Enabling Cross-Chain Liquidity on Wormhole

Catalyst is thrilled to announce a strategic integration with Wormhole, enhancing our capabilities in facilitating seamless cross-chain swaps between native assets.

Wormhole, a leading arbitrary messaging bridge (AMB), empowers blockchain developers to securely and effortlessly facilitate the flow of data and value across networks. As a premier cross-chain interoperability protocol, Wormhole enables the smooth transfer of value and information across almost 30 prominent blockchains with a single integration.

What does Wormhole unlock for Catalyst?

Wormhole is a versatile message passing protocol designed to facilitate communication across different blockchains. While the concept might seem straightforward, the protocol's architecture and components are intricate and offer a broad range of functionalities. Wormhole is not a blockchain, but instead acts as a bridge for communication between various blockchains or rollups.

The applications of Wormhole are vast and diverse, opening up new possibilities in the blockchain space. For instance, developers can create exchanges that accept deposits from any chain connected to Wormhole, significantly expanding the liquidity available to users. In governance, groups from different NFT collections across various networks can coordinate to vote on collective proposals. Votes cast on separate chains can be communicated to a chosen 'voting' chain through Wormhole. Moreover, in the gaming sector, games developed on high-performance networks like Solana can issue rewards as NFTs on a different network, such as Ethereum, showcasing the protocol's ability to bridge and enhance cross-chain functionalities.

Through our integration with Wormhole, Catalyst gains access to a multitude of leading blockchains, including BNB Chain, Injective, and Solana–broadening the reach of our cross-chain swap capabilities.

How does the integration work?

In order to understand how Catalyst builds on top of Wormhole, we first need to understand how Catalyst works in general. Catalyst is comprised of four components:

1. Pools that store digital assets on-chain.
2. An Automated Market Maker (AMM) to coordinate asset pricing across different chains.
3. The cross-chain message aggregator that transports and verifies the validity of the state of Catalyst pools.
4. Solvers that provide fast liquidity between Catalyst pools

Consider a use case where Alice wishes to exchange her Ethereum ETH for MATIC on the Polygon PoS chain.

Alice begins by depositing her ETH into the Catalyst pool on Ethereum. Afterwards, the Unit of Liquidity is generated, reflecting Alice's ETH contribution in relation to the pool's total liquidity. This Unit of Liquidity serves as a critical parameter for executing the swap across chains.

Following this, a swap message is crafted–including the Unit of Liquidity–and passed to Catalyst's cross-chain message aggregator, which relays it to the target chain.

On the Polygon PoS chain, the Catalyst pool receives the swap message. The Unit of Liquidity is recalculated to determine the proportion of MATIC tokens that Alice will receive from the vault. Based on the calculated proportion, the appropriate amount of MATIC tokens is withdrawn from the vault and delivered to Alice's Polygon wallet.

The cross-chain message aggregator currently connects interoperability protocols (i.e., AMBs) in order to pass messages. In the future, the cross-chain message aggregator will be able to use any arbitrary cross-chain communication mechanism – such as L2 native bridges and ZK storage proofs.

In summary, adding Wormhole to the Catalyst cross-chain message aggregator gives Catalyst access to more chains! With Wormhole, Catalyst pools can be deployed on any Wormhole-enabled chain and its state can be communicated with Catalyst pools on other chains.

About Cata Labs

Cata Labs is a software development company that contributes to open-source technology, including Catalyst Protocol. Cata Labs is backed by prominent investors such as Spartan Group, HashKey, Polygon and Circle. Check out our website here and read more here.

Catalyst Protocol is an AMM purpose-built to connect all chains. Its mission is to empower individuals to acquire any asset on any chain. Using Catalyst, any chain can swap assets with major blockchains like Cosmos, Ethereum and its rollups. Catalyst Protocol is operated by Catalyst Foundation, based in the Cayman Islands. Find out more about Catalyst Foundation at its website. Contact Catalyst Foundation here.

About Wormhole

Wormhole is an industry-standard cross-chain messaging protocol that powers applications across Web3. It provides developers with access to liquidity and users on over 20 leading blockchain networks, enabling use cases in DeFi, NFTs, governance, and more. Wormhole's messaging layer allows a growing suite of products to be built on top of it.

One of Wormhole's key asset layer products is Wormhole Connect. It offers developers an in-app bridging widget that can be integrated with as few as 3 lines of code. The wider Wormhole network is trusted and used by teams like Circle and Uniswap. To date, the platform has facilitated the transfer of over 35 billion dollars through hundreds of millions of cross-chain messages.

- Website: https://wormhole.com/ 

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/wormholecrypto 

- Discord: http://discord.gg/wormholecrypto

- Documentation: https://docs.wormhole.com/wormhole/