Dev Bharel: Wormhole – The Cross Chain Messaging Protocol #468

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Felix and today we're speaking with Dev Burrell who is working on developer relations at Jump crypto a core contributor to Wormhole Wormhole is a cross-chain messaging protocol that allows users to access applications across networks before we talk with Dave about Wormhole we'd like to talk tell you about our sponsors this week Omni Omni is your favorite new multi-chain mobile wallet that puts the power of web3 at your fingertips in just three tabs you can Stag and manage your assets and over 22 built-in protocols including all major EVMS layer twos and non-evms like Cosmos Solana and year and more Omni extracts

away all complexity while being fully self-custodial meaning getting yield on your crypto has never been this easy and secure Omni also has multi-chain nft support so you can view all of your nfts in one place and you can flex your cleanest nft by studying it as your app background don't forget to check the explore section in the app for your daily fix of the hottest dapps yields and news across chains on September 7th Omni upgraded app to provide you with more functionality than tens of different D5 apps and wallets combined to highlight their transformation they renamed from State wallet to Omni the next generation super wallet join thousands of users on this next Generation wallet by downloading it today on Iris Android at omni.app another news we're hiring epicenter is

hiring we're looking for a community manager to help grow our audience and take episode to the next level if you're passionate about crypto and creating great content we want to hear from you full details can be found at the careers page that we're going to link in the show notes uh please share with anyone who you think might be a good fit for this role so today I'm really excited to join be joined by deaf uh who's working with as a core contributor with Wormhole Wormhole is an exciting Network and cross-chain protocol generally we start these episodes uh by introducing our guests so high def hi happy to be here

I left your core contributor to Wormhole with jump uh usually at the start of the episode we often try to find out how did our guests get into crypto and in this case or specifically how did you get into working with jump on wormhole yeah so so I'm one of the very old people in crypto um I got into crypto in like 2013 uh in in high school uh this was before we even called crypto uh you know blockchain this is in the Bitcoin days and I got involved with an organization called the blockchain education network uh back on back then it was like the Bitcoin education Network um called Ben and I used to organize events with like all the disparate

college students all around the universities uh in the United States uh so we could do meetups and hackathons and so on and I got really into decentralized identity zero knowledge proofs all that kind of stuff uh fast forward uh I've built a couple companies um and then eventually I ended up joining jump um as a developer relations but one of the most interesting facts is that while I was doing um I've been doing developer advocacy for a long time while I was working in decentralized identity and building my startups I was also going around to over 200 300 hackathon events sponsoring mentoring or participating at dressed up in a full space suit teaching students how to write like solidity code as if it

was the word of God you know like this is the coolest thing so one of my greatest achievements one of the things that I'm really proud of is that there are hundreds if not thousands of Engineers whose first ever taste of blockchain uh the technology was through one of my workshops so taking all of that all of that experience and all of that history with crypto and all that uh you know context around how crypto was formed I eventually applied for a job jump uh through my friend Anthony Ramirez who mentioned that they were looking for core contributors for one uh you know one of the projects so therefore you're really passionate about which is Wormhole and Wormhole again is a cross messaging platform now I got really excited about Wormhole because

I'm an engineer and I love um I love uh tackling a lot of different problems so I was coming from the salinity world but I wanted to have a lot of different like I wanted to go into different ecosystems and so Wormhole is an interesting challenge where as an engineer I don't just have to I don't just do I don't have to learn just one ecosystem I have to like really be on my feet dancing and learning a lot of different challenging ecosystems and uh you know whether that's rust for Solana move for aptus and sui custom awesome for injective or what you know any of these ecosystems and picking that knowledge up and picking those

architectures up so I ended up at uh jump well we're doing car contribution for Wormhole back in February of this year yeah that's a amazing history I I didn't know that you've been around for so long that's that's super cool to have guests there that are like dating way back and have seen a lot I'm sure you took a lot of lessons away from that and uh as our guests could see today you don't wear a spacesuit anymore but maybe maybe you can make a return I still got that I still got my space painting I don't know up there if you can see it yeah yeah awesome yeah nice face um cool all right yeah definitely I think yeah one of the super interesting things I think of a wormhole or generally about the space you're you're in is it's like you said you're touching

