Light Clients & Relayers

An IBC connection relies on light clients—miniature replicas of another chain’s consensus—to verify headers efficiently, and relayers—off-chain processes that monitor events and forward packets. Together, they form the trust-minimized courier service for cross-chain data.

Light clients keep proofs small and computationally cheap, so nodes don’t need to run full archival instances of each counter-party chain. Relayers are economically incentivized (via fees or block rewards) to keep channels alive and packets flowing.

This architecture ensures that user prompts can trigger actions on distant chains with the same security assumptions as local transactions, while end-users remain blissfully unaware of the underlying logistics.