Questions:
- How does your bridge work (at a medium or high level of detail)? What are its best features? Is it permissionless, non-custodial, trust-minimized, and decentralized? What additional trust assumptions does it put upon Osmosis users? If there are new trusted parties, how are/were they chosen?
- At a high level the Portal Bridge is a specific application built on top of the Wormhole Network that enables token and NFT swapping between chains using Wormhole Network’s generic message passing layer.
- The Wormhole Network is a (current) PoA network that bridges 7+ chains together (Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Oasis, and Terra) with more being added all the time.
- The PoA network of 19 Guardians are some of the biggest validator companies in the space, often already running validators for the various chains Wormhole wants to bridge to and from. They simply run an additional gossip network amongst themselves to check and validate Wormhole messages. The full list of Guardians can be found here: https://wormholenetwork.com/network/
- Portal and Wormhole are as much developer tools as they are tools for retail users, allowing powerful cross chain dApps to be built that leverage cross chain swaps, deposits, defi, etc.
- Video explanation of Wormhole Network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngnWF5wid
- What are the liveness and/or censorship resistance guarantees of your bridge solution (including both the protocol itself and the interfaces used to interact with it)?
- Guardian Network is operated by the biggest validators in the space, this means that they have extremely good liveness guarantees, often better than the chains they validate for. The liveness faults we see from a user experience point of view are usually to do with a specific fault within a chain when that chain is experiencing liveness trouble.
- Transaction relayers (which are an optional connivence to streamline user experience and not required for transaction processing) may also face liveness faults, but these are usually application specific and up to the dApp provider to provide liveness guarantees for.
- 1/3 of the Validators would have to collude to be able to adequately censor transactions.
- Describe your current and future UX. What concrete steps are you taking to get there, and what is the timeline? Will users be able to deposit/withdraw assets directly between Ethereum and Osmosis? Or will they have to make a transaction on an intermediary blockchain?
- Our user experience is a simple two step process, users create a transaction on the source chain and redeem it on the target chain for a given asset.
- The Wormhole team is currently working on a product called Native Swap, which will set the bar for bridges everywhere through one click token swap between chains, rather than the three step process that currently exists today.
- How does your bridge plan to support itself economically? Will it be self-supporting? When?
- There are no fees to use the Wormhole network except for a 100 lamport fee (about a thousandth of a cent) to transact on Solana. There are no current plans to add fees.
- Is your bridge planning to offer liquidity mining incentives? If so, please describe the prospective program.
- There are currently no plans on providing liquidity mining incentives.
- Who owns the bridge? Is there a token, vested shares, etc? Who are the stakeholders?
- Wormhole is a decentralized, trust minimized bridge secured by 19 Guardians who comprise some of the top validators in the space including Jump Crypto, P2P, Chorus One, Staking Facilities, etc. The full list can be seen here -https://wormholenetwork.com/network/
- What costs will users of the bridge experience, and how do you plan to minimize these?
- The only fees users incur are for gas on the source and destination chains of the transaction. There are no current plans to add fees for the bridge.
- How will the bridge and any related contracts, modules, and chains be secured? How could funds be attacked, and what mitigation strategies are in place? Are there any other recovery systems to help recover any sort of locked funds?
- Just like all other protocols and on chain programs, Wormhole faces inherent smart contract risk about vulnerabilities in our open source software. Wormhole mitigates these through multiple rounds of ongoing audits by some of the most trusted and experienced team in the business.
- Wormhole currently offers the largest bug bounty in all of crypto ($10 million) through Immunefi.
- Recovery process for partially complete transfers. Funds cannot get stuck.
- Are there any sort of insurance funds or anything of the like to compensate users in the case of stolen or irrecoverable funds?
- There is currently no official insurance fund for but it is something that is being discussed by the community.
- Wormhole had an exploit in February of 2022 for 120K ETH ($326M) and all users were made whole within 18 hours. A week after the exploit, the bridge’s TVL went up by ~$500M. You can read more about the exploit and resolution here.
- When users experience problems, what is your plan to provide easily reachable support?
- We have multiple dedicated support personnel from around the world active 24/7 on our Discord that help with user questions.
- There’s over 13 thousand active members in our Discord.