upon so many different network ecosystems that's actually quite similar to what what we're working on and I think that's one of the nice spots in the space but I guess before we dive into that even more uh maybe you can like explain to us you know what what specifically what is wormhole in your words and then we can take it from there yeah so Wormhole is a cross-chain messaging layer and a lot of people confuse this um who confuse two things they confuse warm all in Portal and I'll talk about what those things are separately in just a second but Wormhole basically um is a way for us in layman's terms it's a way for users to not care about developer choices and what I mean

by that is um when we look at blockchains we look at blockchains as different infrastructure providers just like in web 2 we have Microsoft Azure we have AWS we have Google cloud engine um we have our Google Cloud platform in in web3 we have Solana ethereum polygon uh injective yeah all of these different chains these are all infrastructure a user should not care about what infrastructure the developer chooses to deploy their application when I go to my bank's website I don't care that my bank is on Google Cloud platform right I just care that it's a good application that I get to use and that's it and so Wormhole is that missing piece of technology that

allows different infrastructure providers to connect to each other so the end user can get an application rather than an infrastructure to interact with um so it's this layer on top of blockchains that really for the end user makes it so they can interact with just clear applications now on top of that an application was built called portal the portal asset bridge is what most people uh you know and consumers actually end up using and it's a simple way to just move you know tokens from one chain to another now while it's super useful right now because one of the biggest use cases for blockchain technology is tokens we've seen we're seeing some

interesting use case pop up that are non-token based use cases for example like cross chain governance or nft support or like you know gaming or other things that are not just tokens and those are going to use that generic message passing layer that Wormhole has without necessarily using token passing as we see it in Portal all right thanks yeah that that makes a lot of sense I think there's really there's a lot of applications that can still be unlocked and before you even had something like Wormhole right like the general way of bridging to other networks is it either impossible or through some centralized party so I think this is a very important like kind of step towards

really interconnecting this this these ecosystems um now you mentioned already like a bunch of the chains that um Wormhole today's supports um can you talk a little bit about you know how how do you add support uh for for a network in Wormhole um what are the challenges with adding a new network uh to this um kind of layer to this protocol yeah so first and foremost the Wormhole is a decentralized protocol what that means is the core contributors can't just add a network this is one of the biggest misconceptions that people usually run into the core contributors

might uh write some code uh that says hey we can add in uh here's sample code here's a here's a working uh connection to this new network but at the end of the day it gets proposed uh to our Guardians our Guardians are the Wormhole validators so every Wormhole validator would which observes messages on all of the chains that we connect to has to basically run a node for every chain that Wormhole wants to connect to and so if uh if a new network wants uh wants to be added to the Wormhole ecosystem they have to propose to the Guardians hey please run a node um for our you know our chain our

Network our uh you know protocol and the Wormhole Guardians have to do a governance vote the 19 Guardians have to decide yes we want to run this network no we don't want to run this network and after that um uh vote passes um is that Network live yeah it makes sense that's I guess um so can you talk a little bit about how does this I guess this Guardian said today who they are and I guess how the governance works now and maybe also a little bit how do you plan to expand as you mentioned there's 19 obviously it's a very high burden I guess on this card into support so many networks how do you maybe imagine or how that's what I'm imagine to to grow that and and

um um yeah what what do you see as the steps for that was chosen as top 19 validators in the space um so it's not that uh you know these are 19 random validators these are validators that are in the blockchain space um unique and uh separate um so there's a very high anti-collusion probability what that means is like they there's very it's very unlikely that these 19 unique companies would collude with each other uh because they are they have a reputation at stake so beyond uh Beyond just um you know value of like other for example our competitors might say uh use a proof of stake system which

allows you to become a guard or become a validator on their Network um on on the Wormhole uh Guardian Network you have your reputation at stake as well because um there's there's that bigger uh context of this these Guardians being the bigger validators in the space and again as we mentioned there's a big burden there now there we are thinking about ways to propose the Guardians to expand the uh Guardian Set uh the Wormhole contributors are working on improvements such as warm chain um and a variety of other improvements um that we can't just talk we can't talk about just yet just because the designs aren't finalized

um but the idea is uh if the Guardians want to expand and want to grow there are potential ways that we're currently uh discussing with them uh to grow that uh grow that pie that being said again like you said it's a huge burden to be a guardian on a wormhole Network so one of the scaling solutions that we're looking into right now is instead of having Guardians run full nodes use something like zero knowledge proofs for validation and we're trying that out um you know in uh in testing and design phasing right now so we don't have to worry about Guardians running full nodes but they can have actually runs your

