Seun Lanlege and David Salami, co-founders of Polytope Labs, have achieved global recognition with their blockchain infrastructure solution, Hyperbridge.
While many African blockchain startups focus on local payment solutions, Lanlege and his team are building a foundational global infrastructure designed to fix the long-standing problem of interoperability.
After years of intensive research, the company’s protocol, which tackles one of the blockchain industry’s most complex challenges, was valued at a staggering $200 million.
In the blockchain world, transferring assets from one network, such as Ethereum, to another, like Solana, is difficult, which is the interoperability problem. There are existing solutions known as bridges that have facilitated billions in transactions, but most share a critical security flaw – they are secured by a multisig (multi-signature) architecture.
Lanlege argues that multisig fundamentally defeats the purpose of decentralised blockchain technology because it relies on trust. A multisig setup requires a small group of people or servers to sign off on a transaction.
If these keys or the servers holding them are compromised, as it happened in the $600 million Poly Network hack, the entire bridge and all the funds it controls are vulnerable.
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Most existing bridges don’t truly move assets. They simply lock the tokens on the source chain and issue an ‘I owe you’ (IOU0) token on the destination chain. A breach on one side allows hackers to access all users’ locked funds.
Hyperbridge replaces this vulnerable human-controlled system with a truly decentralised bridge secured by complex mathematics and smart contracts.
Instead of relying on human signers, Hyperbridge utilises a network of relayers that collect and verify finality proofs, which are cryptographic evidence that a transaction is permanent from the originating blockchain. The verification process happens on the dedicated Hyperbridge chain.
The key innovation is bidirectional verification, as Hyperbridge not only verifies other chains’ proofs but also generates its own proofs that must be externally validated. This creates a secure, mathematical feedback loop that guarantees every cross-chain transfer is valid on both ends, eliminating the need for a multisig setup.
To handle the immense computational workload of verifying millions of transactions securely, Hyperbridge leverages the Polkadot network. By renting dedicated Coretime (computational power) from Polkadot, Hyperbridge gains the robust validation support needed for scalable interoperability.
The project raised over $5 million in seed and public sales, and it processed $92.4 million in transaction volume.
It has major validation as the Polkadot DAO recently voted to make Hyperbridge the native bridge for the entire Polkadot network, a significant industry endorsement. Hyperbridge supports 14 major blockchains, including Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche.
