Summary

We’re excited to announce that Stride is partnering with Hyperlane to build the cross-chain infrastructure for bridging TIA and stTIA throughout Celestia’s vast modular ecosystem.

Hyperlane builds and deploys technology for permissionless cross-chain interoperability, focusing on the modular ecosystem. It does not have its own chain. One of many applications that can be built using Hyperlane tech is a secure bridge.

Stride is a neutral, secure, and minimal blockchain with a single purpose: liquid staking. Given these attributes, Stride is well-suited to serve as the central routing hub chain in the modular ecosystem.

Users will now be able to bridge their TIA and stTIA across modular chains via the Hyperlane bridge, routed through the Stride chain. Stride is the ideal platform to host a Hyperlane deployment, given its neutrality, security, and minimalism.‍

stTIA is already Celestia’s largest LST in less than a week after launch, and Hyperlane will now ensure that it expands even further as modular money. 

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stTIA is modular money

But first, why is it so important to bridge TIA + stTIA throughout the modular ecosystem? Because TIA + stTIA will become money.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, we’ve seen ETH emerge as money. It’s a dominant base pair in liquidity pools; it’s used to trade NFTs; it’s used as collateral; it’s used to pay for transactions on mainnet and rollups.

TIA + stTIA will achieve the same status in the modular ecosystem. Celestia’s burgeoning modular ecosystem is the natural evolution of Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap. 

But unlike Ethereum, the liquid staked version of TIA - that is, stTIA - will likely be used more commonly than unstaked TIA. Because the Celestia staking reward is much higher than Ethereum’s, there’s a higher opportunity cost for not staking. Plus, staked TIA receives airdrops.

Since stTIA gets a staking reward and airdrops while remaining fully liquid, stTIA is positioned to become the form of TIA most commonly used.

stTIA is modular money.

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Liquidity paths

Hyperlane’s secure interoperability infrastructure is needed to bridge stTIA throughout the modular ecosystem.

Although Celestia supports IBC, the gold-standard of interoperability, many major Celestia rollups will not be IBC-compatible. So while Celestia can send with IBC, most modular rollups cannot receive with IBC.

For instance, these major Celestia rollups will likely not support IBC: Eclipse, Manta, Aevo, and Movement. And what about more established chains, such as Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism? No IBC. 

The solution is a bridge built on Hyperlane’s permissionless interoperability infrastructure.

Hyperlane shares similarities with IBC. It’s a means of expanding flexible interop to non IBC chains —  the bridging layer for the modular world.   

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Stride is the modular routing hub

Routing for the modular eco‍

Celestia is secure and minimal, so it doesn’t support smart contracts. Just data availability - that’s it. So Hyperlane cannot deploy on Celestia itself.

Instead of routing through Celestia, Hyperlane is working with us to make Stride the central routing hub for TIA and stTIA.

Having Stride as the central routing hub also importantly retains asset fungibility across chains. For example, routing stTIA from Stride → Dymension → Eclipse would result in a different token on the destination chain vs. routing stTIA from Stride → Manta → Eclipse. However, routing everything through Stride as the modular routing hub preserves token fungibility.

Why Stride?

Because Stride is the most neutral, secure, minimal chain available.

Stride’s neutrality

The only thing Stride does is liquid staking - that’s it. No DeFi, no NFTs, no gaming, no social. Stride is not a general-purpose smart contract platform. Just liquid staking.

Because of this neutrality, other chains want their bridged  TIA + stTIA to come from Stride. Unlike most others, Stride has no competing interests against these destination chains. Stride has no need for native liquidity, no DeFi, and no incentive to control the flow of TIA and stTIA for itself. Stride just provides the best liquid staking products around.

Stride’s security

Since launching in September 2022, security has always been Stride’s #1 priority. That means nine audits of Stride’s code base from multiple industry-leading firms, continual auditing of all new code, IBC rate limiting, and extremely high economic security and decentralization provided by Cosmos Hub.

Stride’s minimalism

Finally, the Stride chain is incredibly minimalist - very similar to Celestia itself. The result is that the Stride chain has historically had zero downtime, which is crucial for a routing hub.

Most Cosmos chains have complicated modules and features, which have often resulted in significant periods of downtime several times a year. But not Stride.

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How it will look

Let’s run through an example of the UX of sending stTIA around the modular ecosystem.

Hyperlane will deploy its contracts on Stride, Eclipse, Movement, and all modular rollups. 

Using the Hyperlane bridging app, a user will be able to send stTIA from any modular chain to any other modular chain. Each chain will simply have one connection - with Stride. So whenever a user bridges, on the backend the stTIA is routed through Stride.

Because Stride doesn’t currently support smart contracts, we’re adding a gated CosmWasm module to support Hyperlane. This will not be used for any other contracts. The module and Hyperlane contracts should be deployed later next month.

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Final thoughts

Stride’s neutrality, security, and minimalism make it the perfect chain to serve as the modular routing hub via Hyperlane. And given that Stride issues stTIA anyway, it just makes sense that Stride serves as the hub for TIA + stTIA.

Hyperlane builds and deploys the technology for cross-chain interoperability, focusing on the modular ecosystem. And Stride is the routing hub for TIA + stTIA bridging transactions.

Hyperlane is also a great partner because they, like us, understand that making sure LSTs are eligible for modular airdrops is necessary for TIA to spread as modular money. More to come. ⏩

One final thing to point out. There’s a distinct possibility Hyperlane may at some point introduce a token. There has been no announcement, no information, and no suggestions of any kind regarding a Hyperlane token. However, a token anouncement might be forthcoming. So if a token is announced - big if - and if there’s an airdrop… 

Well, probably nothing.