Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving to centralization. And the blockchain revolution. I'm Felix. And today, we're speaking with deaf Burrell who is working on developer relations at Jump crypto, a core contributor to Wormhole Wormhole is a cross chain messaging. That allows users to access applications across networks. Before we talk with deaf about Wormhole, we'd like to tell tell you about our sponsors this week.
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going to link in the show notes. 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, Dave was working with all. That's a core. Contributor with Wormhole Wormhole is exciting Network and cross chain protocol. Generally, we start these episodes by introducing Our Guest so high def. Hi.
Happy to be here. Right after your core contributor to Wormhole with jump, usually at the start of the episode we often try to find out how it our guests get into crypto. And in this case, I'll specifically, how did you get into working with jump on Wormhole? Yeah, so I'm one of the very old people in crypto. I got into crypto and like 2013 in high school. This was before we even called
crypto. But you know blockchain this is In the Bitcoin days and I got involved with an organization called the blockchain education, Network back home back. Then it was like the Bitcoin education Network called Ben and I used to organize events with like all the disparate college students all around the universities in the United States. So we could do meetups and hackathons and so on. And I got really into decentralized identities. Your knowledge proves all that
kind of stuff fast forward. I've built a couple of companies and Eventually I ended up joining jump as a developer relations, but one of the most interesting facts is that while I was doing 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, salinity code as if it was the word of God and don't like the, this is 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 Technology was through one of my
workshops. So taking all of that, all of that experience, at all of that history, with crypto and all of that, you know, context around how crypto was formed. I eventually applied for a job. Jump through my friend Anthony Ramirez, who mentioned that they were looking for. Core contributors or what, you know, one of the projects that they feel really passionate about which is Wormhole and a wormhole again is across messaging platform.
Now, I got really excited about Wormhole because I'm an engineer and I love I love tackling a lot of different problems. So I was coming from solidity 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 a Engineer. I don't just have to, I don't just do what. I don't have to learn smart ecosystem. I have to like really be on my feet dancing and learning a lot of different challenging
ecosystems. And, you know, whether that's rust for Solana, move for aptus and soui costume. 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 Jump. We're doing core contribution for Wormhole back in February of this year. Yeah, that's a amazing history. I didn't know that you were have 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 that's our guest Casita de you. Don't wear a spacesuit anymore, but maybe, maybe I can make a return. I still got that. I've still got my space painting, I don't know up there if you see it. Yeah, yeah, awesome. Yeah, nice face, but I'm cool. All right, yeah, definitely, I think, yeah, one of those super interesting things, I think of a wormhole or Generally about the space.
You're you're in is like you said, you touching upon so many different network ecosystems, that's actually quite similar to 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, maybe you can like, explain to us, you know, what, what specifically, what is wormhole in your words and then
we continue from there. Yeah. So Wormhole is a cross chain messaging layer and a lot of people confuse this will confuse These two things, they confuse Wormhole and portal. And I'll talk about what those things are separately in just a second. But Wormhole basically 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 when we look at blockchains, we look at blockchains as different infrastructure providers.
Just like in web to we have Microsoft Azure, we have AWS, we have Google cloud in And we have our Google Cloud platform in what three, we have Solana etherium polygon, injective, all of these different chains. These are all infrastructure, 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. How 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. So it's this layer on top of blockchains that really for the end user makes it so they can interact with just clear out the patient's. Now on top of that and application was built called
portal, the portal asset. Bridge is what most people And consumers actually end up using. And it's a simple way to just move, you know, token 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 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 makes a lot of sense. I think there's a really it's a lot of applications that can still be unlocked and before you even had something like Wormhole Ride, Like the general way of bridging to other that versus is either impossible or through some centralized party. So I think it's a very important like kind of step towards really interconnecting this District
These ecosystems. Now you mentioned already like a bunch of the chains that Wormhole today, support, can you talk a little bit about, you know, how, how do you add support for for a network in Wormhole? What are the challenges with adding a new network to this kind of layer to this protocol? Yeah. So first and foremost 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 write some code that says, hey, we can add in hair sample. Code, here's a, here's a working connection to this new network. But at the end of the day, it gets proposed to our guardians or Guardians are the Wormhole
validators? So every 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 a new network wants wants to be added to the Wormhole ecosystem, they have to propose to the Guardians. Hey, please run a node for our, you know, our chain, our Network our protocol and the Wormhole Guardians have To do a governance. Folk 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 vote passes is that Network live. Yeah, it makes sense that I guess 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 that you mentioned? There's 19, obviously, it's a very high burden, I guess on this card in to support so many networks.
