Relayer Next Overview

Motivation

With the IBC ecosystem starting to see more interest and buy-in from non-Cosmos chains, the types of relaying use-cases will expand rapidly as a result. Hermes' current architecture does not allow an adequate degree of flexibility for relayer developers to easily enable such use-cases. The Relayer-Next project (you might also hear it referred to as the relayer framework or the relayer library) aims to address this lack of flexibility; it seeks to re-architect Hermes' back end such that the different components that comprise its relaying pipeline can be composed together in a much more functional and modular fashion.

While the hope is that such a re-architected relayer back end will lead to a more performant and maintainable Hermes codebase, such a composable back end will also be open sourced as a library for the benefit of other relayer developers. We hope that such a library will make it much easier to spin up new relayer instances that address currently-nonexistent relaying use-cases.