knowledge proof systems to test state from different chains and grow that grow that validator set awesome yeah that is definitely something we should get into a little bit later again because that seems quite interesting how how you might use zero knowledge proofs to do that but I guess before we get there maybe you can talk a little bit about just kind of the bridging experience now talking about portal if you have a new network can you walk us a little bit through how would I as a user interact uh with portal and um yeah could you just like walk us through this flow Maybe yeah so

generative active portal uh first of all you can just go to portalbridge.com I believe that's the website let me double check yeah portalbridge.com um but uh really so the way Wormhole works is um you start on a source chain you emit a message that I miss that message gets observed by the Guardians to make sure that it's valid and then a relayer comes along picks it up and then submits it onto the target chain the most confusing um and uh you know the non-intuitive part about this is the relayer and the re and we'll talk about why in just a second but everything else uh is fairly simple you go to portalbridge.com

you start your transfer you say I want to bridge you know five whatever tokens over to a different network now it's really important to note uh the difference between bridging a token and swapping a token a lot of people come to portal and they are like uh why can't I swap a token why is it only letting me Bridge a token and the reason for that is when you bridge a token you're sending the same token from point A to point B when you swap a token you are exchanging one token for uh for one token to another token on another chain and swapping a token requires things like price oracles requires things like exchange rates requires someone to take

on counterparty risk there are other applications that have been built on top of portal that allow you to swap uh tokens for example swim is a great example where you can do stable swaps uh and uh you know we have a couple of other partners that are building some swaps that you can interact with but portal basically is very basic primitive that lets you just Bridge the same token from point A to point B the second thing to note about portal bridging just like any kind of bridging is that the way Bridges generally work is that they lock up your token on one side and they mint an IOU on the second on the other side so they brought me a

wrapped version of the token on the foreign chain the wrapped version can always be redeemed one for one for the locked up version of The Source chain so it can be treated basically the same as if it was just you know the source chain token but that means that if you want to use it on the foreign chain sometimes you might run into problems because you have to swap it for the native version an example is usdc so for example if I want to bridge uscc from say ethereum to Solana usdc has its own mints on ethereum and solata and so if you're using portal you might have to after you bridge your usdc over to Solana swap the portal usdc

um into the native mint uh for uscc on Salata so those are two kind of caveats the gotchas that people often run into with portal now let's talk about the relayer bit that I just discussed a little while ago the relayer is a kind of dumb piece of software uh it's a web service that listens for messages that Guardians have signed and submits them onto Target chains it's necessary because someone has to pay the gas for transactions on the target chain right there's no such thing as a free lunch just because you create a transaction on a source shame doesn't mean that you have paid the gas on the foreign chain so the relayer is in charge of paying the gas on the foreign chain now you

might be asking why would a Wheeler do this the reason relayers do this is when you're creating a transaction on the a source chain one of the things that you're doing is that you can often attach a fee for a relayer you can say here's 50 cents please relay my transaction to Solano and a relayer might say okay cool the transaction fee is only 25 cents so I'll pay I'll pay the transaction fee I'll pay the gas fee on Solana and pocket the difference between the relayer fee and the gas fee and in this way if they do enough transactions they can actually earn money um and so but they can't modify the message in any way the Wormhole architecture is such that it's just a dumb message but basically relayers can

just submit messages to Target chains hopefully that covers the portal flow yeah that that's that's super interesting and so the the benefit for the user I guess is also that this tip that you give the relayer you're paying that in the native currency on this Source chain or can you also like attach tips in different ways or how does it currently work yeah so right now um You can pay in uh I think stable coins and Native currencies um but um there's nothing stopping you from attaching a fee in whatever token you choose the relayer just has to accept it and relayers are selective about accepting different tokens because

they want to make sure that tokens are accepting actually have liquid markets uh right if you attach for example you know your Sheba new derivative time you know 12. uh that doesn't have a liquid Market anywhere uh the relayer might not be willing to accept that as a fee because they can't exchange it for something that they can use to pay gas makes sense and maybe like in practice do you have insights into like how many of these relayers are running or is this like something that you know is dominated by certain people that are like that run this and or is it like more distributed would you like to see more people running relayers yeah we

definitely want to see more people running relayers um I think right now we have something like 10 relayers running um but uh basically uh one of the things that we often see is that there aren't uh relayers so relayers are a huge topic of conversation like we could spend hours talking about just three layers because we have new things rolling out called generic relayers plug-in relayers there's relayers are a huge amount of optimization that's being done in the Wormhole network but as they stand right now one of the things is that um we generally see application specific relayers and what that means is just like portal is an application if you have an application using Quorum hole

