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.