Wormhole gets stronger, safer, and more secure every day

Wormhole didn’t become one of the longest-standing interoperability protocols without experiencing setbacks. That’s the expected cost of trailblazing. It’s how you react to those setbacks that matter. The hack of early 2022 propelled Wormhole forward, unlocking a flurry of innovation to fortify the protocol. Today, Wormhole has one of the best security programs in all of Web3.

The Guardians

Before any Wormhole transaction can be completed, it must pass through multiple Guardians, each of whom conducts their own independent validation process prior to verifying and validating that transaction.

Rigorous auditing

Wormhole contributors perform internal audits of new features and capabilities. In addition to internal audits, third-party audit firms are contracted to perform external audits that serve two primary goals:

Discover bugs missed in internal audits

Provide transparency and confidence for users

View audit reports

Proven tech

Wormhole runs on the same cryptographic primitives as Ethereum. We implement a multi-sig approach, whereby 19 Guardians - via a proof of authority of their private key - independently sign messages but largely distrust each other. Guardians are spread across the globe, and each has their own operational security requirements, making it nearly impossible to compromise.

Transactions require 2/3+ consensus

Upgrades require 2/3+ consensus

Always open source

Building in the open hardens you in a way that nothing else does. We believe in the power of transparency and community and have been proudly sharing our progress, patterns, and process since July, 2020. It is open to any and everyone to contribute and improve upon.

Check it out

Bug bounty program

Bug bounty programs and the white-hat community at large are a strategic value add to our internal security program. This program allows any motivated white-hat in the world to review our code and receive multi-million-dollar incentives - including the hightest single payout in the industry - to responsibly report critical bugs in Wormhole.

Learn more

Safety features

The Governor allows Wormhole Guardians to provide optional value movement protections to token bridges built on Wormhole. This protection allows Wormhole Guardians to govern (or effectively rate-limit) the notional flow of assets from any given token bridge chain.

This safety feature allows Guardians to limit the impact of any security issue any given chain may have from affecting other connected chains. The Governor allows the setting of daily limits of notional flow and also has an ability to set a fixed finality delay for transactions over a specific size for each supported chain.

Whitepaper Configuration example