you might actually um run your own relayer um just for the messages for your application and so generally we see a variety of different app relayers where you have you might have 10 portal relayers running on various different chains uh so for every chain that one will connects to there might be a different relayer that's submitting messages for each chain that way they only have to worry about the gas for the specific chain that they're submitting transactions on but then you also see application specific relayers and so in that case you might have you might have as many relayers as there are you know applications so the answer is it is distributed it is kind of a scatter plot of different uh modules and we're trying

to make that you know much easier by writing some sample code and writing some architecture that makes plug-in relayers really really easy and uh easy to deploy all right also yeah that's that's very cool I think um I guess you know the we talked a little bit about this bridging and then the assets that are created essentially when you move through the chain as and as far as I understand like basically what you're saying is also that wormhole basically won't cover this use case of like switching them to the native token whatever that might mean but that is something that should be built on top that is being built on top uh potentially even by the application that

is is using wormhole as like kind of a infrastructure now um I guess maybe the question is is there also like are some of these Wormhole bridged assets being used directly uh when there is maybe no native token on that chain uh and um how does liquidity work in that case how how do you guarantee that yeah that's an excellent question so the word we use for so in the usdc example usdc has a has a mint on boat change but if you don't have a mint on any chance for example you create your token we call these uh cross chain tokens or cross

chain assets X assets if you want your token to be an X asset all you have to do is create it on one chain and then use a bridge to have a canonical representation of it on all other chains so for example if tomorrow I were to launch Dev coin um and then just Bridgit over using portal onto Clayton and you know ethereum and all these other different chains um I would just have the portal wrapped version but because I would claim it as the canonical version of that token um uh I would let developers know that hey please use the token here as the official token and so that way you help consolidate liquidity pools now there's

nothing stopping someone from using a different bridge to bridge that token over but because I've taken the proactive step as a developer to say that the canonical version of my token is the portal rocked version of my token generally developers will consolidate around that token rather than they're using different Bridges so a lot of this has to do with just you know user awareness and user experience and letting developers and end users know that hey you can use my token on other chains you can use this token on the other chains but please use the canonical mint rather than a non-canonical mint as otherwise you would need a liquidity pool I see yeah yeah exactly I I've I think a

lot of the issues of the user experience actually that are supposed to be solved somewhat by the bridges kind of reappear in this like now we have these different uh representations it obviously also creates like a little bit opportunity maybe for like these swap protocols I know like for example saber or Solana had like a big kind of Market just to like exchange between these different representations in in a stable swap manner but obviously I don't know if that's the ideal path so would you generally say that you would like is the goal for broomhole to like get these ax assets to be the canonical representation um I assume basically the answer is yes

but maybe maybe on top of that yeah is that kind of also part of let's say the business model for Wormhole to have that or I guess we kind of talked a little bit about all right let me let me yeah let me maybe um introduce a concept here that it will help uh guide this conversation one of the things that a wormw core contributors just uh launched and was approved to mainnet is uh contract control transfers you might hear this called payload three uh it's a portal specific payload and I'll talk about why I'm talking about this technical it's a technical thing but it allows for It's A Primitive that allows for building some really really cool swap infrastructure and so contract control transfers allow

you to send tokens alongside a payload from one chain to another and this is really really cool because in one Atomic transaction you can say I want to say send ethereum along with the payload the payload says please Swap this ethereum for Solana and then um to send the Solana to this address and so what this will do is I can pay an ethereum on one side have that Atomic transaction that transaction goes to Solana swaps it for a soul and deposits the sold into the account that I want and

then pays the relay or whatever the fee is and what that allows me to do is again do that swap build that swap on top of portal without needing to do multiple transactions and in one Atomic transaction you can bridge and swap so that's something that we're really excited about and we think that like major swaps and not just major swaps a major use cases for example say I have a game on Solana and to play the game you have to pay uh the gaspian Seoul well one of the things I you can enable is actually I want to uh you know spend my ease I can create a rapper contract around the game or you know however I want to

implement it but I pay in East the eth gets transferred convert it to Seoul and then pays for the gas cost for the play button on the cut on the game and so in this way I can pay for the gas cost for the application on Solana even though I'm sending money from a uh foreign chain like ethereum I see yeah that that sounds super promising and kind of brings back that composability that is probably needed to really create a user experience that is like Mass adoption ready so that that's really cool I think you know we mentioned a bit that how relayers basically earn money in terms of like just uh

