Enter The Wormhole

Crypto is going multichain and needs a secure but flexible interoperability platform to connect the industry. Wormhole is one of the leading solutions in the market with a full-stack interoperability platform.

Today I’m excited to announce that we co-led a $225M round in Wormhole. This round closed late last year; we are formally announcing our investment today to coincide with the launch of W token, which goes live today.

The Leading Multichain Platform

Most people think of Wormhole as just a bridge. But it is far more than that. It is a development platform, on top of which many apps across many categories can leverage it: multichain DeFi protocols and applications (Aave, Circle USDC, Hashflow, Pike, Magpie), multichain governance (Uniswap), token bridges (Portal, Carrier) multichain oracle feeds (Pyth), in-wallet bridging (Backpack), multichain NFTs (DeGods, y00ts), etc.

What excites us most about Wormhole is the diversity of applications built on top of it. And it is still so early. With over $41B of assets bridged using Wormhole, the opportunity set for Wormhole native applications continues to grow.

Recently, Wormhole crossed a major milestone: 1B multichain messages. This is the most of any cross-chain messaging system.

But perhaps most importantly, Wormhole supports almost 30 disparate chains making it an extremely robust bridging solution. Wormhole is live on virtually every major EVM chain, along with Near, Move-based chains such as Aptos and Sui, and of course, Solana.

Wormhole offers one of the most diverse and flexible stack in crypto. It prioritized this from day 1, and they have continued to re-invest in many-chain support. This was a risky decision, but ultimately turned out to be a prescient decision.

UX UX UX

One of the most important use cases for Wormhole is asset-pegging, using front-ends such as Portal. Portal was one of the first third-party products built on Wormhole.

Shortly after Portal went live Wormhole released Wormhole Connect, a front-end widget that developers can embed directly into their applications. Wormhole Connect makes it trivial for applications to accept deposits and withdrawals from any asset on any chain. Wormhole Connect enables derivatives DEXs, such as Drift, to offer a UX that rivals that of CEXs, such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, and Coinbase International. Users can simply deposit any asset into Drift to use as collateral, regardless of which chain the asset originates from. Wormhole Connect is a major unlock that makes cross-chain UX frictionless.

More recently, Wormhole recently launched Native Token Transfers (NTT). Tokens that leverage the NTT framework can seamlessly move across chains using a burn-and-mint mechanism, rather than the traditional locking mechanism on the originating chain. This reduces gas costs, lowers latency, and improves security for end-users. Best of all, tokens work seamlessly in Wormhole Connect. Users nor application developers have to think about this at all.

Lastly, Wormhole supports Circle’s CCTP for moving USDC natively across chains.

Collectively, Wormhole supports all three configurations for moving assets across chains: asset-pegging, native-token transfers, and CCTP. Because Wormhole supports all three methodologies using a single SDK, Wormhole makes it as easy possible for developers to integrate, and to support all asset configurations.

Wormhole’s ZK Future

The single biggest challenge in bridging systems is verification. How does chain B know the finalized state of chain A as of some block height?

Historically, every bridging system—including Wormhole—relied on some degree of trust to facilitate a multichain verification. In January Wormhole announced their ZK roadmap. Wormhole is going all-in on ZK verification. Ultimately, this will result in a whole host of benefits, including better UX, better DevEx, and even more safety.

We have had the pleasure of working with the Wormhole team for some time now. They are outstanding builders, and it has been amazing to watch them meticulously build what we believe is the leading asset bridge and the leading multi-chain development platform. We are grateful for the chance to back Robinson Burkey and the Wormhole team.