How do you may be imagined or how does work? Well, imagine to to grow that and yeah, what do you see as the steps for that? Yeah, so the guardian network was chosen as the top 19 validators in the space. So it's not that, you know, these are 19, random validators. These are validators that are in the blockchain, space unique and separate. So there's a very high antique
illusion probability. What that means is like, there's very, it's very unlikely that these 19 unique companies would collude with each other because they are they, Have a reputation
at stake. So beyond beyond just, you know, value of like other, for example, our competitors might say use of proof of stake system, which allows you to become a guard or become about it, or on their Network on the Wormhole, Guardian Network, you have your reputation at stake as well because there's there's that bigger context of this, these Guardians, being the bigger validators in the space and again as Actually, there's a big burden there.
Now, there we are thinking about ways to propose the Guardians, to expand the guardian set. The Wormhole contributors are working on improvements to just warm chain and a variety of other improvements that we can just talk. We can talk about just yet just because two designs aren't
finalized. But the idea is, if the Guardians want to expand and want to grow, there are potential ways to That we're currently discussing with them to grow that 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, you know, and testing and design facing right now. So we don't have to worry about Guardians running full nodes, but they can actually run zero. 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 proof 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, we're talking about portal, if If you have a new network, can you walk us a little bit through? How would I as a user interact with portal? And yeah, could you just like walk us through this flow, maybe?
Yeah. So to interact with portal. First of all, you can just go to portal bridge.com. I believe that's the website. Let me double-check. Yeah. Portal bridge.com. But really, it's so the way Wormhole works. Is you start? A source chain, you emit a message that it missed 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 chained, the most confusing.
And, you know, non-intuitive part about this is the relayer and the rear and we'll talk about why in just a second, but everything else is fairly simple. You go to portal. Bridge.com, you start your transfer? You say, I want a bridge. Judge you know, five whatever tokens over to a different network. Now it's really important to note the difference between Bridging the token and swapping a token. A lot of people come to portal and they are like, 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. For for one token, to another token, not another chain and swapping a token requires things. Like price oracle's 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 allows you to swap tokens.
For example, swim is a great example where you can do Sable swaps. And 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 wave bridge is generally work is that they lock up your token on one side and they meant an IOU
on the second on the other side. So they brought mint a rap version of the token on the foreign chain, the rap version can always be redeemed. 1414 the locked Version on 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 floor and change, sometimes you might run into problems because you have to swap it for the native version, an example is U STC.
So, for example, if I want to bridge, you SC see from say is here, IAM to Solana. Usdcad has its own mint on a theorem in Solana. And so if you're using portal, you might have to after you bridge or USD see over to Solana swap, the portal, u.s. DC into the native meant for you SEC on celada so those are too 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. It's a web service that listens for messages, that guardians of 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 floor and chain. So the relayer is in charge of paying the gas on the for and chain. Now, you might be asking, why would a regular do this? The reason re layers do? This is when you're creating a transaction on the source chain one of the Things that you're doing is that you can often attached a fee for a relayer. You can say, here's 50 cents. Please relay my transaction to Solana and a relay or might say, okay, cool. The transaction fee is only 25 cents.
So I'll pay I'll pay the transaction if you pay the gas field, 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 our money 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 re layers 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 it's 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 attached tips and different ways or how does it hurt? Ooh yeah. So right now you can pay in I think stable coins and Native currencies but there's nothing stopping you from attaching a fee and whatever token you choose. The real are just has to accept it.
