Wormhole Network Launch
Today, the Wormhole network announced its long-awaited mainnet launch.
The Wormhole story started in late 2020 with a simple token bridge designed by Certus One and other contributors, connecting Solana and Ethereum. It has been operated by a decentralized network of validator nodes (“guardians”), running reliably ever since.
From the feedback the project received over the past year, one thing quickly became clear— people and projects wanted interoperability not just for tokens, but also for NFTs, Pyth oracle market data, and dozens of other exciting use cases much broader than originally contemplated.
Wormhole has therefore been redesigned as a generic, cross-chain messaging protocol, an entirely new project— the Wormhole network.
After months of work, the network’s validators launched its mainnet today, connecting Solana, Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.
The Wormhole network is not backwards-compatible and will be a new, completely separate, and independent network.
The Wormhole core protocol no longer contains token bridging functionality. Instead, it provides the message passing foundations, and token bridges can be built on top of these foundations.
Work on building an example token bridge implementation and accompanying SDK and UI is in progress — stay tuned!
The old Wormhole bridge is a decentralized protocol, with various users and projects relying on it and an ecosystem of third party UIs like wormholebridge.com. It remains operational for as long as the guardian set wants to keep it alive. However, the contributions of Certus One to the legacy bridge will enter maintenance-only mode (critical fixes only, no new features). We recommend that users migrate to a token bridge built on top of the new Wormhole network as soon as such a bridge exists.
