Wormhole Gateway: A New Onramp to the Interchain

Wormhole Gateway: A New Onramp to the Interchain

Gateway connects liquidity and users from 23+ blockchains to the entire interchain, all with one IBC-based liquidity router.

At Osmoscon 2023, the Wormhole Foundation announced the launch of Wormhole Gateway — an application-specific blockchain, powered by the Cosmos SDK.

This post is a technical deep-dive into how Gateway works, how it integrates with IBC, and how you can integrate with it. For a higher-level overview, see the original Wormhole Gateway Announcement.

About Gateway

Gateway’s purpose is to help broaden access (and bring liquidity) to the interchain while also improving security and sovereignty for Wormhole’s entire network.

Gateway will enable all of Wormhole’s 23+ connected blockchains (across 6 runtimes) to be connected to the interchain via one simple IBC integration. This will enable users to bridge funds to any IBC-enabled chain with zero additional bridging fees.

How does Gateway work?

Gateway is compatible and complimentary to IBC and provides unified liquidity across Cosmos.

In practical terms, when an entity bridges a token from any of Wormhole’s 23+ connected blockchains to any Cosmos SDK chain via Gateway, that asset will be locked, and a new ICS-20 will be minted on Gateway, that will be sent to the destination chain via IBC. For example, this would allow Solana’s native $SOL token to be bridged to Osmosis to be used in liquidity pools or deposited as collateral on Mars Protocol.

The resulting ICS-20 asset will be fungible via Strangelove’s packet forward middleware. Gateway also leverages IBC Hooks for seamless integration with Cosmwam contracts.

Under the hood, Gateway is composed of three Cosmwasm smart contracts and three IBC Middlewares.

The contracts are (1) the Wormhole Core Bridge, (2) the Wormhole Token Bridge, and (3) a new IBC Translator contract. The Wormhole Core and Token Bridge contract handle everything related to Wormhole functionality — maintaining the current guardian set, publishing and verifying messages, and burning and minting CW20 tokens. The IBC Translator contract handles parsing Wormhole Token Bridge messages and transforming them into ICS-20 messages, and vice versa.

The IBC Middlewares are (1) Strangelove’s packet forward middleware, (2) Osmosis’ IBC Hooks, and (3) a new IBC Composability middleware developed by Wormhole. The packet forward middleware is used for Cosmos → Cosmos transfers, while the IBC Hooks middleware is used for Cosmos → External chain transfers. The new IBC Composability middleware improves the developer experience by providing Gateway integrators with a single memo payload structure that gets routed to either the packet forward middleware or the IBC Hooks middleware based on the destination chain. The IBC Composability middleware enables Wormhole to embrace the battle-tested PFM and IBC Hooks in a standardized way that helps to extend IBC beyond just Cosmos SDK chains.

When/where/how can I start using Gateway?

Gateway will be connected with several major Cosmos SDK chains at launch, with plans to expand to connect with as much of the interchain as possible soon thereafter. If you’re building a chain and want to integrate with Wormhole Gateway, please get in touch with the Wormhole Foundation here. If you’re a dApp builder looking to leverage Gateway on an integrated chain, check out the docs here.

Why Gateway was built with the Interchain Stack

Gateway was built using the Cosmos SDK because it helps increase Wormhole’s transparency and sovereignty; enabling Wormhole to utilize IBC light clients to facilitate liquidity transfers within the interchain, and further improves Wormhole’s ability to enable the free flow of information and value across blockchains.

Improving Transparency

Gateway acts as a sovereign verification layer for Wormhole messages, adding a second means of protection to Wormhole’s own Guardian consensus mechanism on a verifiably transparent public ledger. The SDK serves Wormhole’s purpose of improving transparency of the Guardian consensus mechanism without sacrificing the independent nature of that consensus mechanism.

Security

Using IBC to transport Wormhole messages allows Gateway to leverage IBC’s time-tested protocol while minimizing infrastructure overhead for its Guardian network. Instead of running a full-node on every Cosmos SDK chain that Wormhole wants to connect, the Guardian network can simply run a node on Gateway and leverage IBC for interchain transfers.

Additionally, building on the Cosmos SDK allows Wormhole to add enhanced security features like Global Accountant, a CosmWasm-based module that ensures that the fungibility of native and wrapped assets remains in 1:1 parity. Global Account is an accounting system-like security feature that keeps track of the number of tokens locked in the origin chain token bridge contracts. Using this data, the Guardians ensure that the appropriate number of canonical tokens are locked in the appropriate token bridge contract before signing off on releasing said tokens. This prevents ‘infinite mint-like’ bugs on any chain draining the canonical tokens from the token bridge implementations on other chains.

Enabling Value Flow Across Chains

Wormhole’s modular interoperability platform enables the free flow of value across blockchains. The interchain itself is designed around this same core concept, and Gateway was accordingly designed to be a better, safer, and more affordable on-ramp to the Cosmos SDK chains than existing solutions. This furthers both Wormhole and interchain missions by seamlessly bringing interchain-native assets and dApps to other ecosystems.

Improving the Cosmos developer experience with Gateway

One IBC connection to reach all of crypto

Wormhole Gateway is an application-specific blockchain powered by the Cosmos SDK. Through Gateway, Cosmos SDK chains can access seamless cross-ecosystem liquidity and message routing with one simple IBC integration.

Purpose-built for the interchain

Gateway leverages the flexibility of the Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm to enable seamless composability between the Wormhole Stack and all IBC-enabled Cosmos SDK chains.

No additional bridging fees

Gateway’s purpose is to drive liquidity to grow the interchain, not to charge users additional fees for transferring their own assets.

Fungible assets via IBC

Gateway utilizes the ICS-20 standard for IBC-native token bridging, ensuring greater fungibility of assets, compliance with interchain native protocols, and a better experience for users.

Deep interchain liquidity

Gateway and the greater Wormhole ecosystem have industry-leading liquidity and integrations across Ethereum, Solana, and over 20 other chains. This means driving liquidity of top assets like stETH and tBTC to the interchain.

Start Building with Gateway

Interested in building with Gateway? Follow these simple steps to get started:

About Wormhole

Wormhole is an industry-standard cross-chain messaging protocol powering applications across Web3. Wormhole provides developers access to liquidity and users on over 20 of the leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases that span DeFi, NFTs, governance, and more. Wormhole enables a growing suite of products to build on its messaging layer.

Wormhole Connect is a key asset layer product, providing developers an in-app bridging widget that can be integrated in as few as 3 lines of code. The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap, and to date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through hundreds of millions of cross-chain messages.

To learn more about Wormhole, visit wormhole.com, join the Discord, or find Wormhole Connect integration details at wormhole.com/connect

Wormhole Gateway: A New Onramp to the Interchain was originally published in Interchain Ecosystem Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.