<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Solana, the Ethereum challenger and home to Serum, FTX’s new decentralized exchange, has unveiled a cross-chain bridge that will allow users to turn ERC20 tokens into Solana’s SPL tokens for use in DeFi applications.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The company says the “trustless” bridge makes it possible for DeFi traders to take advantage of Solana’s </span><a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/72924/ftx-dex-serum-solana-blockchain"><span style="font-weight: 400;">higher speed and lower cost relative to Ethereum</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in a way that “still allows the value to settle back to the Ethereum network if so chosen.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wormhole was developed in collaboration with Certus.One, a startup that creates validator architecture for proof-of-stake blockchain networks. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The DeFi boom, which has drawn traders to Ethereum-based decentralized exchange platforms like Uniswap, has also led to congestion on Ethereum’s network. As a result, the cost of transacting on Ethereum </span><a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/76662/ethereum-fees-dex-boom"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has soared</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Wormhole is intended to let traders sidestep that congestion — and, in the process, help Solana bootstrap its own DeFi market. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In August, FTX </span><a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/76409/ftx-serum-dex-august"><span style="font-weight: 400;">launched Serum, a Solana-based decentralized exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">“However, bootstrapping a new ecosystem is hard and all foreign tokens currently traded on Serum are wrapped tokens issued by FTX,” Leopold Schabel, co-founder and CTO of Certus.One, wrote today in a </span><a href="https://medium.com/@llk/24911b7335f7"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Medium post</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> announcing the project. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">He added: “The remaining hurdle for bringing more DeFi apps and value to Solana are truly decentralized cross-chain assets that do not rely on a single point of failure.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wormhole will let users lock ER20 tokens in an Ethereum smart contract and mint corresponding SPL tokens on Solana. To pull this off, it will rely on “cross-chain oracles” called guardians, which will be operated by “a set of node operators that include top Solana validators and other ecosystem stakeholders whose incentives are strongly aligned with Solana and Serum,” according to Shabel. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Guardians will securely “certify token lockups and burns on one chain in order to mint new tokens or release tokens on the other, and vice versa,” Shabel wrote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Solana foundation is now inviting developers to use Wormhole in a hackathon that will begin October 28.</span></p>