xdapp-book/src/wormhole/1_whatIsWormhole.md

# What is Wormhole?

Wormhole V1 was introduced in 2020 by Certus One and was initially conceived as a traditional token bridge between Ethereum and Solana. It served as the first bridge on Solana and was responsible for bootstrapping a large amount of the liquidity in the early Solana and Serum ecosystems.

However, despite its beginnings as a token bridge, Wormhole quickly grew beyond Solana and token transfers.

Wormhole v2 launched in August 2021 as a decentralized generic interoperability protocol for multiple blockchain ecosystems with initial support for Solana, Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.

Over the past year, Wormhole has evolved to support an ever-growing list of blockchains across an unrivaled number of smart contract runtimes.

While Wormhole is a generic interoperability protocol, it is also an ecosystem and platform for developers to grow the decentralized computing space. Wormhole consists of multiple modular swap-in components that can be leveraged independently and supports an increasing number of composable applications built by numerous teams.

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In the next section, we'll go over the major components of the Wormhole ecosystem and how they fit together to enable the cross-chain functionality required to develop xDapps.