- How would you describe the likely network effects of your bridge and your team’s reputation within the ecosystems you are bridging, both among DeFi users and among developers?
- Wormhole has strong traction within its supported ecosystems. Some proof points include:
- Wormhole has trust among key partners
- Terra
- Solana - Wormhole assets are the canonical wrapped assets in the Solana
ecosystem. For example, in Solana’s token list, Wormhole ETH is just listed as “ETH”
- FTX has enabled deposits and withdrawals of ETH assets from FTX to and from Solana.
- Oasis - Wormhole is currently the only bridge to connect Oasis’s emerging defi ecosystem to the rest of the cryptoverse.
- Neon - using Wormhole to get ETH assets onto Solana
- Jump Crypto - Core contributors
- How would you describe your incentive-alignments with the Osmosis community, now and in the future.
- Terra is a deep partner of Wormhole, and they’re excited to have UST serve as the canonical decentralized stablecoin within the Osmosis and broader Cosmos ecosystem.
- Wormhole is strongly focused on bringing as many L1s and L2s together for the largest network effects. This grows DeFi as a whole, and each platform gains access to multitudes of new user bases from other chains and projects.
- Similarly, how would you rate your team on ability to quickly ship excellent upgrades, patches, and new features? How focused is the product towards bridging Cosmos and EVM assets? Is it the primary focus of the project or one of many features and/or projects that the development team is building?
- The Wormhole team has shown a dedication to shipping integrations with new chains at a fast pace, delivering 7 distinct ecosystems since our Token Bridge launched in September, 2021.
- Wormhole is extremely focused on bringing assets from the broader non IBC world into Cosmos, to directly help protocols like Osmosis compete with centralized exchanges.
- What is your timeline for adding other EVM chains beyond Ethereum? Do you have any plans for non-EVM chains?
- Wormhole’s generic architecture already facilitates the support of Solana, Terra, as well as the EVM implementation of Oasis (Emerald Paratime).
- Wormhole’s network onboarding strategy and generic architecture allows for the support of a number of disparate, high value networks. The Wormhole mandate is to create composability between heterogenous networks that can be additive to the whole.
- What is your timeline for adding non-token cross-chain messages (e.g. Interchain accounts and NFT transfers)?
- We already have those features :)
- We have a number of different projects integrating with us to accomplish variety of cross chain tasks. Some, like 01, enable direct deposits from other chains into their DeFi protocol through Wormhole. Others, like Bridgesplit, provide multi chain NFT fractionalization, pooling and lending. Even projects like Lido are looking to use Wormhole for governance actions and Serum uses us for massive liquidity boosts on their cross chain pairs.
- Because Wormhole is a generic message passing solution, community members could even build an ICS integration on top of Wormhole.
- Anything else should we know?
- Wormhole is more than a token bridge. It is a way for Osmosis to go cross-chain to all of Wormhole’s 7 (and counting) diverse and high value networks.
- The Wormhole network is a full featured cross-chain messaging protocol, that can support a plethora of cross-chain apps like swaps, borrow/lends, oracle data from Pyth , governance, cross-chain ICO infrastructure, cross-chain token standards, and much more.
- Some exciting new features we are releasing in the next few weeks:
- Beyond basic bridge functionality, because Portal is built on top of the Wormhole messaging layer, we get to expose Portal as a developer tool. In testnet we have support for Contract Controlled Transfers, which allow users to not only send tokens back and forth between bridges, but also signal that a specific program should be called on the target chain with given parameters to accept the tokens. This opens a whole new world of possibilities for developers (such as)
- Native Swap powered by Contract Controlled Calls integrates with existing DEX’s on source and target chains to allow end users to one click swap any token from one chain to another token on another chain. This user experience feels exactly like the buy/sell mechanic in CEXs and just works^tm. Furthermore, because Portal and Wormhole are developer tools, users aren’t locked into any specific DEX and any DEX can integrate our canonical token highway system.
- The UST Highway, as we like to call it, allows users to swap an asset on one chain for UST, bridge that UST and swap for their target asset all in one click. Wormhole’s dominance in canonical tokens is useful in this swap because there’s greater chances of exit liquidity existing on target chains.
- Wormhole makes the blockchain promise of true composability into a reality.