The Hyperlane protocol decouples the transport layer from the security layer of cross-chain message passing. To run a deployment, it relies on offchain agents that observe onchain activity and carry out either the transport or security aspects of the protocol.

These agents are implemented in Rust and distributed as Docker images and binaries.

  1. Relayers fulfill the message transport requirement of the protocol. They aggregate off-chain security metadata for the IInterchainSecurityModule interface and deliver messages to their recipients.
  2. Validators fulfill the security requirement of the protocol, as part of the Multisig ISM or the Hyperlane AVS, by attesting to the validity of Mailbox messages and making their signatures available to a relayer.