um yeah the fees that are attached to these payloads is there what if there is there something like how it works for guardians or how why do guardians do it or if you can talk about it like are the plans for this and how might it work or even if there's nothing clear yet could you talk about what some of the options maybe are that that could exist in such a in this network yeah so like the business model for Wormhole is really not really a business model Wormhole is um a a public infrastructure so the way jump looks at Walmart is that it's public infrastructure the reason job passcore contributors that work on Wormhole is that um there's a belief that

um there there needs to exist applications on top of Wormhole that are super useful that are investable that are businesses uh but to build those businesses requires this public infrastructure so one of the reasons the Guardians and Trump and other uh interested stakeholders are building on top of Wormhole or contributing to Wormhole is that if this public infrastructure exists then uh there's a pathway to building businesses that can that can have bigger business models on top of Wormhole does that make sense yeah thanks that that that's that's super helpful just like you need like an electric grid to exist before you can build like

computers and you know all of these other things so there's a belief that the the future uh applications that are monetizable um that are going to be super interesting to use and so on uh require this kind of public infrastructure to exist okay so but then they would still at some point have to pay for this infrastructure potentially these applications once it's more let's say ingrained in the the system or is that something that could happen or yeah so there's definitely talks about you know um how can Barb hole be self-sustainable um and and so on

um the again all of this is in the design phase so I don't want to mention any specific thing because in case uh the Guardians reject it like one more quarter contributors might say hey this is like a thing you could do and the Guardians might say no that's not actually what we want to do or the Guardians might say um hey we want to actually implement this um and you know I I just don't know about it or things like that so there are a lot of plans that are being shaped about how to build wormholes uh self-sustainability uh but that's currently a lower priority uh than making sure that that infrastructure exists in the first place all right makes sense thanks for expanding on that I think that that surely is interesting for a lot of users and the Guardians and everyone including

me even uh so uh that's that's cool and I guess maybe to get back a little bit to kind of the security assumptions or like just like in general Bridges so I think you know maybe for contextors for our listeners there's definitely you know a lot of concerns around these predictions is like very complex technology a lot of the hacks that actually have happened in the past year have been kind of related to Bridges I think if you looked at direct leaderboard there is a lot of like Bridges a lot of value that has been kind of um lost in in the bridges of course uh unfortunately Wormhole was also um

part of this now maybe um you can talk a little bit about you know why I guess first of all why is is it that Bridges seem to have like more of these kind of issues if if that's true and then I guess also like what Wormhole learned from this specific incident and kind of like what specifically changed in the approach to to building Wormhole or actually like really in the code that that maybe kind of makes these kind of incidents less likely yeah so let's first of all um just talk about the Wormhole hack and specifically what happened just so everyone has the same context and that way everyone's on

the same page so uh the Wormhole hack happened actually the third day uh when I was a core contributor for Wormhole um so I just joined on and you know third day this hack happened um but one of the things that happened was a bug in our Solana code um and so um uh you could read the whole write-up on our medium it goes into detail about exactly how it happened uh but basically one of the uh signature verification programs that uh the Wormhole core code uh called in was spoofed and instead of actually checking signatures it just returned valid for whatever signatures so how that happened and all of the other readmates you can go and read that now one of the reasons

that Bridges specifically are such a big honey pot for hackers is this concept of their their large vaults of Locked Up cryptocurrency they uh taken uh large amounts of currency on cryptocurrencies On Any Given chain and they lock it up and so they have this massive reserves and on the other side uh they uh they create ious that can be used and redeemed wherever wherever possible so one of the reasons uh that uh people the hackers specifically like this is if they break a bridge they get everything that's in the large Vault of the locked up currencies uh this is kind of you

know this is as a hacker it's a pretty low bear like a a low attack Vector for a large you know reward now what's being done to kind of mitigate this risk is uh after the hack happened a couple of things the Wormhole core contributors started looking into was how can we mitigate attacks such that if something happens on one chain so there there's always going to be smart contract risk if you're going to create open source software there's always going to be smart contract risk because that all of the contracts are open source anyone can look at that and they can you know run the tax on them all day long until they find a zero day and then use it so how can we actually mitigate these for this risk one of the

