By
Steve Muchoki
April 17th, 2024
Hyphen’s testnet between Ethereum and Polygon has been launched and already has various partners working on integrating it on their dApps.
Over the last couple of months, protocols and decentralized apps such as Sushiswap, Aave, Curve, etc. have migrated to various scaling solutions. As much as none of them plan to leave the Ethereum base layer altogether, they are left with no choice but to find immediate scalability. The excessive gas fees have made DeFi and Web3.0 inaccessible to a large number of people, this counters the mantra ‘banking the unbanked’.
The limitation of the Ethereum base layer is evident, it can’t all alone solve the scaling and congestion problem. Sharding will surely minimize the rate of congestion but only for some time. Soon enough, the Ethereum base layer will return to the congested state due to the exponential increase in demand. This leaves us in a dilemma; on one side of the coin, we want mass adoption and on the other side, we can’t manage the mass adoption when it eventually comes.
As dApps continue to migrate to various scaling solutions, they create a fragmented and isolated ecosystem, causing reduction in network efficiency, interoperability and multi-chain composability. Hyphen is the missing cross-chain transaction infrastructure that aims at consolidating the multi-chain world and bringing about flexible options to paying gas fee, enhance fast fund transfers and Inter-blockchain liquidity.
Continuous migrations pose more challenges than just fragmented and isolated ecosystem. Moving between L1 base layer and various L2s, and other scaling options is expensive, slow and sophisticated. Users have to go through a complicated process to move their funds between chains, which may take hours. These constitute the following ripple effects on the ecosystem:
- A dApps user on any Layer 2s cannot seamlessly move their assets between these layers because it is stressful and time-consuming. They would need to hold funds on different scalable solutions such as Polygon, xDai, ZkRollups etc. depending on what dApps they use. Thus, most users will be locked-in to just one preferred solution.
- In a situation whereby 2 dApps are on different Layer 2s, they won’t be able to interact freely with each other. Also, if you have 1 Dapp deployed across a couple of chains, the consistency of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of the app across chains would be difficult to deploy.
- Due to the restrained free flow between various scaling solutions for both protocols and users, each Layer 2 solution will act as its own closed economy. This in turn helps to reduce the network effects for the ecosystem.
To solve these problems, most dApps and consequently most users are forced to move to the same L2 scaling solution. This enables network efficiency and allows dApps to work together as Legos. All this is however for a short while because as we saw with Binance Smart Chain that once everyone moves to the same solution we face the congestion problem all over again. What to do?
Introducing ‘Hyphen’ – the missing Superhighway Infrastructure for Multi-chain Web3.0
Hyphen provides simple application programming interface (API) and solves the salient challenges of congestion, fragmentation and isolation of L2s. This is achieved by offering instantaneous value transfers between EVM chains, various L2s and the efficient onboarding from Ethereum to L2s and other sidechains. End users thereby enjoy the network composability of Ethereum as well as cheaper and faster transactions of Layer 2s. The superhighway network is a barrier breaker and also an integrator of ecosystems to encourage interoperability.
Incorporating Hyphen grants effortless experience on the multi-chain ecosystem. Currently, onboarding onto L2s is such a hard nut to crack. It is expensive, slow and complicated. Hyphen provides easy access to inter-blockchain liquidity on supported EVM chains. It also solves the problem of scaling through a multi-chain architecture without unnecessary complications for end users. Hyphen does nothing but grant seamless experience in the multi-chain.
Consequently, Hyphen will make the entire web3.0 network into one picture-perfect interconnected ecosystem. That’s the vision for Hyphen. No dApp, protocol or scaling solution will exist in isolation. All scaling solutions can easily connect to the globalized web3.0 ecosystem through Biconomy’s superhighway and bridge infrastructure.
Hyphen’s testnet between Ethereum and Polygon has been launched and already has various partners working on integrating it on their dApps. As of now, they have carefully restricted the functionalities of the testnet for security reasons. Once the testnet is reviewed and improved, the mainnet will be launched with extended functionalities to support multiple L2s and tokens.