Get the best insights in crypto delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter below.

mail icon

Enter The Wormhole

Kyle Samani
April 3, 2024 | 3 minute read

Crypto is going multichain and needs a secure but flexible interoperability platform to connect the industry. Wormhole is one of the leading solutions in the market with a full-stack interoperability platform.

Today I’m excited to announce that we co-led a $225M round in Wormhole. This round closed late last year; we are formally announcing our investment today to coincide with the launch of W token, which goes live today.

The Leading Multichain Platform

Most people think of Wormhole as just a bridge. But it is far more than that. It is a development platform, on top of which many apps across many categories can leverage it: multichain DeFi protocols and applications (Aave, Circle USDC, Hashflow, Pike, Magpie), multichain governance (Uniswap), token bridges (Portal, Carrier) multichain oracle feeds (Pyth), in-wallet bridging (Backpack), multichain NFTs (DeGods, y00ts), etc.

Wormhole Ecosystem

What excites us most about Wormhole is the diversity of applications built on top of it. And it is still so early. With over $41B of assets bridged using Wormhole, the opportunity set for Wormhole native applications continues to grow.

Recently, Wormhole crossed a major milestone: 1B multichain messages. This is the most of any cross-chain messaging system.

But perhaps most importantly, Wormhole supports almost 30 disparate chains making it an extremely robust bridging solution. Wormhole is live on virtually every major EVM chain, along with Near, Move-based chains such as Aptos and Sui, and of course, Solana.

Wormhole offers one of the most diverse and flexible stack in crypto. It prioritized this from day 1, and they have continued to re-invest in many-chain support. This was a risky decision, but ultimately turned out to be a prescient decision.

UX UX UX

One of the most important use cases for Wormhole is asset-pegging, using front-ends such as Portal. Portal was one of the first third-party products built on Wormhole.

Shortly after Portal went live Wormhole released Wormhole Connect, a front-end widget that developers can embed directly into their applications. Wormhole Connect makes it trivial for applications to accept deposits and withdrawals from any asset on any chain. Wormhole Connect enables derivatives DEXs, such as Drift, to offer a UX that rivals that of CEXs, such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, and Coinbase International. Users can simply deposit any asset into Drift to use as collateral, regardless of which chain the asset originates from. Wormhole Connect is a major unlock that makes cross-chain UX frictionless.

Jupiter x Wormhole

More recently, Wormhole recently launched Native Token Transfers (NTT). Tokens that leverage the NTT framework can seamlessly move across chains using a burn-and-mint mechanism, rather than the traditional locking mechanism on the originating chain. This reduces gas costs, lowers latency, and improves security for end-users. Best of all, tokens work seamlessly in Wormhole Connect. Users nor application developers have to think about this at all.

Lastly, Wormhole supports Circle’s CCTP for moving USDC natively across chains.

Collectively, Wormhole supports all three configurations for moving assets across chains: asset-pegging, native-token transfers, and CCTP. Because Wormhole supports all three methodologies using a single SDK, Wormhole makes it as easy possible for developers to integrate, and to support all asset configurations.

Wormhole’s ZK Future

The single biggest challenge in bridging systems is verification. How does chain B know the finalized state of chain A as of some block height?

Historically, every bridging system—including Wormhole—relied on some degree of trust to facilitate a multichain verification. In January Wormhole announced their ZK roadmap. Wormhole is going all-in on ZK verification. Ultimately, this will result in a whole host of benefits, including better UX, better DevEx, and even more safety.

We have had the pleasure of working with the Wormhole team for some time now. They are outstanding builders, and it has been amazing to watch them meticulously build what we believe is the leading asset bridge and the leading multi-chain development platform. We are grateful for the chance to back Robinson Burkey and the Wormhole team.

Disclosure: Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this post are solely those of the author(s) in their individual capacity and are not the views of Multicoin Capital Management, LLC or its affiliates (together with its affiliates, “Multicoin”). Certain information contained herein may have been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Multicoin. Multicoin believes that the information provided is reliable and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This post may contain links to third-party websites (“External Websites”). The existence of any such link does not constitute an endorsement of such websites, the content of the websites, or the operators of the websites.These links are provided solely as a convenience to you and not as an endorsement by us of the content on such External Websites. The content of such External Websites is developed and provided by others and Multicoin takes no responsibility for any content therein. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in this blog are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.

The content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as the basis for an investment decision, and is not, and should not be assumed to be, complete. The contents herein are not to be construed as legal, business, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisors for those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by Multicoin, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Multicoin is available here: https://multicoin.capital/portfolio/. Excluded from this list are investments that have not yet been announced (1) for strategic reasons (e.g., undisclosed positions in publicly traded digital assets) or (2) due to coordination with the development team or issuer on the timing and nature of public disclosure.

This blog does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any limited partner interests in any investment vehicle managed by Multicoin. An offer or solicitation of an investment in any Multicoin investment vehicle will only be made pursuant to an offering memorandum, limited partnership agreement and subscription documents, and only the information in such documents should be relied upon when making a decision to invest.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. There can be no guarantee that any Multicoin investment vehicle’s investment objectives will be achieved, and the investment results may vary substantially from year to year or even from month to month. As a result, an investor could lose all or a substantial amount of its investment. Investments or products referenced in this blog may not be suitable for you or any other party.

Multicoin has established, maintains and enforces written policies and procedures reasonably designed to identify and effectively manage conflicts of interest related to its investment activities. For more important disclosures, please see the Disclosures and Terms of Use available at https://multicoin.capital/disclosures and https://multicoin.capital/terms.