Challenge

Wormhole’s Guardian Network, a decentralized set of highly-reputable validator nodes including RockawayX, P2P, Figment, and Everstake, serves as the critical backbone for transaction verification across 35+ blockchains. As the ecosystem expanded, Wormhole faced increasing demands for:

• Enhanced uptime and reliability for cross-chain messaging
• Greater redundancy in the verification process
• Scalable infrastructure to support growth across dozens of blockchains
• Advancement of zero-knowledge (ZK) verification capabilities

Solution

Wormhole adds Google Cloud to the Guardian Network. As a Guardian Node, Google Cloud’s infrastructure strengthens the decentralized network, ensuring uptime while providing verification redundancy coverage across the entire Guardian set by immediately backfilling any Guardian that experiences downtime.

Google Cloud brings the latest enhancement to Wormhole’s advanced security system to minimize downtime and unverified messages for thousands of application developers and users across over 40 supported blockchains.

Results

Wormhole's defense-in-depth security strategy employs a multi-layered approach to safeguard cross-chain communications. The decentralized Guardian Network is reinforced by two critical components: the Global Accountant, which maintains strict 1:1 parity between native and wrapped assets across blockchains, and the Governor, which monitors and limits asset outflows to prevent cross-chain contagion. Together with rigorous auditing and open-source development practices, these mechanisms form a comprehensive security infrastructure that has established Wormhole as a trusted leader in interoperability and the only interoperability protocol unconditionally approved by the security experts of the Uniswap Foundation's Bridge Assessment Committee.

The addition of Google Cloud to the Guardian Network has furthered these efforts by adding security redundancy built on Google Cloud’s reliable, planet-scale infrastructure.

In addition to adding Google Cloud to the Guardian Network, this collaboration will further accelerate Wormhole’s ZK roadmap to optimize multichain security through extended research and product development. A key initiative will be strengthening provers for rapid, cheap, and trustless message verification that is uninterrupted across chains. With Google Cloud’s support, Wormhole is researching the addition of trustless ZK verification mechanisms in addition to the Wormhole Guardians.