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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.
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.