TL;DR
With so many quality bridges to choose from the Wormhole dilemma is infecting someone new every day. Do you keep returning to whatever outdated technology makes Wormhole the most expensive bridge? Taking the chance of getting left behind in the next big bridge Airdrop. Or is this just the beginning of what Wormhole has to offer? If so, is admission worth the additional price? That’s the focus of today’s report as Wormhole’s flagship product Portal Bridge slips behind the competition. It’s time to examine how they intend to make up for it in the long run.
Wormhole started as a safe and reliable way to send funds from one network to another. Admittedly, life before Wormhole sucked when it came to bridging tokens across different networks. Waiting almost an entire day to send data from one network to another and paying a hefty fee to do so. Thankfully the technology has come a long way since then. But, for those still using Wormhole, the latest Ethereum upgrade Dencun wasn’t enough to bridge the divide between Wormhole and its biggest competitor Stargate. Now, with even better technology found operating in DeBridge, LiFi, Across, Owltoo, and RhinoFi. We have to seriously consider whether or not Wormhole is just a relic of the past that will always be limited by its technology stack. Add in two devastating blows to the trust of Wormhole users and this dilemma becomes even more important to consider.
What does Wormhole offer users?
As one of the first “reliable” bridges (more on that later), Wormhole has had a lot of time to experiment with the services it offers users. Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT) is one of the first open-source, flexible, and composable frameworks for transferring tokens across blockchains. The big deal with NTT is that while it’s extremely slow to execute, it allows for additional customization and control over token parameters. The way Wormhole actually works when transferring tokens from one network to another is through a mint and lock process. Say you send a token from Ethereum to Solana. You’re not really transferring that token. Instead, you’re burning the token on Ethereum and minting a new version on Solana.
Wormhole Services
What used to be the Wormhole Bridge is now known as Portal. PortalBridge is the main interface for the m majority of users that access Wormhole services. However, you can find Wormhole technology being used on Mayan Swap, Allbridge, and Jumper Exchnage. So by interacting with any of these products, you’re using some form of the Wormhole software stack. Wormhole also has additional features available to developers like custom messaging protocols and Wormhole SDK. But for the majority of us, our main interactions with the Wormhole protocol will be through one of the four bridges.
The other main use of Wormhole that some will find themselves needing is the NFT Bridge. Because of Wormhole’s ability to replicate and change token parameters during the bridging process. This allows users to stay up to date with their favorite NFT collection and seek a more reliable network to store those non-fungibles if necessary. However, this process is not cheap and comes at the cost of around 0.01 ETH per transfer. Making it more of a niche product for a select group of traders and holders….
Head of Research Jesse is a passionate seeker of truth who enjoys educating others about Bitcoin. As a free thinker and 2nd amendment advocate, Jesse believes each individual has the right to monetary freedom. “The swarm is headed towards us” -Satoshi Nakamoto
