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31 Jan 2024
•4 min read
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Trust lies at the very heart of every interaction, organization, or system.
One of the great innovations of crypto has been the ability to reduce reliance on a small set of trusted actors to a wider audience of users, developers, and stakeholders. This process of democratizing and disintermediating trust has been challenging. But nonetheless, the Wormhole community remains committed to upholding this ethos of trust-minimization.
Wormhole is a leading interoperability platform for facilitating multichain communication. Since 2021, Wormhole has served as a foundational tool for fast, reliable, and cheap multichain messaging. As new blockchains continue to emerge, efficient and scalable mechanisms for interoperating across a wide range of networks will continue to be a key challenge.
This post outlines a significant upgrade to Wormhole’s verification system — the design choices, technologies in use, and the complexities of bringing Wormhole into a trust-minimized future.
Today marks a major advancement toward improving the trust assumptions of the Wormhole protocol, with the announcement of Wormhole’s ZK Roadmap. By integrating zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, the Wormhole protocol adds the following improvements:
Today, a Wormhole message is produced when at least 13 of the 19 (a supermajority) Guardians agree on the state and execution of the blockchain the message originated from, and they all observe the same message being sent. This means that users and applications that rely on these messages (e.g. consume them on another blockchain) must rely on the Guardians to validate messages accurately. This constitutes the verification mechanism underlying Wormhole — its root-of-trust.
The Guardians were recently recognized for security and decentralization by the Uniswap Foundation’s third party Bridge Assessment Committee in a report released in 2023, naming Wormhole as the only unconditionally approved interoperability protocol for Uniswap’s multichain governance system.
Although sufficiently decentralized and highly secure, the Wormhole protocol is becoming more secure, decentralized, and less trust-based over time; the next step toward this objective is decentralizing Wormhole’s verification layer and moving toward a trust-minimized model using zero-knowledge technology.
The Wormhole ecosystem will be launching a portfolio of software solutions to achieve the following collective vision for ZK-enabled interoperability. The path ahead for Wormhole ZK is marked by a few significant milestones and strategic collaborations, all aimed at enabling extremely fast, cheap, and trustless message verification.
Here’s a detailed look at the roadmap:
In summary, Wormhole's verification system and ZK Roadmap is focused on:
Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform that powers multichain applications and bridges at scale. Wormhole provides developers access to liquidity and users on over 30 of the leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases that span DeFi, NFTs, governance, and more.
The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap, and to date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through over 1 billion cross-chain messages. To learn more about Wormhole, visit the Wormhole website, Twitter, Discord, or blog.
Here’s your chance to get in on this one.
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