Introducing Wormhole

We’re incredibly excited to announce the mainnet launch of Wormhole. With the emergence of a number of high-value chains of various shapes and sizes, interoperability between these currently siloed networks has become ever more important.

Wormhole aims to fill this gap as a cross-chain messaging protocol, secured by a network of Guardian nodes. At launch, Wormhole mainnet will support Solana, Ethereum, Terra and Binance Smart Chain, with a view to connect to other prominent chains in the near future.

Network Overview

Wormhole Guardians observe and attest to events and data on its connected chains. These attestations are gossiped around the open Wormhole peer-to-peer network, allowing anyone connected to the network to observe the flow of information. Attestations from 2/3+ of the guardians in the network are sufficient for an attestation to be created, which allows for asynchronous, fast single-round consensus. These attestations are then persisted and can be shipped to one or more destination blockchain(s) to be parsed and trigger custom application logic.

Features of the Network

Fully generic

• Wormhole cross-chain messages can contain arbitrary data. This allows for developers to build applications using the Wormhole that include, but are not limited to, asset transfers, oracle data, governance decisions, NFTs, and much more we haven’t even thought of.

Abstraction of consensus /application logic

• Consensus is a very lightweight high-throughput process in Wormhole’s peer-to-peer network and is completed asynchronously. The resulting signed messages can then be relayed to any connected chain with custom application logic to parse and trigger events. This abstracts away the hairy/tedious multi-chain light client logic, and the trust assumptions/decentralization set while retaining full flexibility for developers looking to leverage this platform.

Fast

• The asynchronous nature of Wormhole’s single-round consensus allows for low-latency consensus on state, allowing for the information to be used on any blockchain (or off-chain!) with minimal delay — keeping up even with high-throughput chains like Solana.

Easily extensible and fully upgradeable

• Incorporating new chains is a straightforward governance process and requires no disruption of the activities on the rest of the network. All core contracts are also fully upgradeable with governance is controlled by the Guardian set, requiring a supermajority to pass upgrades.

Build on Wormhole

We’re very keen to see all of the creative applications developers will come up with! Design documents can be found on GitHub along with Certus One’s reference node implementation, with a lot more tooling and developer documentation to come! Join our Discord for active discussion on network functionality and developer support.

High-quality guardians

We’re fortunate to be launching with a set of the finest network operators in the space as the initial guardian set for Wormhole! We couldn’t have done this without each of these valuable community members.

Chorus One, Staked.us, P2P Validator, triton.one, Certus One, Everstake, Chainode Tech, ChainLayer, Staking Fund, Dokia, 01Node, Moonlet, Inotel, Figment, Staking Facilities, HashQuark, Forbole, Syncnode and Smith MCF.

The journey for Wormhole is only just beginning. Join our budding communities on Twitter, Discord, Medium, and Telegram. We’re thrilled for the road ahead!