About

Wormhole is a decentralized interoperability protocol that enables the transfer of assets and information across multiple blockchains. The project’s primary goal is to provide a secure, chain-agnostic platform for cross-chain communication and value transfer.

History

Wormhole was introduced in October 2020 by Certus One, with the intention of being a token bridge between Ethereum and Solana. In August 2021, Certus One was acquired by Jump Trading, after which Wormhole was launched on mainnet as a communication bridge between Solana and other blockchain networks.

In November 2023, it was reported that Jump Trading Group had spun off the Wormhole project. Later that month, following a $225.00 million funding round, the Wormhole Foundation announced the launch of Wormhole Labs, an independent core contributor to Wormhole that “specializes in building products, tools, and reference implementations that help grow cross-chain activity and development.”

The protocol’s notable developments are detailed below:

• In January 2022, Wormhole introduced “NativeSwap,” a testnet showcasing Wormhole’s ETH/MATIC bidirectional swap mechanism.
• In March 2022, the Wormhole V1 bridge, the protocol’s original Ethereum-Solana bi-directional token bridge, was deprecated. Users were instructed to swap certain V1 tokens to the platform’s V2 bridge.
• In April 2022, the project renamed its token and NFT bridge from “Wormhole” to “Portal,” This was done to more clearly distinguish the underlying messaging protocol (”Wormhole”) from the protocol’s bridge application (”Portal”).
• In March 2023, Wormhole announced its integration with Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), enabling developers to compose generic messages on top of cross-chain, native USDC transfers.
• In July 2023, the Wormhole Foundation introduced Wormhole Gateway, an application-specific blockchain developed using the Cosmos SDK.
• In August 2023, the Wormhole team established the Wormhole Foundation, aiming to support teams building within the Wormhole ecosystem.
• In December 2023, Wormhole announced the launch of Wormhole Queries, a service designed to enhance cross-chain data access for blockchain applications.
• In January 2024, Wormhole introduced native token transfers, powered by Uniswap V3, with native-to-native transfer support for ETH (available between Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Optimism, Polygon PoS, and BNB Smart Chain) and wstETH (available between Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon PoS, and Base).
• In February 2024, Wormhole introduced Native Token Transfers (NTT), a framework designed to facilitate the transfer of native tokens across multiple blockchain platforms while maintaining the tokens’ inherent properties.
• Wormhole commenced the airdrop for SPL W on April 3, 2024.

Wormhole intends to implement a decentralized governance model via W tokenholders (”on both Solana and EVM chains”); however, based on a commercially reasonable search, no verifiable information on a planned release date could be found.