Intro to Interop Experience: OIF 1.0, Hyperlane, Khalani, Espresso
Why Interop, why Hyperlane?
Our team has delivered Gnosis Bridge and Explorer and was about to wrap up uRamp (on-/off-ramping dApp) at the beginning of 2024. At that point we realised that interop is where we should be digging deeper into to resolve fragmentation, user and developer experience issues that were in the spotlight.
That's when Hyperlane caught our attention and we started exploring Hyperlane bounties to find a way to contribute, deliver value and partner with an amazing team.
The Bounties chapter
The team’s first bounty involved exposing Hyperlane bridge data on DeFiLlama. This required understanding Hyperlane's message routing and chain metadata and mapping that structure to DeFiLlama’s existing bridge tracking patterns.
While the task was relatively low-profile, the resulting pull request was merged, demonstrating technical competence and a solid grasp of Hyperlane’s stack.
The second bounty addressed deployment friction for Warp Routes, Hyperlane’s mechanism for handling interchain tokens. The team built a solution to automate and simplify deployment from a single UI or chain. This improved developer experience and exposed interop UX bottlenecks.
The experience helped shape thinking that later influenced work on OIF 1.0.
Full-experience: The Interop Experience: BootNode’s Path into Hyperlane via Bounties
The OIF chapter
Hyperlane introduced us to the idea of building a framework for building and deploying intent product experiences at the end of 2024. As a result of our collaboration, developers can leverage a suite of modular abstractions - including a solver and composable smart contracts - to customize and deploy intent-based protocols with ease, instead of building intents infrastructure from scratch.
By modularizing key components of the intents stack, such as solving and settlement, the Open Intents Framework gives developers the flexibility to mix-and-match parts that are best suited to their specific needs, without being locked into a single vendor.
Bonus Track: The Global Espresso Hackathon
OIF received great support by the community and was promoted by the Ethereum Foundation. Additionally, Espresso Network ran Build & Brew - Espresso Global Hackathon that included a challenge to build cross-chain apps using OIF. It was an opportunity we couldn’t miss and we jumped in to support the initiative. We hosted a workshop aligned with the Open Intents Framework and its GitHub repo, spread the word to attract top builders, joined as a judge and participated in office hours to support builders throughout the hackathon.
Numbers spoke for themselves:
- 486 hackers joined
- 156 project submitted
- 91 Espresso-integrated Arbitrum Orbit chains deployed
- 12 finalists pitched at Pitch Day
It’s been an amazing experience end-to-end that we’d be happy to repeat it all over again!
The Khalani chapter
Thanks to all our prior interop experience and drive to move the industry forward, we engaged with Khalani Network to get it integrated into the Nexus bridge, so when a user has the need to bridge Khalani supported tokens/chains, it will be using Khalani infrastructure behind the scenes.
"BootNode's prior experience with Hyperlane SDK and WarpRoute UI made the integration easy. Their familiarity with the technology and requirements in our ecosystem enabled us to quickly move from requirements gathering to implementation. Their guidance helped us maintain backward compatibility of the Hyperlane stack. BootNode team has also proposed building a light-SDK to maximize the likelihood of upstream, official support of the Khalani integration and to make future integrations easier. This integration enables Khalani to keep up with new chains added to the hyperlane ecosystem on day 1 through the Nexus bridge."
— Tannr, Co-founder at Khalani Network
The Warp Routes Rebalancer chapter
As part of our initial bounty work, our team learned a lot about Hyperlane and most importantly Warp Routes, which positioned us well to contribute effectively to the MCWR rebalancer.
A few months after OIF saw the light of day, we implemented a rebalancer agent that monitors liquidity across all collateral chains and automatically moves tokens between them. This prevents situations where a destination chain lacks sufficient collateral to fulfill withdrawal requests.
Full-experience: Hyperlane Warp Routes Rebalancer
"Working with the BootNode team has been super easy. Their expertise, dedication, and proactiveness were exactly what we were looking for in a partner to work on the Open Intents Framework and our recent rebalancer project. OIF 1.0 was delivered just three months after kick-off and received a lot of interest and strong community support. For the rebalancer, the BootNode team handled everything—from architecture and agent services to testing and documentation—making integration with our smart contracts seamless. A big thank you to the entire BootNode team for their hard work and commitment!"
— Nam Chu Hoai, Co-founder/CTO at Hyperlane
Follow along on the journey and learn more about each chapter in a detailed blog posts that will follow!
BootNode
BootNode is a high-output engineering and product shop specializing in DeFi, staking, infrastructure, and interoperability. We help protocols and builders ship faster and scale smarter — from zero to mainnet and beyond. Explore other projects and get in touch.
