Glossary
Wormhole
A generic cross-chain messaging protocol secured by a 19-of-19 guardian set, widely used for asset bridging and cross-chain governance across 30+ chains.
Wormhole is one of the oldest and most-used cross-chain messaging networks. A federated guardian set observes events on source chains and signs attestations that other chains' Wormhole contracts verify; 13 of 19 signatures are required to accept a message.
The trust model is straightforwardly a multisig — security reduces to the honesty of the guardian set. Wormhole was the target of a 325M USD exploit in February 2022 (a signature-verification bug, since fully reimbursed). The protocol has since launched Wormhole Native Token Transfers (NTT) and Wormhole Queries (cross-chain reads) on top of the core messaging layer.