Wormhole W / Wormhole

## What is Wormhole? Wormhole is the asset transfer infrastructure through which all digital assets move. As capital markets, stablecoins, and real-world assets transition onchain, Wormhole provides the secure, universal interoperability platform that enables them to flow seamlessly between blockchains. Since launching in 2020, Wormhole has become the leading interoperability platform, connecting more than 40 blockchains and facilitating over $60 billion in value in more than 1 billion cross-chain messages. Institutions including BlackRock, Apollo, Hamilton Lane, VanEck, and Securitize rely on Wormhole to power tokenized assets and multichain capital markets, while protocols like Circle (USDC), Uniswap, Lido, Pyth, and Jupiter depend on it to enable movement of assets and data across ecosystems. By bridging the gap between traditional finance and crypto, Wormhole is not just an interoperability protocol, it is the critical infrastructure layer for the future of global capital markets.

## What is unique about Wormhole? Wormhole was the industry’s first cross-chain bridge, a true pioneer in the industry back when “multichain” was not a widely accepted trend. Today, Wormhole’s uniqueness lies in its security, decentralization, and open source code. Wormhole’s decentralized set of 19 validators include globally-recognized entities such as Google Cloud and other top validator firms. Wormhole’s model was independently selected by the Uniswap Bridge Assessment Committee as the most secure option for cross-chain bridges, citing its validator quality, decentralization, and architecture. In addition, Wormhole has one of the industry’s most robust bug bounty programs and employs end-to-end encryption to safeguard transactions. These measures ensure Wormhole’s infrastructure can be trusted for the largest-scale use cases in both DeFi and traditional finance. Wormhole also holds open source ethos as a standard for development, unlike some competitors who operate with closed source code similar to Web2 companies like Facebook.

## How is Wormhole used? Wormhole provides tools for users to bridge assets and developer tools for blockchains, apps, and tokens: Portal – A user-facing bridge powered by Wormhole, offering low fees, low latency, and strong security guarantees. The most used bridge in the history of the industry. NTT (Native Token Transfers) – The leading multichain token standard that enables tokens to exist multichain with a single supply, critical for stablecoins and institutional assets. Messaging – Developers can integrate cross-chain messaging directly via the Wormhole SDK.