things is something that we call accounting and that's a basically to deploy um a middle layer between all the chains that actually keeps track of how much his money is moving in and out of any given chain and what that allows us to do or allows a wormhole to do is actually limit attacks when uh an attack happens on one chain when uh portal gets uh if if portal gets attacked on one chain that attack uh limit is the size of the chain itself so if if like ethereum goes down then we have a bigger problem because ethereum has a large number of locked assets but if one of the smaller chains goes down it's less of a you know it doesn't affect the

entire locked worth locked net worth secondly a huge huge huge help that's uh you know we really uh been proud of is uh the Wormhole bug Bounty program uh we launched with I think one of the largest bug Bounties in the space 10 million dollars we've had a couple of really good submissions that have helped us find bugs right before they happen um uh so that's been really really exciting that uh people have responded to that um and we've been able to secure and you know help build uh Security in the bridge um and then a couple of other things that we're working on um are things like uh worm chain so worm chain you might have heard of uh

mentioned a couple of times you can go read about it in our design docs on the GitHub but basically worm chain is this uh is this middle layer between all the chains uh that we can kind of use to do accounting and other things another thing that we're working on is uh limits we call it governor so for example um this actually went live I think two weeks ago um which uh if you're if you're transacting large amounts between portal from one chain to another all the Guardians actually have to approve uh I uh uh certain limits on each chain so for example you might not be able to and this is just a random number I don't know the exact Governor limits you can

look them up on the GitHub uh but like if you're moving from ethereum to Solana you might not be able to move more than like a hundred million dollars in a day and you might have to wait until the next day um so these kinds of Governor limits um also help mitigate mitigate risk and we're working on a number of other features um uh there's a research team that's dedicated to coming up with um kind of uh security tools um and uh security best practices and we're not doing this alone uh Bridge just as you mentioned bridges are one of the most vulnerable pieces of technology in the ecosystem because they're honey pots and these you know

they're large vaults that lock up large amounts of cryptocurrencies and so um we're actually uh working with uh you know other Bridges and trying to work with uh trying to understand um are there are are there ways that we can uh do better in in terms of security across the board yeah thanks that's that's super insightful I think also we'll link to all these or like try to link to most of these documents or things that we mentioned especially I guess the bug Bounty program the write-up and uh maybe things about warm chain in in the show notes so if you're listening to this uh hopefully the links will be there if not hit us up and we'll we'll send them to you hopefully or Google it

um so right I think the security question obviously it's like a pretty big one you we mentioned already earlier a little bit around zero knowledge proofs I guess is this another kind of value that might make it more secure is it more just like around scalability or what are the benefits of of using that again maybe uh uh for for Wormhole um and then maybe you can also talk a little bit about how exactly or like not exactly but how you plan to incorporate uh this technology into Wormhole and what might it bring in terms of benefits

yeah at a high level the way we uh Bridges um plan on using zero knowledge proofs is basically to attest the state of an entire chain um on just as a roll-up does um basically it has a state of an entire chain using block headers um onto another chain so basically you say oh Solana has the past hundred blocks we're going to roll them up with all the block headers um we're gonna submit izr knowledge proof and then anytime A change is made to the you know uh made to this next block uh the news your knowledge proof must be computed such that it it still uh listens to the old zero or it still complies with the old zero knowledge

proof and then you can you can validate that and you can keep submitting those proofs and then you can run a set of uh you know the Guardians basically just go around validating those air and all which groups and making sure that you know the the that no invalid proofs are submitted but again a lot of this is still in the design phase because there's a certain number of requirements to this uh depending on different chains or different ecosystems this gets really complex people are used to zero knowledge proofs in the evm ecosystem uh but validating proofs on for example Solana is a lot harder than evm because like compute limits and so on and no native support for uh like uh you know a

gross16 verifier or any of these things so um when we talk about zero knowledge proofs one of the challenges is that we don't have uniformity across different ecosystems and so uh you know one of John's research teams uh what they're working on is really just finding that uniform uh validation ground between different ecosystems that we can we can use this across all the chains that Wormhole connects to right yeah that makes a lot of sense I've I think also even ethereum right A lot of these because that's a very fast moving like space where a lot of the new cryptographic

