Wormhole is a bridge protocol, which allows assets to be transferred between different blockchains. Initially launched to connect the Solana (SOL) blockchain to other DeFi blockchains, it now supports 10 different blockchains. An 11th has just been announced, with the connection to Injective, a blockchain belonging to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Wormhole connects to Cosmos
Wormhole is one of the main bridge protocols in the DeFi ecosystem. With more than $500 million in TVL, it allows assets and data to be transferred between the Solana, Terra, Ethereum, Avalanche, Oasis, BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, Fantom, Algorand and Aurora networks.
Its operation is relatively classical. Wormhole has smart contracts deployed on all supported blockchains. When a user wants to send a token from blockchain A to blockchain B, the protocol will operate in two steps.
In the first step, the smart contract of blockchain A will block the token to be sent. In a second step, the smart contract of blockchain B will be notified of the transfer and will issue a tokenized version of the token on blockchain B.
From now on, Wormhole extends its presence to the Cosmos ecosystem. Indeed, on May 25, the Injective blockchain, part of the Cosmos ecosystem, announced the integration of Wormhole.
“Injective announces a new integration with Wormhole. Wormhole brings 10 new chains, such as Avalanche and Solana, to Injective’s already interoperable chain. Thus, this makes Injective the primary gateway to enter the Cosmos ecosystem.”
Wormhole strengthens its security
At the beginning of February this year, the Wormhole bridge sadly made the headlines in the crypto media after falling victim to a hack. Effectively, the attacker had managed to issue many ETH on Solana and withdrew them on Ethereum, effectively emptying Wormhole’s entire smart contract. In total, $326 million was stolen in this attack.
In response to this event, Wormhole set up a bug bounty program in partnership with the Immunefi protocol. As a reminder, these programs allow users and developers to be rewarded for discovering a bug or a flaw. Moreover, the amount of the reward will depend on the severity of the flaw discovered.
A few days after the bridge hack, a developer known as Satya0x alerted Wormhole to the presence of a new bug affecting the bridge’s main contract. Fortunately, the bug was fixed before it could be exploited by a malicious user. For its part, Satya0x got the maximum reward offered by Wormhole, namely $10 million.
Earlier this year, Vitalik Buterin warned about the systemic risks of bridges. Unfortunately, this did not prevent several other bridge protocols from falling victim to attacks that resulted in large losses.