Andre layers are selective about accepting different tokens because they want to make sure that tokens are accepting actually have liquid markets, right? If you attach for example, you know, your Shiba, Inu, derivative time, you know, Twelve, that doesn't have a liquid Market anywhere. The relay or might not be willing to accept that as a fee because they can 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 re layers 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? See more people running re layers. Yeah, we definitely want to see more people running real Ayers. I think right now we have something like ten re layers running but basically one of the things that we often see, is that there aren't real Ayers. So, readers are huge topic of
conversation. Like we could spend hours talking about just re layers because we have new things rolling out called generic re layers, plug-in re layers. There's real errors, are a huge amount of optimization that's being done in the Wormhole Network. As they stand right now. One of the things is that we generally see application-specific re layers, and what that means is just like portal is an application. If you have an application using Wormhole, you might actually run
your own. Relayer just for the messages for your application. And so generally, we see a variety of different app of re layers where you have, you might have 10 portal re layers running on various different chains. And so for every chain that we're more connects to there might be a different relayer that submitting messages for each aim. 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 re layers. And so, in that case you might have, you might have as many re layers if they are, you know, applications. So the answer is it is distributed. It is kind of a scatter plot of different modules and we're trying to make that money, you know, much easier by writing Some sample code and writing some architecture that makes plug-in re layers really, really easy and easy to deploy. All right. I'll still be a that's that's very cool.
I think I guess, you know the we talked a little bit about this raging and then the assets that are created. Essentially when you move through the chain 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 then to the native totin, whatever that might mean.
But that is something that should be built on top of it is being billed on top potentially even by the Patient that is is using Wormhole as like kind of a infrastructure now, I guess. Maybe the question is is there also like are some of these Wormhole bridged assets being used directly when there is maybe no native total on that chain? And 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
u.s. DC example, u.s. DC has a has a man talking about change but if you don't have a mint on any chance, for example you create your token, we call these cross chain tokens or cross chain opposite-sex assets. If you want your token to be an excess set, 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 bridging over using portal on to Clayton and you know it cerium and all these other different chains. I would just have the portal wrapped version but because I would claim it as the canonical version of that token, I would let developers know that. Hey please use the token here as the official token and so that way you helped 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 rock version of my token. Generally developers will consolidate around that token rather than do using different Bridges. So a lot of this has to do with just, you know, user awareness and user experience and letting people developers and users know
that. Hey, you can use my token on other chains, you can use this token of the other But please use the canonical meant rather than a non-canonical meant as otherwise he wouldn't even liquidity pool. I see, yeah, exactly. I think, a lot of the issues of the user experience actually that are supposed to be solved. Some what by the bridges kind of reappear in this.
Like now we have these different representations, obviously also creates like a little bit opportunity, maybe for like these swap protocols, I know, like, for example, Sample, Savor of Solana had like a big kind of Market just to like exchange between these different representations in a stable swap manner. But obviously, I don't know if
that's the ideal path. So what you generally say that you would like is the goal for Rome whole to like get these acts assets to be the canonical representation. I so basically the answer is yes. But maybe, maybe on top of that. Yeah, it's 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. Let me let me yeah, let me maybe introduce a concept here that it
will help guide. This conversation, one of the things that a wormhole core contributors just launched and was approved to maintain that is contract control transfers. You might hear this called payload three. 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 Score. It's A Primitive that allows for building something really, really cool, swap
infrastructure. And so contract control transfers, allow you to send a 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 if you're IAM along with the payload, the payload says, please Swap. This etherium for Solana, and then Send this a lot to this address.
And so what this will do is I can pay in a theory of on one side, have that Atomic transaction, that transaction goes to Solana, swaps it, for soul and deposits. The sold into the account that I want and then please 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 the gas be in Seoul. Well, one of the things I you can enable is actually I want to, 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 East gets transferred convert it to Seoul and then pays for the gas cost for the play button on the on the game.
And so this way, I can pay for the gas cost for the application on Solana even though I'm sending money from a foreign chain like aetherium. I see. Yeah, thatthat 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 Howry layers basically earn money in terms of like just, 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 not the 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 where all is a public infrastructure. So the way jump looks at Wormhole is that its public infrastructure. The reason job has korkin Tutors that work on Wormhole is that there's a belief that their their needs to exist.
