The MicroPay staff, considered one of 5 finalists and a winner of the Constructed Prize at 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 at 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 modern use of Hyperbridge, a Polkadot-based rollup. Hyperbridge makes use of novel know-how to deal with the safety and interoperability challenges of conventional bridges, which have collectively misplaced over $2.8 billion to hacks.
This victory highlights a essential function 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, information, or providers is already underway, thanks to foundational work by protocols like Coinbase’s x402. Nonetheless, a serious hurdle has endured: cross-chain compatibility. Think about an AI agent (the consumer) with funds on Base that wants to pay an API supplier (the server) who solely accepts Ethereum. Present methods require a guide bridging course of which is gradual, costly, and mirrors the friction of worldwide financial institution transfers. With no seamless answer, 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 allows safe, on-chain verification of cross-chain messages utilizing superior consensus proofs like BEEFY and zk-light purchasers. 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, up to $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 mechanically batches a number of micropayments into bigger volumes for settlement. Hyperbridge then converts the EVM tokens from the consumer’s chain to the server’s most popular chain (e.g., Ethereum Sepolia). This essential step includes safe, on-chain verification of state transitions. Funds are bridged to the server’s deal with, enabling rapid, low-cost information entry for the agent.
Hyperbridge was the perfect selection for this know-how due to the way in which it allows the appliance to question different chains like they’re subsequent door and even so with a excessive financial safety. It at present assist over 12 EVM chains like Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and others. Its structure allows environment friendly information 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 essential issue for real-time interactions in autonomous economies.
MicroPay’s win underscores Hyperbridge’s essential function 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 permits Hyperbridge to inherit Polkadot’s pooled financial safety, offering the very best safety ensures accessible. The platform has additionally acquired 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.
Current milestones have quickly cemented its trade place. The platform is already linked 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 function 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 growth positions it as a key infrastructure for verifiable cross-chain exercise. This know-how is poised to empower various functions in DeFi, gaming, and information markets, the place brokers will want to pay for APIs, compute, or oracles with out human oversight.
###
About Hyperbridge
Hyperbridge is the world’s most secure bridge; it replaces multisigs and MPC options, which have been at the centre of the biggest bridge hacks with safe cryptographic (consensus & storage) proofs. It is already linked to over 14 chains, together with Ethereum, Base, BNB chain, and so on. It allows mission-critical cross-chain consumer experiences that shouldn’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 number of the world’s most transformative apps and blockchains. Polkadot affords 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 linked chains and apps linked 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.
