The MicroPay staff, certainly one of 5 finalists and a winner of the Constructed Prize on the hackathon. Picture supply: @PolkadotAPAC on X
[Zurich, Switzerland – October 6th, 2025] – The fusion of AI and blockchain reached a brand new milestone at a 36-hour hackathon on the TOKEN2049, Asia’s main crypto convention. Among the many occasion’s standout initiatives, MicroPay, a system enabling cross-chain micropayments for AI brokers utilizing Hyperbridge, a Polkadot-based rollup, was named a class winner for its revolutionary use of Hyperbridge, a Polkadot-based rollup. Hyperbridge makes use of novel expertise to handle the safety and interoperability challenges of conventional bridges, which have collectively misplaced over $2.8 billion to hacks.
This victory highlights a crucial position cross-chain bridges play towards a really autonomous, agentic web the place machines can transact and collaborate with out human oversight.
The rise of agentic economies the place AI brokers autonomously pay for APIs, knowledge, or companies is already underway, because of foundational work by protocols like Coinbase’s x402. Nonetheless, a significant hurdle has persevered: cross-chain compatibility. Think about an AI agent (the shopper) with funds on Base that should pay an API supplier (the server) who solely accepts Ethereum. Present programs require a handbook bridging course of which is sluggish, costly, and mirrors the friction of worldwide financial institution transfers. With no seamless resolution, agentic funds stay impractical, stifling the expansion of AI-blockchain integration.
MicroPay solves this by integrating modifications of x402 with Hyperbridge, a Polkadot interoperability coprocessor. Hyperbridge permits safe, on-chain verification of cross-chain messages utilizing superior consensus proofs like BEEFY and zk-light shoppers. This distinctive structure permits builders to question and ship messages to disconnected chains as in the event that they had been native, whereas concurrently dodging the vulnerabilities of legacy bridges. By distributing validation throughout Polkadot’s core parachain safety, Hyperbridge achieves full node safety, as much as $3 billion, with out compromising on velocity or value.
In a stay demonstration, the MicroPay system validated Hyperbridge’s effectivity. The MicroPay course of begins with the AI agent making an preliminary micropayment on its native chain (e.g., Base Sepolia) utilizing the X-402 commonplace. To offset excessive bridging charges and delays, MicroPay routinely batches a number of micropayments into bigger volumes for settlement. Hyperbridge then converts the EVM tokens from the shopper’s chain to the server’s most popular chain (e.g., Ethereum Sepolia). This crucial step entails safe, on-chain verification of state transitions. Funds are bridged to the server’s deal with, enabling fast, low-cost knowledge entry for the agent.
Hyperbridge was the best selection for this expertise due to the best way it permits the applying to question different chains like they’re subsequent door and even so with a excessive financial safety. It at the moment assist over 12 EVM chains like Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and others. Its structure permits environment friendly knowledge sharing, asset tokenization, and cross-chain funds with out centralized intermediaries. For AI brokers, this interprets to high-speed, low-cost responses. It is a crucial issue for real-time interactions in autonomous economies.
MicroPay’s win underscores Hyperbridge’s essential position in enabling a verifiable, multichain future. The protocol is the brainchild of Polytope Labs co-founders, Seun Lanlege and David Salami, former engineers from the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems. They designed Hyperbridge as an interoperability coprocessor that offloads complicated computations off-chain, bringing solely cryptographically safe proofs again on-chain for verification.
This revolutionary design is powered by the Interoperable State Machine Protocol (ISMP), which acts as an HTTPS-like API for safe cross-chain requests. This enables Hyperbridge to inherit Polkadot’s pooled financial safety, offering the best safety ensures obtainable. The platform has additionally obtained important validation, having secured $5.6 million in seed funding, led by the Polkadot Ecosystem Fund and with assist from traders like Web3 Basis and Scytale Digital.
Latest milestones have quickly cemented its trade place. The platform is already related to over 14 chains together with Polygon, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, and BNB Chain. Moreover, Hyperbridge, now the native bridge of Polkadot, has been enjoying a key position within the Polkadot DeFi Singularity initiative which is deepening the footprint of DOT, Polkadot’s native token.
As blockchain ecosystems mature, options like MicroPay display how strong interoperability protocols can drive adoption. Hyperbridge’s ongoing enlargement positions it as a key infrastructure for verifiable cross-chain exercise. This expertise is poised to empower various purposes in DeFi, gaming, and knowledge markets, the place brokers might want to pay for APIs, compute, or oracles with out human oversight.
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About Hyperbridge
Hyperbridge is the world’s most secure bridge; it replaces multisigs and MPC options, which have been on the centre of the biggest bridge hacks with safe cryptographic (consensus & storage) proofs. It is already related to over 14 chains, together with Ethereum, Base, BNB chain, and many others. It permits mission-critical cross-chain consumer experiences that wouldn’t have the luxurious of centralized safety fashions, like stablecoins and different RWA issuers, DAOs and cross-chain governance.
About Polkadot
Polkadot is the highly effective, safe core of Web3, offering a shared basis that unites a few of the world’s most transformative apps and blockchains. Polkadot presents superior modular structure that permits devs to simply design and construct their very own specialised blockchain initiatives, pooled safety that ensures the identical excessive commonplace for safe block manufacturing throughout all related chains and apps related to it, and strong governance that ensures a clear system the place everybody has say in shaping the blockchain ecosystem for progress and sustainability. With Polkadot, customers will not be simply members, they’re co-creators with the ability to form its future.