Applications on top of Wormhole that are super useful that are investable that our businesses, but to build those businesses requires this public infrastructure. So one of the reasons to Guardians and Trump and other interested, stakeholders are building on top of Wormhole or contributing to Wormhole. Is that if this public infrastructure exists then? 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 Dad, 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 future applications that are monetizable that are going to be super interesting to use. And so on, 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 a gradient in the the system or is that something that could happen? Or how did that play out? Yeah. So there's definitely talks about, you know, how can warp hole be self-sustainable. And so on the again, all of this is in the design phase. So I don't want to mention any specific thing because in case the Guardians rejected like, where were molten core?
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, hey we want to actually implement this and, you know, and 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 self-sustainability, but that's currently a lower priority 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. So that's, that's cool. And I guess maybe to get back a little bit to kind of the security assumptions or like just in general Bridges. So, I think, you know, maybe for context doors for our listeners. There's definitely You know, a lot of concerns around this resistance 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 the wrecked leaderboard there is a lot of like Bridges, a lot of value that has been kind of lost in the bridges. Of course, unfortunately Wormhole was also part of this. Now maybe you can talk a little bit. About, you know why I guess? First of all, why is it that Bridges seem to have, like, more of these, kind of issues 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 building Wormhole or actually like really the code that that may be kind of makes these kind of incidents, less likely. Yeah, so let's first of all, 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 the worm will hack happened actually the third day when I was core contributor for Wormhole. So I just joined on and, you know, Third Day, the sack happened. But one of the things that happened was a bug in our Solana code and so You can read the whole right up on our medium. It goes into detail about exactly how it happened.
But basically one of the signature verification programs that the Wormhole core code called in was spoofed and instead of actually tracking signatures, it just return valid, for whatever signatures. So how that happened and all of the other read means, 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 large?
Vaults of Locked Up cryptocurrency, they take in large amounts of currency on the cryptocurrencies On Any Given chain and they lock it up. And so, they have this massive reserves and on the other side, they they create iou's that can be used and redeemed wherever wherever possible. So one of the reasons that At people hackers simply like this is if they break a bridge, they get everything that's in the large, Vault of the locked up currencies.
This is kind of, you know, this is exciting as a hacker. It's a pretty low bear, like a low attack Vector for a large car, you know, reward. Now, what's being done to kind of mitigate this risk is of, after the heck happened, a couple of things to the Wormhole. Core contributors started looking into was, how can we mitigate attacks? Such that if something happens on one chain. So there's always going to be
smart contract risk. If you're going to create open source code 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? This risk one of the things is something that we call a counting and that's a basically, to deploy a middle A layer between all the chains that actually keeps track of how much is 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 an attack happens on one chain, when portal gets if court against attack on one chain that attack limit, is the size of the chain
itself. So if like etherium goes down, then we have a bigger problem because if you're even has a large Were blocked 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 lock net worth. Secondly, a huge, huge huge help. That's, you know, we've really been proud of is the Wormhole bug Bounty program. 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. So that's been really, really, really exciting that people have responded to that. And we've been able to secure and, you know, how build Security in the bridge and then a couple of other things that we're working on are things like worm chain.
So warm chain, you might have heard of mentioned, a couple of times you can go read about it in our design doc's, on the GitHub, a basically, warm chain, is this ask is this middle layer between all the chains. That we can kind of use to do accounting and other things. Another thing that were working on is limits, we call it Governor.
So, for example, this actually went live, I think two weeks ago, which if you're transacting large amounts between portal from one chain to another, all the Guardians actually have to approve certain limits on each change. So for example, you might not be able to and this is just a
random number. I don't know the exact Governor limit You can look them up on the GitHub, but like, if you're moving from aetherium 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. So these kinds of Governor limits also help mitigate mitigate risk, and we're working on a number of other features. There's a research team that's dedicated to coming up with kind of security, tools and security,
best practices. And we're not doing this alone, Bridge. Just as you mentioned, bridges are one of the most vulnerable pieces of technology in the ecosystem because they're honey pots abuse. You know, they're large bolts that lock up large amounts of cryptocurrencies. And so, we're actually working with, you know, other Bridges and trying to work with trying to understand. Are there? Are there ways that we can do better in terms of security across the board? Yeah, thanks that's super
insightful. I think also will link to all these or like traveling to most of these documents or things that we mentioned, especially I guess the bug Bounty program the right up and maybe things about weren't chained in the show notes. So if you're listening to this, hopefully links will be there. If not hit us up and we'll send them to you hopefully or Google it so, right. I think the security question obviously is Like a pretty big one. You mentioned already earlier.
