Wormhole

Wormhole started in 2020 as a Solana–Ethereum token bridge built by the Certus One team, and grew into a general messaging layer. It does not run its own chain. Each connected chain has a Wormhole core contract; when an app emits a message there, the Guardians observe it, sign it, and the bundle of signatures becomes a Verified Action Approval (VAA) that any destination-chain contract can check.

Validity rests on a supermajority: 13 of the 19 Guardians must sign (Wormhole docs). The Guardians are established validator companies, chosen for reputation rather than stake. Two add-ons limit damage if something goes wrong: the Governor delays unusually large outflows from a chain, and the Global Accountant refuses transfers that would make wrapped supply exceed what is locked.

NTT is where recent growth has come from: Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin expanded to layer-2s with it, Monad launched with a Wormhole-powered native bridge in November 2025, and BlackRock and Securitize used it to bring the BUIDL fund to BNB Chain. The W token is used for governance; for its price and supply see W market data.

When people say "the Wormhole bridge" they mean Portal Bridge (portalbridge.com). It moves tokens by locking them on the source chain and minting a Wormhole-wrapped version on the destination, or, for tokens that adopted NTT, by moving the native token itself. Wrapped tokens are only as good as the lock contract and the Guardian signatures behind them, so check whether a token you receive is native or Wormhole-wrapped before depositing it anywhere.

• 30 June 2026: the old interface at legacy.portalbridge.com was switched off and redirected. Pending multi-step transfers had to be finished before then.
• 2025–2026: Wormhole dropped support for a run of chains: Aurora, Terra, Terra Classic, Karura, Acala, XPLA, Oasis, Fantom, X Layer, Mantle, Scroll, Berachain (31 August 2026) and Injective (30 September 2026).
• Cosmos chains including Osmosis, Evmos and Kujira moved to third-party front ends.

If you still hold a Wormhole-wrapped token on a chain that has been deprecated, bridge it back while the route is open; after the cut-off, getting the underlying asset out may require manual help from Wormhole support.

On 2 February 2022 an attacker found that Wormhole's Solana contract could be fed a fake signature set. By exploiting how the contract verified the Guardian signatures, they forged an approval and minted 120,000 wETH on Solana with nothing locked on Ethereum, then bridged much of it back to Ethereum as real ETH. At the time that was roughly $326M (Rekt).

Within a day the team said ETH would be added so that wETH was backed 1:1 again, and it was. The ETH came from Jump Crypto, whose Certus One unit built Wormhole. A $10M bug bounty offer to the attacker went unanswered. So users did not lose money, but nobody recovered it from the attacker either: a trading firm's balance sheet absorbed a $326M hole.

Since then Wormhole has added the Governor and Global Accountant, collected 29 audits and run a large Immunefi bounty. None of that changes the basic assumption that 13 signers can approve anything; it limits how fast and how much can leave if they, or the code that checks them, fail.

Wormhole's 2025–2026 announcements split into two streams. One is issuers adopting NTT: Monad's MON and its canonical bridge (November 2025), Folks Finance's FOLKS, RLUSD to layer-2s (December 2025) and to more ecosystems (June 2026), BUIDL on BNB Chain, and HYPE brought to Base through Aerodrome. The other is pruning: the list of supported networks has been shrinking since February 2025, with the most recent cut-offs on 31 August and 30 September 2026.

Builders using the old Standard Relayer have also been told to migrate to the Executor relay. For users the practical point is the same as with any bridge: before you move an asset, check that both chains are still on Wormhole's supported list.