We’re excited to announce Hop Rails, a better bridge.
Trustlessness and decentralization are losing in today’s bridge landscape. Existing bridge designs all face the same capital efficiency bottleneck — message times. Trusted bridges win out on price with immediate message times, and trustless bridges have turned to less secure messaging solutions to keep up.
Rails offers an alternative — a permissionless and trustless bridge protocol settled by users themselves. Rails achieves the best-case capital efficiency profile currently offered only by trusted bridges. Any token can be added permissionlessly without any liquidity provisioning required. An open network of bonders provides faster-than-finality execution for a top-notch user experience.
Speed and efficiency aren’t everything. We also need better cross-chain user experiences. Rails can be used to bridge directly or to settle intent and chain abstraction transactions in the background. Current cross-chain solver networks require solvers to fragment their liquidity across many supported chains and rebalance liquidity themselves. Rails allows solvers to settle in place enabling them to focus on individual chains and not worry about asset rebalancing.
Until now, interoperability has only been accessible to the largest rollups and assets. Rails’ efficiency, settlement dynamics, and permissionless nature open the door for a much longer tail of rollups and tokens to interoperate fostering a more interconnected Ethereum ecosystem.
So how does it work?
Introducing Rails
Rails (Rolling asynchronous interchain liquidity settlement) decouples cross-chain liquidity settlement from the underlying message settlement by enabling users to settle directly with each other. The idea is simple. Each transfer sent includes data about transfers from the destination freeing them up as it’s sent. A virtual AMM, requiring no external liquidity, sets a rate between chains to balance flows. Transfers are freed up in the order they were made and an open network of bonders provides fast execution for those who aren’t keen on waiting.
For an in-depth overview of Rails, check out the Rails whitepaper.
The Hop Hub
Rails works with paths that connect any two given chains. A cross-chain transfer can seamlessly string together multiple paths to get the user to their desired destination.
The Hop Hub is a rollup that acts as (you guessed it) a hub for cross-chain liquidity. While any chain can create a direct path with any other chain, it’s more efficient to route liquidity through a single path with the Hop Hub.
Supporting Rails is just the start. The Hop Hub is a prime location for DeFi applications supporting cross-chain liquidity including swaps, lending, and more.
Where we’re headed
Hop has stayed dead focused on our mission – driving the adoption of secure, trustless, and community-owned cross-chain infrastructure. Soon we will be launching Rails and the Hop Hub with limited routes and bonders enabled. Over the coming months, we will be opening up all routes as well as the open bonder network, will be supporting their growth, and releasing tools for easy and seamless integration. Once Rails has a foothold in the market, we’ll turn our focus to the modular messaging layer that underpins Rails, opening it up for any cross-chain application as well as driving growth on the Hop Hub. More on this to come. Lastly, we’ll be doing a broader announcement of all of this information next week.
We see a bright future for an Ethereum without fragmentation and we’re here to build it.
With love, the Hop team 