Inco x Hyperlane: Enabling Confidential Computing Across Blockchains

Traditionally, public blockchains operate with complete transparency, but not everyone wants all of their onchain activities to be public. Inco introduces the confidentiality layer to solve this issue. Today, Inco is excited to announce an integration with Hyperlane, the leader in interoperability for the modular ecosystem. Through Hyperlane’s interoperability framework, Inco can extend confidential storage and computation to the broader modular blockchain ecosystem.

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Given the additional FHE hardware and MPC protocol requirements, existing public blockchains cannot easily support threshold FHE. As a modular blockchain with instant block finality, Inco fills this gap by extending randomness and confidentiality-as-a-service (CaaS) to existing transparent blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Base.

Expanding Adoption with Hyperlane:

Permissionless Integration

Hyperlane enables anyone to connect any blockchain out of the box without needing permission. Integration with traditional bridges usually takes a long cycle of backroom politics and integration work. Hyperlane's self-service nature makes it ideal for developers and dApps to quickly benefit from Inco’s Confidentiality-as-a-Service (CaaS) across any chains, including testnets.

Custom Block Finality

The flexibility of customizing the block finality with Hyperlane significantly improves the user experience and security. For example, in a simple onchain card game, the block finality to settle a hand can be set to a lower number. In case of an occasional block reorganization, the message passing can be triggered again from the origin chain with minimal risk to the end user. For bridging money across chains, a higher block finality can be enforced.

Ease of Deployment

The deployment process of Hyperlane is abstracted in a way that makes it easy for roll-up-as-a-service (RaaS) companies to integrate. Inco offers its confidential computing to hundreds of roll-ups in the easiest way possible with just one click.

Modular Security

Instead of locking developers into one security model, Hyperlane enables them to customize their security with composable security modules for different needs. The level of security can be increased or reduced depending on the use case.

How Confidentiality-as-a-Service (CaaS) Works:

The Inco team customized Hyperlane’s InterchainQueryRouter to support cross-chain execution with callback capability. Here’s an example to illustrate the flow:

1. A smart contract is deployed on Polygon with the core game logic.
2. Another smart contract is deployed on Inco, which stores the hidden player stats and the battle mechanics.
3. A transaction is initiated on Polygon, which uses Hyperlane to trigger the battle function on Inco. Inco performs the FHE confidential computation by multiplying the hidden player stats with native on-chain randomness. The battle's outcome (who won) is bridged back and settled on Polygon.

Here's another example of how an on-chain mod enabled a betting mini-game on top of a popular on-chain game, Primodium, by leveraging Inco’s randomness and Hyperlane to connect to the Caldera Sepolia testnet during the Autonomous World Summit 2024.

If you want to try out the beta version of Inco’s Confidentiality-as-a-Service, here’s the link.

Hyperlane enables modular cryptographic primitives to compose with the modular ecosystem. We are excited to partner with Hyperlane to bring confidential computing to blockchains, and we look forward to seeing builders utilize this and enable the next net-new use cases in Web3.

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