using IBC primitives, similar to how TCP/IP works for the web.
With Polymer Hub, rollups can now interact across different ecosystems. This means they can coordinate quickly, matching the speed at which they produce blocks. The protocol significantly improves communication speed, bandwidth, and cost for on-chain operations compared to existing solutions.
The goal of Polymer is clear: make cross-chain interoperability as fast and affordable as possible. This will help Ethereum applications scale to millions of users. Real-time, high-throughput rollups are on the horizon. However, current interoperability methods, like point-to-point models, aren’t built to handle the heavy traffic from numerous rollups.
The Polymer team believes that existing solutions are too slow and costly for the next wave of Ethereum applications. As the ecosystem grows, interoperability must keep up. Real-time apps need real-time interoperability, and Polymer is committed to creating the fastest and most efficient protocol for upcoming rollups like MegaETH.
Polymer Hub sends messages in real-time through sequencer pre-confirmations. This ensures that communication across chains keeps pace with the millisecond block times of these rollups. Additionally, Polymer uses EigenDA to boost cross-rollup bandwidth, which is crucial for data-heavy use cases on-chain.
Lei Yang, co-founder and CTO of MegaETH, said, “Real-timeness—the ability to react to inputs with ultra-low latency at massive scale—will enable truly groundbreaking decentralized applications. Preparing the infrastructure for this revolution will be a joint effort, where real-time interoperability from Polymer will be essential.”
Ethereum has been divided into rollup clusters due to various technologies like shared sequencers. However, these clusters can now use Polymer Hub’s one-to-all architecture to become interoperable in minutes instead of months. Importantly, Polymer Hub is the first interoperability solution to provide re-org protection. This feature allows token bridges and solver networks to settle cross-chain transactions securely and quickly.
Looking ahead, the next generation of on-chain applications will resemble cloud applications. Rollups will act as microservices while AVSs will serve as infrastructure services. For on-chain horizontal scaling, cross-chain infrastructure must be low-latency, high-bandwidth, and affordably scalable.
The Polymer team aims to enhance interoperability performance. This will enable the development of new categories of applications, such as high-throughput e-commerce and ride-sharing, directly on-chain. Vikram Arun, co-founder and CEO of Superform Labs, emphasized, “Building interoperable applications that don’t sacrifice cost or latency is a must for making crypto usable again.”
Starting with the OP stack, Polymer plans to extend real-time interoperability to all rollup ecosystems on Ethereum. This will allow applications to scale quickly and cost-effectively in the near future. Developers interested in exploring Polymer Hub’s mainnet can find more details on the Polymer Labs website and follow Polymer on X.
Polymer Labs focuses on providing real-time, high-throughput interoperability for Ethereum rollups. This foundation will support the next generation of internet-scale applications built on-chain.
For more information, you can contact Peter Kim, co-founder of Polymer Labs, or Harry Lam, the marketing lead of Polymer Labs.