Wormhole Gateway was recently announced as an app-chain built on the industry tested Cosmos-SDK to enable bridging non-native assets into the Cosmos ecosystem. This is a huge milestone for cross-chain or chain-agnostic application, but before we explain what Gateways aims to achieve, lets briefly re-introduce Wormhole, for what it is, and what it tries to achieve in the web3 ecosystem.
So as we know, ever since the existence of blockchains capable of executing arbitrary programs on-chain a.k.a Smart Contracts, different networks have sprung up, each with it own unique promise and competitive advantage, and although this has led to innovation in the web3 space but albeit not without its own challenges as well. Having blockchain networks which are isolated is synonymous living in world without any means of communication or even transportation from a source to a destination.
Now we can begin to imagine the kinds of challenges we're poised to face in a world such as this, including missed out opportunities for economic co-operation, trade and skills or knowledge transfer. These problems are also synonymous in isolated blockchain networks of today, hence the need for a mechanism or a system by which say chainA can communicate and send message back and forth with say chainB.
What is Wormhole?
At its core, Wormhole strives to be a generic message passing protocol, allowing for transfers of arbitrary data between different blockchains. This system is currently operated by a network of guardians, which are responsible for creating what is known as VAAs(verifiable Action Approvals) from messages observed in blockchain networks on which wormhole core-contract is deployed. These VAAs server are a security primitive or these cross-chain interactions, however a planned future upgrade to the Wormhole protocol would replace these with state proofs, effectively leading to a much more decentralized message passing system.
Now that we've established the fundamentals of what Wormhole is about, let's meet Gateway😃.
Enter the Gateway
Gateway is an app-chain built with the Cosmos-SDK, to facilitate message transfer in the cosmos ecosystem and serve as a unified liquidity source in the Cosmos ecosystem.
A big selling point for Gateway is that it leverages IBC(Inter-blockchain Communication) which is an industry standard protocol for authentication and transport of data between blockchains.
It might be worth pointing out that Cosmos itself is a Multichain ecosystem, allowing for seamless interoperability between sovereign blockchains, all enabled by IBC(Inter-Blockchain Communication) module. Therefore cosmos chains that do implement this module can interact seamlessly with each other.
(An overview of the cosmos ecosystem).
How Gateway work?
For transfers of x-Assets between cosmos chains, these assets are sent from the source chain to the Gateway via IBC messages, and then forwarded to the destination chain on cosmos. By leveraging IBC and packet forwarding middleware, it becomes possible to bridge tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem without liquidity fragmentation, hence making Gateway the canonical chain in cosmos for bridging x-Assets through IBC transfer, and with no additional fees.
Fun Fact: Originally Gateway was called Wormchain😉
Why you should use Gateway
Scalability:
Gateway is highly scalable as only one full node is required to be operated by the Guardians to connect the entirety of the Cosmos ecosystem.Security:
Gateway leverages light clients to facilitate assets transfers to and between cosmos chains, making it highly secure.Fungibility:
Gateway acts as the router for x-Assets transfer, hence making these assets 100% fungible.
Additional Information and resources
As part of a series of events lined up for the month of August, Gateway would be launched officially on 15th of August, with connection to Osmosis as the first supported chain, then other cosmos chains would follow suite. Some Interesting times ahead!🚀🚀
To stay up-to-date with happenings in the wormhole ecosystem, be sure to check wormhole socials:
Wormhole twitter
Official Site
Thanks for reading, and see you all in web3, WAGMI!!!
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