The soft matter hydrogel community has come a long way in the development of hydrogel architectures that satisfy a broad range of properties and applications. With the emergence of tough hydrogels for load-bearing applications, new territories were charted, especially in the (bio)medical area. Many systems are increasingly accessible, for instance, the likes that make use of polysaccharides, PVA, and ionic or Fracture strain (%) 10 -2 10 -1 10 0 10 1 10 2 10 3 hydrogen-bonding monomers. For the majority of materials, free-radical polymerization has been the method of choice due to its ease of use and tolerance to various solvents, monomers, pHs, temperatures and fabrication conditions. The increased availability combined with the simplicity of the building blocks and methods will progressively reduce production costs, and render the resulting materials more attractive and competitive towards today's established performance materials.