Building for a cross-chain future, with Nikhil Suri of Wormhole Foundation

TL;DR

Wormhole Foundation is building interoperability infrastructure so otherwise incompatible blockchains can communicate. Product lead Nikhil Suri traces Wormhole’s roots to an Ethereum-to-Solana bridge discovered at a Solana hackathon, its incubation by Jump Crypto, and the broader opportunity to create messaging, bridging, and other cross-chain primitives. Read on to understand Wormhole’s origins, Suri’s background, and why he sees interoperability as a foundational crypto challenge.

Transcript

there were so many different problems being tackled a lot of different smart people working on different things and that kind of place was a great breeding ground for projects like Wormhole and pith because you know projects could learn from each other there was a lot of cross-pollination okay so today I'm really happy to welcome on the show produc... Read More

Key Insights

• 😵 Wormhole's cross-chain technology aims to enable developers and builders to work on any blockchain or VM without being limited by liquidity or user access.
• 👻 Interoperability is essential for the growth of DeFi and other crypto applications, as it allows protocols to access liquidity and communicate governance decisions across multiple chains.
• 😵 Wormhole is focused on continually improving its technology, with upcoming releases including Wormhole queries, ZK bridging, burn and mint token bridging, and a liquidity layer for cross-chain swaps.

Questions & Answers

Q: What cross-chain problem is Wormhole Foundation trying to solve?

Wormhole addresses interoperability between blockchains that are not inherently compatible. Its work is intended to provide the cross-chain primitives, products, and features needed to connect otherwise separate ecosystems.

Q: Who is Nikhil Suri, and what is his role at Wormhole Foundation?

Nikhil Suri is a product leader at Wormhole Foundation. He focuses on Wormhole’s technology stack, product features, and the kinds of applications developers can build with its interoperability infrastructure.

Q: How did Wormhole begin?

Wormhole was originally founded by the team at Certus One. Its roots were an Ethereum-to-Solana bridge found at a Solana hackathon and funded by the Solana Foundation.

Q: What role did Jump Crypto play in Wormhole’s development?

Jump acquired Wormhole and incubated it for a period. Suri became involved with Wormhole while working at Jump Crypto, where it was one of the important infrastructure projects being developed.

Q: Why did Nikhil Suri decide to work on Wormhole?

Suri was drawn to Wormhole because its product space was greenfield, with many primitives, products, and features still to build. He also saw bridging as a vast field and wanted to return to the interoperability problem that had first excited him about crypto.

Q: What experience did Nikhil Suri have before joining Wormhole Foundation?

Before Wormhole Foundation, Suri worked at Jump Crypto on infrastructure products, including Wormhole and an in-house custody product called Silo. Earlier, he built global payment systems at PayPal and worked on Uber’s marketplace of drivers and riders.

Q: How did Nikhil Suri first become involved in crypto?

Suri entered crypto in college during the 2017 bull run, when he and his roommates experimented with CryptoKitties. He later became involved with Interledger, an early interoperability project founded by people from Ripple.

Q: Why does Nikhil Suri consider blockchain interoperability important?

Suri noticed that many new blockchains operated as incompatible ecosystems in themselves. That fragmentation made interoperability an exciting foundational problem for him, eventually leading from his early work with Interledger to Wormhole.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Wormhole Foundation is focused on solving the problem of interoperability in the crypto space through its cross-chain technology.

• The foundation encourages developers and builders to build on any virtual machine (VM) that suits their needs, without being restricted by liquidity or user access.

• The primary use case for interoperability currently is token bridging, but there is also demand for cross-chain governance, queries, and identity solutions.