How does Wormhole's guardian network work?

Wormhole uses 19 guardian nodes run by reputable entities. When 13 of 19 guardians observe and sign a cross-chain message, they produce a VAA (Verified Action Approval) — a cryptographic proof that any destination chain can verify and act on.

What is a VAA in Wormhole?

A VAA (Verified Action Approval) is a signed attestation from Wormhole guardians confirming that an event occurred on a source chain. It contains the message payload plus guardian signatures and can be submitted to any destination chain to trigger actions.

Is Wormhole safe after the $320M hack?

Wormhole was exploited for $320M in February 2022 due to a signature verification bug, which Jump Crypto covered. The protocol has since undergone extensive audits and introduced NTT (Native Token Transfers) for improved security architecture.

Wormhole: Guardian Network & VAAs

Wormhole uses a Proof-of-Authority model: 19 guardian nodes run by reputable entities (Jump Crypto, Everstake, Staked, etc.) observe every supported chain. When 13 of 19 guardians sign a message, it produces a VAA (Verified Action Approval) — a portable proof that any destination chain can verify. Simple, fast, and battle-tested with over 1 billion messages processed.

Guardian Network Consensus

19 guardians must reach 13/19 (⅔+1) consensus to produce a valid VAA. Click guardians to simulate them going offline and see how it affects the network.

Online Guardians

19 / 19

Consensus Status

✅ Healthy

Fault Tolerance

Can lose 6 guardians

Signatures Needed

Guardian operators include: Jump Crypto, Everstake, Chorus One, P2P, Staked, Figment, ChainodeTech, Inotel, HashQuark, ChainLayer, xLabs, Forbole, StakingFund, MoonletWallet, MCF, Certus One, Triton, RockX, Blockchain Sherpa

VAA (Verified Action Approval) Lifecycle

Step through how a VAA is created, signed, and consumed. VAAs are the atomic unit of cross-chain communication in Wormhole.

Step 1 / 6

1. Emit Message: A contract on the source chain calls wormhole.publishMessage(nonce, payload, consistencyLevel). The core bridge contract logs the message with a sequence number.

VAA Structure Explorer

A VAA is a binary-encoded struct. Hover over each field to understand what it contains.

version

1 byte

guardian_set_idx

00000004

4 bytes

sig_count

0d (13)

1 byte

signatures[13]

00 + r[32] + s[32] + v[1] ... × 13

858 bytes

timestamp

67890abc

4 bytes

nonce

00000001

4 bytes

emitter_chain

0002 (Ethereum)

2 bytes

emitter_address

0x00..0098f3c9e6E3fAce36bAAd05FE09d9F0...

32 bytes

sequence

0000000000001a4f

8 bytes

consistency_level

1 byte

payload

application-specific bytes...

variable

Wormhole Latency Simulator

Wormhole latency depends on source chain finality + guardian observation time. Adjust parameters to estimate end-to-end delivery time.

Source Chain Finality 15 blocks (~3 min) Consistency Level Confirmed Guardian Observation Speed Normal Relayer Speed Standard

Chain Finality

~3 min

Guardian Signing

~15s

Relay + Execution

~30s

Total E2E

~3.75 min