SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Solana, an open source project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain, today announced Wormhole, a secure and trustless bridge connecting Ethereum to Solana. Wormhole, currently in testnet phase, is the result of a partnership between Solana and Certus One, a premier validator for distributed ledger technology (DLT), and it is the first of many bidirectional cross-chain bridges planned for the Solana network. Wormhole connects ETH and ERC20 tokens to SPL Tokens, the token standard of the Solana blockchain.
Founded by former Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox engineers in late 2017, Solana is focused on delivering scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security. In celebration of its new innovation, The Solana Foundation is inviting developers to experiment with Wormhole via a hackathon commencing on October 28th. The virtual hackathon will bring ideas and crypto enthusiasts together to create highly scalable and cost-efficient web3 applications.
Solana will judge the hackathon along with Gauntlet, Curve, FTX, Balancer, Aave, Audius, and other major projects.
“Smart contract chains are universal computers, and all universal computers can talk to each other, fundamentally making blockspace on any layer-1 fungible with blockspace on any other layer-1,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, The Solana Foundation CEO.
Yakovenko and his team built Solana to solve blockchain scalability issues, and they’ve already battle-tested their solution with projects like Serum, Anchor, Terra, Stardust, and most recently, Tether.
Solana emulates the scale, speed, and low-cost of the web, which makes it a preferred platform for decentralized applications (DApps). The majority of DApps need to perform as well as, if not better than Web2 products.
Wormhole allows existing projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly and trustlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost. Interoperability remains a high priority for projects, as it unlocks network effects and allows for the most efficient use of resources. It’s not pragmatic to expect an entire ecosystem of value to immediately shift across networks, and teams can’t afford to wait for such a mass migration.
Excerpt from Certus One:
Wormhole is the first of many such cross-chain bridges to come. It uses decentralized cross-chain oracles — called guardians — operated by a set of node operators that include top Solana validators and other ecosystem stakeholders whose incentives are strongly aligned with Solana and Serum.
Those guardians certify token lockups and burns on one chain in order to mint new tokens or release tokens on the other, and vice versa.
Read more from Certus One’s post.
About Solana
Solana is a high-performance Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain focused on delivering scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security.
Until now, blockchains have been single-threaded computers, guaranteeing no two transactions conflict if executed in parallel. Solana unlocks concurrent GPU-parallelization for the first time, using Proof of History (PoH),a clock before consensus, delivering high speed, low latency, and inexpensive transactions, all at layer 1 without sharding.
Developed by a team of former Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, and Dropbox engineers, Solana is stewarded by The Solana Foundation and is advanced by a loyal community of decentralized developers around the world. To learn more, please visit https://solana.com/.
