Becoming Hyli

We started with matter. In ancient Greek, Hylé (ὕλη) is the primordial substance, matter in its most fundamental state. We chose the name because it’s what we are building: the infrastructure of all that is to come.

Hylé was a name we loved: elegant and French. But if you didn’t come from our little corner of the world, you struggled to write and say it. We’re building something essential. Essentials should be simple.

That’s why today, we become Hyli (ˈhaɪliˈ). Same sound, cleaner signal.

What is Hyli

We aren’t designing new proofs for blockchains. We’re designing a new blockchain for proofs.

Hyli is a next-generation base layer for a post-proof world. It’s an opinionated layer-1 blockchain built around the affordances of proofs. Hyli is built to unlock what proofs make possible: customizability, scalability, and privacy.

Hyli combines native proof verification embedded directly into the protocol with a fast data dissemination and data availability layer powered by the Autobahn consensus algorithm.

• Computation must be verifiable, so we enshrined proof verification into the protocol and made it effortless to compose different proofs.
• Proofs introduce latency and overhead, so we invented pipelined proving to remove this bottleneck.
• The future runs on appchains, so everything on Hyli is an appchain by default: apps sequence on Hyli and update their state with a corresponding proof.

Hyli is:

• Highly simple: no execution environment, no native runtime. Just proofs and data.
• Highly efficient: leveraging the latest in consensus design (Autobahn) and proof systems (Risc0, SP1, Noir, etc.).
• Highly usable: identity and access flows powered by existing user credentials (email, wallets, credentials) and signed data (passports).
• Still highly orange.

What Hyli stands for

Blockchain today feels stale, uninspired, and constrained. Incremental improvements have given us engineering marvels, but they also brought complexity for its own sake, limiting developer imagination and user adoption.

We believe the work is far from finished. The time is ripe for something genuinely new.

Hyli isn't here to debate blockchain's utility. That conversation is bigger than us. What we offer is a provocation: If you could rewind the history of blockchain, armed with everything we've learned by 2025, how would you build it?

When everything feels like a copy of a copy, our mission is clear: innovate relentlessly. Build something different, something new.

We chose not the simple or the known,
But the road few dared to see.
We move forward with questions, not answers,
Chasing clarity beyond the noise,
And calling it, with certainty, Hyli.