Three reasons why we led Wormhole’s $225 million round

Author: Kyle Samani, Partner of Multicoin Capital; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

< p style="text-align: left;">Crypto is moving towards a multi-chain future and needs a secure and flexible interoperability platform to connect the entire industry. Wormhole is a comprehensive interoperability platform and a leading solution on the market.

On April 4, 2024, I am happy to announce that we participated in leading a US$225 million round of financing for Wormhole. This round of financing was completed at the end of last year, and we officially announced our investment when the W token was released.

1. Leading multi-chain platform

Most people think Wormhole is just a bridge. But it's much more than that. Wormhole is a development platform on which a large number of applications in many categories can be built: multi-chain DeFi protocols and applications (Aave, Circle USDC, Hashflow, Pike, Magpie), multi-chain governance (Uniswap), token bridges ( Portal, Carrier), multi-chain oracle feed (Pyth), in-wallet bridging (Backpack), multi-chain NFTs (DeGods, y00ts), etc.

p>

What excites us most about Wormhole is the variety of applications built on it. And it's still early days. With more than $41 billion in assets bridged using Wormhole, the opportunity space for native Wormhole applications will continue to grow.

Recently, Wormhole passed an important milestone: multi-chain messages reached 1 billion. This is the most of any cross-chain messaging system.

But perhaps, most importantly, Wormhole supports nearly 30 different chains, making it a very powerful bridging solution. Wormhole runs on almost all major EVM chains, as well as Near, as well as Move language-based chains such as Aptos and Sui, and of course Solana.

Wormhole is one of the most diverse and flexible cryptographic stacks. It has prioritized diversity and flexibility from day one, and they are continually investing in multi-chain support. It was a risky decision, but one that ultimately turned out to be prescient.

2. The importance of user experience

One ​​of the most important use cases of Wormhole is assets Hooks use front-ends such as Portal. Portal is the first third-party product developed on Wormhole.

Shortly after Portal went online, Wormhole released a front-end tool, Wormhole Connect, that developers could embed directly into their applications. Wormhole Connect enables applications to easily support deposits and withdrawals from any asset on any chain. Wormhole Connect enables derivatives DEXs (such as Drift) to provide a user experience comparable to CEXs (such as Binance, OKX, Bybit, and Coinbase International). Users can easily deposit any asset into Drift as collateral without having to care about which chain the asset comes from. Wormhole Connect makes the cross-chain user experience frictionless and achieves major unlocking.

Recently, Wormhole launched the native token transfer function NTT. Tokens using the NTT framework can be transferred seamlessly across chains using a burn-and-mint mechanism, rather than using traditional locking mechanisms on the original chain. This reduces gas costs and reduces latency while improving security for end users. Best of all, tokens are seamlessly bridged within Wormhole Connect. Neither users nor application developers have to think about this aspect.

Finally, Wormhole also supports Circle CCTP for native cross-chain transfer of USDC.

In summary, Wormhole supports all three methods of transferring assets across chains: asset pegs, native token transfers, and CCTP. Since Wormhole supports all three methods using a single SDK, developers can easily integrate and support all asset configurations.

3. Wormhole’s ZK future

The biggest challenge facing the bridging system is verification. How does chain B know the final state of chain A at a certain block height?

Historically, every bridging system (including Wormhole) has relied on a certain level of trust for multi-chain verification. In January, Wormhole announced their ZK (zero knowledge) roadmap. Wormhole is going all-in on ZK verification. Ultimately, this will bring a range of benefits, including a better user experience, better DevEx, and even greater security.

We have been working with the Wormhole team for a while and we are very excited. They are outstanding builders, and it is truly amazing to watch them carefully build what we consider to be the leading asset bridge and the leading multi-chain development platform. We are proud to support Robinson Burkey and the Wormhole team.