curves and stuff has been coming out only like recently and I guess many of the trades didn't have in mind that they might want to use this and it might have to be added in hindsight or later or even can maybe be added so I have I know I've seen like a bunch of you know even like in ethereum right I think adding BLS signatures was was like a whole process that that took forever so definitely very exciting space and I think yeah I should be able to to add a lot to the to the user experience and the security of um of using uh Bridges so thanks for expanding and cool to hear that um jump I guess is also contributing a bunch in this space um so maybe like switching again a bit

to a different topic like more application Level stuff I think you know one of the very interesting things I mean Wormhole has been super successful I think for a while maybe the biggest bridge or at least in the very top it's still in the top three probably and um but if I look at the TV out right it was like I think almost 5 billion for for a moment and then obviously the market crashed but there was also another event that uh that like brought this down a lot which is is the Terra collab so obviously Tara was a big kind of driver of the usage of Wormhole because people wanted to uh bring assets to Anchor or um kind of integrate that so like one of

the things that anchor was supporting just for context for our listeners was also uh staked eth from Lido uh and there was the the anchor eth so that went through Wormhole also the Solana if uh the the same thing so obviously that that collapsed maybe I guess there is a pretty close relationship based on that was there with Tara from from Wormhole maybe you can talk a little bit about you know how that impacted the Wormhole like ecosystem uh and and what what was the situation like in in that

moment on a on a personal note um Trump was actually hosting a Tara Hacker House uh during the terror collapse so when that was happening you know the the mood is very somber um I was there everyone was there well you know what just watching uh the price go up and down um so that was uh quite a place to be in um but when that happened um it was actually very I don't want to say cop it wasn't com uh but from the Wormhole side um there wasn't a big upset um because even though we were losing one of our partners and uh this was

definitely a a sad day um nothing really changed technically right there was there was an exploit on the Wormhole side there was no uh massive change the worst thing that Wormhole core contributors had to deal with was just a customer support of all of the all of the people who were trying to use portal for the first time or the second time and trying to bridge their tokens back from uh from uh Tara to anywhere else and so this actually really goes to show the decentralization nature of Wormhole where Wormhole wasn't so closely tied to any one chain even one as big as Terra even one that was such a big contributor

to the TBL for Wormhole that like Wormhole basically took that uh hit and was like yeah we just moved tokens back and forth or we just send messages back and forth and that's okay um and the you know the Guardians had to figure out uh the the big thing that happened technically was uh on the guardian side the Wormhole core contributors didn't really have to do much the Guardians um had to Halt Terra because uh Tara like when Tara halted they had the haltera and during the time the tarot was halted um uh there was a number of customer support requests why can't I get my tokens out well the chain isn't live so that's why um and then when the chain was restarted

um uh it was a matter of getting uh you know the are the Guardians going to restart the chain some parties wanted to some Guardians didn't um and so you know uh that was a whole conversation but again from the Wormhole core contributor side because it's decentralized you know the core contributors are like well whatever the Guardians want to do that's great like there's there's no extra code to be written Tara didn't change its code base right um it was just a matter of uh Guardians deciding yeah we want to support the new Terror Network or we don't or uh we want to Halt it or we don't and all of these things yeah right I think it overall in in this incident like most of the technical infrastructure actually has performed

very well I think even like on the terror side itself right like tender mint and the smart contract code that kind of made the that made up the system worked very well and under this High load and and I don't think anything happened on that end like most of the problems were more around like on the terror side around you know there being so much lunar minted that some attack would have become likely and then all these these things that had to be done because of that but generally I think like a very interesting kind of stress test in the real environment of course of course like unfortunately a lot of people lost money including all these organizations are lost business and and really like a huge blow up of course but uh I guess it also

kind of proved that some of these infrastructure is actually ready for a really big um kind of uh use uses uh which is maybe not necessarily true even for like centralized systems sometimes where uh things might fall apart more than than what we've seen there um so yeah thanks for that I think one of the big things that also in this event happened um I guess is because of the price disparity on on different networks um there and Luna price crashing fast and people um trying to Arbitrage it and stuff like this so there's a lot of like this Mev I guess essentially on

in that moment especially which which makes up I think a lot of the overall Mev and some of these networks like these table events how from the warm-up perspective was there anything like notable from that do you is there is there anything that that Wormhole like I guess that that impacted it or that facilitated it or that you saw yeah yeah so so one one kind of pro not problem one of the one of the one of the challenges with bridging is that inherently because you're going from one infrastructure to another if you have for example a market of if you have a liquid Market of a token on two