A little bit around zero, knowledge proof. So 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 using that? Again, maybe 44 Wormhole and then maybe you can also talk a little bit about how exactly or like, not exactly. But how do you plan to incorporate this technology into wormhole? And what might it? Bring in terms of benefit? Yeah, at a high level. The way we purchase plan on using zero.
Knowledge proof is basically to attest the state of an entire chain on just as a rollup does basically a test the state of an entire chain using block headers on to another chain. So basically you say it's a lot of has the past hundred blocks, we're going to roll them up with all the block headers. We're going to Submit a zero, knowledge proof. And then any time A change is made to the, you know, made to the next block, the news, your knowledge proof must be
computed. Such that it is still listens to the old as your office or a seal complies, with the old to your 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 you know the Guardians basically just go around validating 20 knowledge groups and making sure that you know, the that no invalid. Sir submitted. But again a lot of this is still in the design phase because there's a certain number of requirements to this.
Depending on different chains are different ecosystems. This gets really complex, people are used to zero knowledge Bruce in the evm ecosystem but validating proofs on. For example, Solana, it's a lot harder than evm because of like compute limits and so on and no native support for like, you know, No, I brought 16 verify or any of these things. So, when we talk with your knowledge, proofs, one of the challenges is that we don't have uniformity across different
ecosystems. And so, you know, one of Trumps research teams, but they're working on is really just finding that uniform 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 etherium ride 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't maybe be added. So I have I know I've seen like a bunch of No even like any
theorem, right? I think adding BLS signatures was like a whole process that took forever. So definitely very exciting space and I think should be able to add a lot to the to the user experience in the security of using Bridges. So thanks for expanding and cool to hear that. John Backus is also contributing a bunch in this space. So maybe like switching again a bit to a Topic like more application Level stuff.
I think, you know, one of the very interesting things, I mean Wormhole, it's 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, but if I look at the TV, I write it was like, I think almost five billion for, for a moment and then obviously, the market crashed. But there was also another event that that like, brought this down a lot, which is the A
collab. So obviously Tara was a big kind of driver of usage of Wormhole because people wanted to bring assets to Anchor or kind of integrate that. So, like one of the things that anchor was supporting just for context for listeners. Who was also stake teeth from Li do? And there was the, the anchor if so, that went through Wormhole, also the Solana, if 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 you can system and then what what was the situation like in that? Moment on a personal note, Trump was actually hosting a Tara Hacker House during the terror clap. So, when that was happening, you know, the the mood is very
somber. I was there, everyone was there will help you know what, just watching the price go up and down, so that was quite a place to be in, but what that happened? It was actually very I don't want to say calm, it wasn't calm, but from the Wormhole side, there wasn't a big upset because even though we were losing one of our partners and this was definitely a sad day, nothing really changed. Technically right there was there was an exploit on the Wormhole side, there was no
massive change. The worst thing that Wormhole to korkin Yours 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 from Terra 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 Tara even one that was such a big contributor to the TBL for Wormhole that like Wormhole basically took that hit and I was like yeah we just moved tokens back and forth or we just send messages back and forth and that's okay. And, you know, the Guardians have to figure out the big thing that happened. Technically was on the guardian side.
They won't. We're more computers, didn't really have to do much, the Guardians had to Halt Tara because Tara, like when Tara halted they had to Halt era and during the time to Was halted. 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. And then when the chain was restarted, it was a matter of getting, you know, are the Guardians going to restart the chain some Hardy's wanted to some Guardians didn't.
And so you know, that was a whole conversation. But again from the Wormhole core contributor side because it's decentralized, you know, the core contributors like 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? It was just a matter of Guardians deciding. Yeah, we want to support the new Terror Network where we don't, or we want to halted, or we don't, and all of these things.
Yeah, right. I think it over all in this incident. Like, most of the technical infrastructure actually has performed very well. I think even like on the parasite itself, right? Like tender remained and the smart contract code that kind of made. That made up the system, worked very well and under this High load and I don't think anything happened on that. And, like, most of the problems were more around like, on the Terrace.
