We’re thrilled to announce Hyperlane completed an $18.5m Seed financing round from a wonderful crew of investors and operators. The round was lead by Variant, with participation from Galaxy Ventures, Coinfund, Asymmetric, Hypersphere, Circle, and several others. More on them later. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of Hyperlane and grow the ecosystem around the emerging Interchain Highway.

Hyperlane is the interchain messaging API allowing you to easily and securely communicate between blockchains. Hyperlane was founded with the belief that an expanding universe of blockchains is inevitable, and the mission to build the interchain network to connect them.

At Hyperlane we talk about the Interchain Highway, but what does that mean? If you’ve been using crypto protocols and applications for the past couple of years you’ve probably attempted to cross between two blockchains, and if you’ve done that, you probably realize why Hyperlane exists. Blockchains can’t natively communicate with each other, in a way you could think of them as distant stars or planets. There are ways to travel between them, but that journey can be long and perilous. Hyperlane creates a network between blockchains, and allows developers and their users to safely and easily traverse between those blockchains. That network is what we’re calling the Interchain Highway, it’s what we hope to turn into the safest, fastest, and ultimately easiest way to communicate between blockchains.

Hyperlane was founded by Asa Oines, Nam Chu Hoai, and Jon Kol. Asa and Nam previously were founding engineers at Celo where Asa had built and led the Protocol team, and Nam operated at all levels of the stack. Jon previously co-led Galaxy’s venture business, directing the firm’s investments and spearheading operational initiatives. Alongside them are Trevor Porter and Yorke Rhodes as founding engineers, both previously at Celo, as well as Morgan Beller and Zaki Manian who are close advisors to Hyperlane.

Hyperlane brings relentless focus on building a platform that provides both the easiest way to create interchain applications, and top-flight security. It’s about finding the optimal point for ease-of-use and security, and that is expressed through the following features:

Ease of Use–

• Simple On-Chain API: Hyperlane provides a simple on-chain API for smart contract developers to send messages quickly and securely between blockchains.

• Interchain Accounts: Hyperlane brings IBC’s interchain account construct to the EVM and other blockchains. Developers can use interchain accounts to perform actions on remote blockchains without having to deploy contracts on those chains.

• Interchain Queries: Hyperlane provides a simple on-chain API to query information from remote blockchains.

Security–

• Power to the App: Hyperlane’s cutting-edge ‘Sovereign Consensus’ security model puts the power in the hands of application developers, allowing them to tailor their interchain security model to their unique needs. Combined with Hyperlane’s simple interchain messaging API, developers of any experience levels are able to build unique applications traversing multiple blockchains.

• Fault Isolation: Applications receiving interchain messages from Hyperlane self-select “Interchain Security Modules”, consisting of a specific security model and configuration. Any potential failures would be isolated to a specific zone, as opposed to the “all-or-nothing” approach to security offered by other interchain communication platforms.

In the coming weeks and months this blog will be regularly updated with posts that go deeper into the unique features Hyperlane brings to the table, as well as expanding on the roadmap and vision for the platform. Ultimately, the goal with Hyperlane is to build the interoperability platform that can accommodate a universe of blockchains that is ever expanding and rapidly evolving. To achieve this goal Hyperlane was designed with modularity in mind, a design that emphasizes adaptability to an unpredictable future. Whether it’s Sovereign Consensus, with its Interchain Security Modules, or the portable mailboxes, which can be deployed to any smart contract platform to connect it to the Interchain Highway. Any developer could use Hyperlane to customize their security for an interchain application, and anyone can deploy Hyperlane to a new blockchain to power it with top-tier interoperability without having to seek permission. Hyperlane gives you the power to take applications where they couldn’t go before. Go Interchain with Hyperlane.

P.S. We’re hiring, want in ?