Hyperbridge relaunches as ‘Interoperability Hyperstructure’ with new OFT adapter after $2.5M exploit

Hyperbridge, a cross-chain interoperability protocol that processed almost half a billion dollars in transaction volume since launch, has today officially resumed its bridging operations following a comprehensive architectural overhaul. The relaunch comes in the wake of the 13th of April security exploit, which saw malicious actors mint 1 billion fake bridged DOT tokens, resulting in over $2.5 million in realised losses across multiple networks.

Rather than applying a temporary patch to its compromised Token Gateway, the core development team at Polytope Labs opted for a fundamental rebuild. During the protocol’s subsequent downtime, the developers partnered with SRLabs for an extensive security audit and launched a rapid-response bug bounty programme on HackenProof, dispensing over $150,000 to more than 20 security researchers in under a week.

This intensive period of re-engineering has successfully transitioned Hyperbridge from its bootstrapped origins into a fully permissionless ‘hyperstructure’. Administrative keys have been rendered defunct, centralisation has been actively purged, and cryptographic proof generation is now open to any global operator.

The relaunch also introduces the Hyper Fungible Token standard, in which every bridged asset operates as its own independently secured application. For teams on existing infrastructure, Hyperbridge has built a drop-in adapter, starting with LayerZero, the most widely adopted cross-chain messaging framework, allowing any OFT or OApp to upgrade to cryptographic security by changing a single parameter, with no migration or redeployment required.

“The security incident served as a catalyst to accelerate our roadmap, moving us directly into the era of permissionless interoperability,” says Seun Lanlege, CEO of Polytope Labs, the developers of Hyperbridge. “Hyperbridge is now the first interoperability hyperstructure, fully permissionless across its entire stack: block builders, provers, relayers & governance. Its destiny is fully owned & governed by the community.”

Key architectural upgrades of Hyperbridge

The relaunch brings a systemic shift in how Hyperbridge secures cross-chain assets, intentionally pivoting away from the multisig-secured infrastructure that has historically been the primary attack vector for DeFi bridges.

1. An unstoppable interoperability hyperstructure: Hyperbridge has made drastic changes to its entire stack, starting with fully permissionless provers incentivised by its native tokens paid from its treasury, which holds 35% of the token supply. The sudo pallet, which served as a necessary training wheel, has now been removed. Team-appointed block builders have also been replaced in favour of a permissionless election system powered by reputation tokens that can only be earned by provers & relayers. With these changes, Hyperbridge achieves the previously theoretical status of hyperstructure: 100% community-owned, unstoppable & credibly neutral.

2. Hyperfungible Tokens: Issuer Ownership and Control: The newly introduced Hyperfungible Token standard deprecates the shared token gateway. Under the old model, every token was routed through a single gateway with a single set of rules, leaving issuers no control over how their asset behaved across chains. Under the new model, each token is its own self-contained application, deployed and controlled entirely by the issuer, with its own contract address, pause keys, and rate-limiting logic.

3. Extending Security to Existing Assets: Billions in DeFi assets currently rely on multisig-secured infrastructure, a trust model responsible for the vast majority of historical bridge exploits. The Hyperbridge LZ endpoint removes the need to rebuild from scratch. The adapter implements the ILayerZeroEndpointV2 interface but routes messages through Hyperbridge’s transport layer, backed by zero-knowledge proofs rather than multisig signers. Any existing OFT or OApp can make the switch by changing a single configuration parameter.

Alongside its technical revamp, Hyperbridge is pivoting its commercial model. Moving away from a traditional pay-as-you-go structure, the protocol now offers prepaid monthly bandwidth subscriptions tailored for cross-chain applications.

These tiered bandwidth plans range from $50 to $1,000 per month and can be paid using stablecoins across any supported blockchain. Applications can dynamically upgrade their selected subscription tiers at any time if they exceed their bandwidth limits, ensuring uninterrupted service for end-users.