Wormhole, the blockchain interoperability project, has launched Wormhole Gateway, an appchain developed in the Cosmos ecosystem. The Wormhole Gateway connects any two blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem, and its primary goal is to increase the flow of funds into the ecosystem by making it easier for developers and users to on-ramp tokens to any given Cosmos chain.
What Wormhole Gateway brings
The goal of Wormhole is to use a unified cross-chain liquidity router to interconnect several Cosmos chains and applications. The Wormhole Foundation says that the Gateway network will act as an additional layer of verification for Wormhole messages, complementing the current ‘Guardian’ consensus method. It supplements Wormhole’s Guardian consensus method on a publicly verifiable ledger with an additional layer of security.
Gateway is an example of an application-specific blockchain, a blockchain designed to run a single application. Developers often create their own blockchain from scratch, designed for a single application but easily extensible to meet the needs of its users, rather than constructing a decentralised application on top of an existing blockchain like Ethereum.
Through an IBC-based liquidity router, Gateway links the 23 blockchains supported by Wormhole to the Cosmos-based appchains. Gateway’s public ledger is intended to be more open and secure for financial transactions. A new version of the token (ICS-20) is created on Gateway whenever a token is moved by an entity within the Gateway system. The old token remains locked in its original position. The ICS-20 will subsequently be sent by IBC to its final destination.
Osmosis, Evmos, Neutron, and Sei are just a few of the well-known chains that will be connected in the first stage of the Gateway’s construction. The inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC), the Cosmos’ native communications system, is already in development for future chain integration. When using Gateway, customers won’t have to pay any more to transfer their assets from Ethereum, Solana, or any other environment into the Cosmos network.