The exploit of Polkadot's bridge protocol Hyperbridge last month is a symbol of deeper dysfunction within one of crypto's most ambitious ecosystems, a former insider says.
Jaskirat Singh, co-founder and former CEO of Polkassembly, which served as the primary governance interface for Polkadot and Kusama for over five years before quietly shutting down last month, told The Defiant the exploit reflects a pattern of costly missteps at Polkadot.
The issues, Singh said, span from lack of direction from ecosystem leadership, to DAO overspending, and even failure to pay ecosystem participants for their contributions, including Polkassembly itself.
A spokesman for Parity, the company behind the development of the Polkadot blockchain, denied those claims.
Bridge Chaos
The Polkadot bridge situation has been expensive and chaotic.
"Hyperbridge, sadly, was the bridge that Polkadot had labeled as the official bridge a while back after having spent millions of dollars on building their own bridge and funding other bridges," Singh told The Defiant.
A 2024 Polkadot governance vote approved nearly $6 million in combined USDC and $DOT for Snowbridge — a Polkadot/Kusama-Ethereum bridge — which launched in 2024 after years of delays, then arrived with what Singh describes as "insane fees." A subsequent Snowbridge funding request for $3.4 million was rejected by governance last August.
Meanwhile, Polytope Labs, the team behind Hyperbridge, raised $2.5 million in a September 2024 seed round led by Web3 Foundation (W3F), the nonprofit entity behind the Polkadot ecosystem, and VC firm Scytale, which Polkadot founder Gavin Wood advises.
Hyperbridge was elevated to native bridge status a year ago, per a press release from the protocol, with Polkadot governance allocating 795,000 $DOT — worth about $3.8 million at the time and just under $1 million today — from the protocol’s treasury for a liquidity campaign.
Stuart Macdonald, chief of staff at Parity, pushed back on Hyperbridge’s and Singh's framing.
He told The Defiant that Hyperbridge is not in fact Polkadot’s native bridge, and that while it was used for the liquidity campaign, it was "not an 'official', Polkadot-endorsed bridge."
Parity and W3F are now distancing themselves from the protocol entirely.
"Hyperbridge is an independent project deployed as a permissionless parachain in the Polkadot network," Macdonald told The Defiant.
Who's Actually Running Polkadot?
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how Polkadot's institutional structure works.
Polkadot operates with two key entities: Web3 Foundation (W3F), a Swiss non-profit founded by Wood that currently leads advocacy and education with a focus on promoting web3 values; and Parity Technologies, the private company that leads protocol development and engineering.
Wood — who was also one of the co-founders of Ethereum before building Polkadot — currently serves as CEO of Parity, which he also founded, and President of the W3F Council.
