Wormhole Network launches Ethereum-Solana bridge amid the latest cross-chain boom

Solana announced the launch of the Wormhole Network, an Ethereum – Solana cross-chain bridge, which enables the transfer of digital assets between ERC-20 and SPL blockchains. The announcement notes that Saber, the Solana-based protocol with more than $4 billion total-value locked (TVL), will support migration from Wormhole V1.0 to V2.0. While the TVL of the top five cryptocurrencies approaches $150 billion, cross-chain bridges are highly demanded.

The Wormhole Network has announced the launch of the Wormhole Token Bridge. This follows the launch of the Wormhole V2.0 mainnet in August 2021.

“Today we’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of our Wormhole Token Bridge starting with Ethereum and Solana,” the Wormhole Network’s said on Twitter. “First up – migration of assets from the soon to be unsupported Wormhole V1 to Wormhole V2 will be available. V1 users will be able to simply exchange their assets for V2 assets at a 1-to-1 rate on wormholebridge.com.”

“The liquidity for this swap will be replenished periodically, please bear with us. There are about $250M worth of assets in Wormhole V1 to be migrated,” the Twitter thread added.

Ethereum has become a favored chain due to the arrival of NFT hysteria, which has seen tokenized digital art race to astronomical prices, and the success of markets such as OpenSea. However, high gas fees have driven collectors to other chains such as Solana, which has seen an array of NFT markets launch in recent months. Therefore, the cross-chain bridge could enable collectors to transfer assets between the two.

Last week in In a panel hosted by Sanctor Capital, Andre Cronje, the founder of leading DeFi platform Yearn Finance (YFI), had trying to explain the sudden surge of demand for cross-chain bridges in the past year.

“The whole DeFi wave gave a reason for people to begin interacting with different blockchains,” Cronje said. “And the more we’re interacting, the more we are realizing that there’s actually a little bit too much activity for any one chain to handle this stuff.”

“While I can’t specifically pinpoint a big bang moment, it’s a combination of the maturing of different blockchains, and their DeFi ecosystems, and things like NFTs that are giving people more and more of a reason to interact,” he added.

Chad Barraford, tech chief at ThorChain (RUNE), told Coin Rivet why the industry was so excited about cross-chain capabilities.

“We’re now expanding beyond programmable money to programmable protocols,” he said. “The next natural evolution of this is to be able to do that cross-chain. Being able to take the idea of programmable protocols to make it interact cross chain is fascinating.”

“We didn’t have technologies like we have now during DeFi summer that would make cross-chain even feasible. Interoperability within many ecosystems, or any ecosystem, is a huge leap forward,” Barraford claimed.

It seems cross-chain interoperability is going to be a hot topic in 2022, as many smaller projects could be squeezed out of the market while the big assets will solidify in the market.

Solana has risen 5,504% in value during the last year and today, Solana (SOL) is a top ten crypto-asset holding the seventh largest position in terms of market capitalization. At the time of writing, the overall Solana market valuation is $48.4 billion and there’s a circulating supply of 296,830,872 SOL, according to Coingecko data.