Hop

Hop

Official Introduction Document

Hop is a scalable rollup-to-rollup universal token bridge. It allows users to send tokens from one aggregate or sidechain to another almost instantly without waiting for network challenge periods.

It works by involving market makers (called bondholders) who provide liquidity on the target chain in exchange for a small fee. The credit is extended by Bonder in the form of hTokens, which are then exchanged for their local token counterparts in the AMM on the target chain.

The end result allows users to seamlessly transfer tokens from one network to the next.

Hop is not to be trusted

Users have on-chain assurance that they will receive their funds even if Bonders is offline. In the rare cases where this happens, users must wait for on-chain proofs to propagate to the target chain before they can manually withdraw their tokens. In the worst case scenario, users will face a slow experience, but their funds cannot be bridged away by Hop.

Automatic rebalancing of liquidity

With AMM on every chain, liquidity always flows to where it is needed most. If a large amount of user money is bridged from Optimism to Ether, arbitrageurs will be financially incentivized to bridge in another way for a premium, thus rebalancing the pool.

Hop driven by a group of Bonders

The binder runs the local node to verify that the state transitions on the source chain are accurate and decides to "bind" the transfer by locking the state of the 110% TransferSumas collateral. This allows them to mint hToken on the target chain sent to the user to provide instant liquidity. Bonder unlocks the capital after a 24-hour challenge period, during which anyone can challenge Bonder. If the challenge is successful, Bonder capital will be reduced.