I'd around, you know, they're being so much Luna 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 at the real environment. Of course, of course, like unfortunately, a lot of people lost money, Me including all these organizations or lost business and really like a huge
blow-up of course. But I guess it also kind of proof that some of these infrastructures actually ready for really big kind of users, which is maybe not necessarily true. Even for like centralized system sometimes where things might fall apart more than what we see in there. So, yeah, thanks for that. I think one of the big things that also in this event And
happened. I guess it's because of the price disparity on different networks there, and Luna, cries crashing fast, and people 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 terrible events, how from the warm our perspective was there anything like notable from Dad's 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 kind of product not problem.
One of the one of the, one of the challenges Woodbridge egg 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 infrastructure providers, you're going to have price disparity and this is actually not even. A blockchain problem. This is just a markets problem. If you have two markets to to markets, are going to have
different prices, right? Whether that's a centralized to marketplaces or decentralized Market places, it doesn't really matter by the virtue of them, being different marketplaces or, or to have different prices. And so when people bridging tokens back and forth between portal, you know, they often were doing so to try to take advantage of price disparity on one markets, a Auto Salon on Siro. Or another on you swap on etherium and so on.
But again, that doesn't really have anything to do with normal technicals. That was just it was something that we could enable Wormhole could enable 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 there was no way for people to be able to bridge currencies from 12 from one infrastructure to another, then you would have even higher price disparity.
Because you would be able to normalize that price but because people could bridge that currency back and forth between two infrastructure providers. There's 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, may be 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, I guess better by nature of just being accessible to everyone and not. Yeah, including everyone. So I think that that's really
cool. I mean that really It goes to show how important that is. This infrastructure also is in a sense, this Tara applications and everything was like some of the most used stuff on Wormhole and maybe you can talk a little bit about what right now, a lot like exciting application.
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, what, 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. So, like a lot of stuff that is being built is a lot of defy
stuff which is very exciting. You know, took him swaps and things like that nature, things that I wish were more, people were building on top of Wormhole would be things of the like cross chain governance or cross chain games, and using va's is identity modules. And all of these, there are some Advanced things you can do with Wormhole that people haven't really tapped into yet. Because again, the current Zeitgeist has been around tokens, 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 such as cross chain governance, right? Makes sense, I think. Yeah, ride. You like your job, I guess. Also like maybe let's talk a little bit or on Dad, like, I guess developer relations That's right. So from the developer perspective maybe just a question as the general again.
I guess how what developers interacts with Wormhole actually? What's the best way? Is there like a? Also like a plug-in? If I say, like I'm a dab that I can kind of somehow have Wormhole be plugged in into my that or 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 it a trations with Wormhole by sending messages back and forth. Using the Wormhole core layer, which is a much more advanced integration.
So you can learn all about the different types of Integrations and how to get started with doing all of this at book dot Wormhole.com. This is our documentation for developers and we're working on a number of sample projects that documentation doesn'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 talked about this, I think if you're I guess there's also like other things you're working on to you mentioned a hacker house. That jump was hosting I guess in general. What kind of initiatives do you have to? I guess recruit developers are like, help them or. Yeah. Get this ecosystem going. Yeah. So there's we're working. Right now, X hack, which is
jump, jump cryptos. Premier event is a cross chain chain agnostic act on it. Starting Monday of this week which I don't know when this podcast will go live but it'll be September 26, you know, and it'll go for four weeks. So we're working with developers at all. Different ecosystems and challenging them to like get started with working on working on Wormhole stuff. So that's that's one of the Big Avenues right now that, you know, all of us, our heads down, trying to get that, get that
going. Yeah, that sounds pretty exciting, and I hope we're not really using this way too late. That no one can look into this, but if we do, then hopefully there's like some exciting use cases, come up, come out of that that you can look at and maybe expand on. I think that's that's all the questions I had. They have thanks so much for coming on for talking to us about Wormhole and giving us a bit better view since I think, you know, a lot of the mystery may be Around 8:00.
If you're not like in this ecosystem, I think our listeners that will also have learned a lot today, so that I really appreciate it. If there's anything else you wanna shout out to or, like talked about, now it's time. But yeah, thanks so much for joining me today and best of luck. Thank you, Felix. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.
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