different uh infrastructure providers you're going to have price disparity and this is actually not even a blockchain problem this is just a markets problem and if you have two markets the two markets are going to have different prices right whether that's a centralized two marketplaces or decentralized marketplaces it doesn't really matter by the virtue of them being different marketplaces they're going to have different prices um and so um with people bridging tokens back and forth between portal um you know they often were doing so uh to try to take advantage of price disparity on one market say on Solana and Sierra or another on you swap on ethereum and so on but again that doesn't really have uh anything to do

with wearable technicals that was just uh it was something that we could enable or more could enable um with people taking advantage and I don't actually think that's a negative thing because that's basically how we normalize price right if if there was no way for people to be able to bridge currencies uh from one to from one infrastructure to another then you would have even higher price disparity uh because you wouldn't be able to normalize that price but because people could bridge that currency back and forth between two infrastructure providers there's uh there's a much more easier path to normalization of that price yeah I think I agree there I guess also like yeah if you don't have that maybe the only way or like people that can do

it are more there where there is like some centralized component that is able to like trade on both sides or just like allows you to bridge like I guess like just a centralized exchange so definitely this is uh I guess better by nature of just being accessible to everyone and not um yeah including everyone so I think that that's really cool I mean that really goes to show how important that this infrastructure also is in a sense this Terra applications and everything was like some of the most used stuff on on Wormhole and maybe you can talk a little bit about what right now what are like exciting applications

I think we also touched upon a bit a little bit in in the course of this interview but maybe you can also talk a little bit more about like what's what's some exciting things that are being built on Wormhole right now that that you're seeing or maybe also that you're not seeing and you want to see um stuff like a lot of stuff that is being built is a lot of defy stuff which is very exciting uh you know token swaps and uh things of that nature things that I wish uh where more people were building on top of Wormhole um would be um things of the uh like cross-chain governance or cross chain games um and using va's as uh identity modules and all of these there are some Advanced things that you can do with Wormhole

that people haven't really tapped into yet uh because again the current Zeitgeist has been around tokens um which makes sense right tokens everyone loves tokens but I like as a personal note I think there's a lot of really cool non-token use cases that I'm excited for people to really tap into and build on um such as cross chain governance right makes sense I think yeah right your job I guess also like maybe let's talk a little bit around that like I guess developer relations right so from the developer perspective maybe just the questioners in general again I I guess

how would developers interact with Wormhole actually what's the best way is there is there like a also like a plug-in if I say like I'm adapt that I can kind of somehow have Wormhole being plugged in into my lab or how how does it look in practice and maybe also like what are you working on to make that even easier yeah so integrating with wormhole is a spectrum on the very easy side you can just integrate with Wormhole by just accepting Wormhole assets right like just accepting portal assets natively so if you just do that you have done the you know a very easy integration on the more advanced side you can do Integrations with Wormhole by sending messages back and forth using the Wormhole core layer which is a much more

advanced integration um so you can learn all about the different types of Integrations and how to get started with doing all of this at book.warmhole.com this is our documentation for developers and we're working on a number of sample projects that documentation isn't live yet I'm working on it but there's there's going to be a number of sample projects that actually show you how to make use of things going back and forth and being able to launch in production so right like we talk about this I think um if you're I guess uh there's also like other things you're working on to you mentioned the hacker house that jump

was hosting like I guess in general what kind of initiatives do you have to I guess recruit developers or like help them or uh yeah get this ecosystem going yeah um so there's we're working on right now X hack which is uh jump uh jump cryptos uh Premiere event is a cross chain chain of Goss the hackathon and starting Monday of this week which I don't know when this podcast will go live uh but it'll be September 26th um you know uh and it'll go for four weeks um so we're working with developers in all different ecosystems and challenging them um to like get started with working on

uh working on Wormhole stuff um so that's uh that's one of the big Avenues um right now that you know uh all all of us are heads down trying to get that get back going yeah that sounds pretty exciting and I hope we're not releasing this way too late that no one can look into this but if if we do then hopefully there's also like some exciting use cases come come out of that that you can look at and maybe expand on um I think that's that's all the questions I had uh devs thanks so much uh for coming on for uh talking to us about warmhole and giving us a better view since I think you know a lot of the mystery maybe sometimes around it if

you're not like uh in this ecosystem I think our listeners that will also have learned a lot today so uh that I really appreciate it if there's anything else you wanna shout out to or like uh talk about now's time uh but yeah thanks so much for for joining me today and uh best of luck thank you Felix