Wormhole Ecosystem Map in India: Key Opportunities
An overview of Indian projects using Wormhole to build the future of cross-chain technology and the potential opportunities.
Blockchains are like cities — each with its own ecosystem and serving its niche. Similar to how there are multiple cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and so on, each serving a specific niche yet generally sharing the same infrastructural traits, such as having hospitals and schools. We now live in a multi-chain world, where there are not just L1s like Ethereum and Solana, but L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism, now even L3s and appchains! Just like roads helped connect the cities, cross-chain bridges and messaging protocols like Wormhole are now helping connect the blockchains.
Started as a Solana Hackathon Project by Certus One, but not just it survived massive hacks but quickly rose to be one of the top cross-chain bridges with 100+ projects building on top of Wormhole.🤯
These projects range from DeFi to Stablecoins to wallets to NFTs and are spread all across the world. But today, we will focus the spotlight on one of the key emerging markets, which has given stellar projects like Polygon, which can potentially become the biggest crypto market in terms of users and hosts one of the world's largest pools of developer talents - India! 🇮🇳
In this essay, we will see all Indian projects building in the Wormhole Ecosystem, identify key opportunities, and what are the key projects that can integrate Wormhole and go cross-chain!
What is Wormhole in a nutshell?
Wormhole is an interoperability protocol that allows projects to build on top of its generic message-passing layer. Think of Wormhole as a communication layer between isolated blockchains or bridges between islands (blockchains). It has two major components:
Asset Bridge: Facilitates the flow of capital (tokens) across blockchains [xAssets]
General Messaging: Facilitates the flow of Information (message) across blockchains [data]
Wormhole has facilitated over $35 billion in volumes and over 350 Million messages. To top it up, Wormhole is fully backed by Jump Crypto, one of the most ambitious and well-funded funds in the crypto space!
We won’t go into much detail, but we have written a 4000+ words essay on the same topic 6 months ago - do check it out.
Wormhole Ecosystem in India: Current State
While we truly believe crypto is inherently global, and we can’t divide them based on geographies, we will try out best to segregate them based on the criteria — If one of the founders of the team is based out of India or the team has spent considerate years in India!
Infrastructure:
1. Polygon
One of the largest Ethereum scaling solutions was started in India as a Proof-of-stake sidechain for Ethereum and now has a suite of scaling solutions like zkEVM, rollups, and supernets. MATIC is one of the top 10 cryptos by market cap with $8 billion+ and has one of the largest ecosystems with partnerships with brands like Starbucks, Reddit, Nike, and so on.
Wormhole Integration: Polygon is integrated as one of the 20 chains by Wormhole, supports cross-chain bridging and messaging, and has over $7 million in TVL. Further, Polygon is one of the strategic partners for Wormhole in initiatives like the $50 million ecosystem fund, Jump Pit, and so on!
Founders: Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Anurag Arjun (left Polygon in March 2023), and others.
Socials: Website | Twitter | Discord | Instagram | Telegram
2. Biconomy
Biconomy is a relayer infrastructure network and transaction highway, providing developers with the ultimate toolkit to leverage smart contract wallets & build custom transaction journeys to reduce the friction between applications built on the blockchain and the end user.
Wormhole Integration: While it has several features, it has a “chainless module” where developers can leverage cross-chain calls to abstract everything to do with cross-chain. Users don’t need to know what chain dApp is on. They can use your dApp from any chain in a single click. Biconomy uses Wormhole in the background to power the cross-chain use-cases.
Founders: Ahmed Al-Balaghi (CEO), Aniket Jindal (COO), Sachin Tomar (CTO) Socials: Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram
dApps
Chingari (GARI):
Chingari is an on-chain video-sharing app that lets the user create short-form video content in over 15 languages. Think of this as Tiktok but for Web3. The app has already been downloaded more than 175 million times on the Google Play Store and ranks among the top 20 most downloaded apps worldwide. Chingari is powered by the GARI network and aims to enable content creators to monetize their videos using its native $GARI token.
Wormhole Integration [Aptos <> Solana]: Chingari aims to leverage Wormhole's messaging protocol and bridge its native token to Aptos (while staying native to Solana) - aiming to significantly expand its social token ecosystem and has the following advantages:
Interoperability: The GARI network will be able to enable smooth asset and data transfers between various blockchain ecosystems by adopting xChain functionality.
Scalability and Increased security: Being Multi-chain enables GARI to offload some transactional load to other networks, improving performance and preventing single points of failure from occurring.
The best part is users who get onboarded to Chingari will not experience forced migrations in the Chingari app, and all the operations will be carried in the backend via Wormhole!
Founders: Sumit Ghosh, Biswatma Nayak, Deepak Salvi, and Aditya Kothar (recently left Chingari in May 2023)
Socials: Website | Twitter | Discord | Instagram | Telegram
Kriya:
Kriya enables traders to experience Institutional grade trading on-chain and offers a suite of products like leveraged perps, options & OTC Desk to swap size. It’s built on the SUI network, a Move VM-based L1.
Wormhole Integration: Kriya is one of the first dApps to use Wormhole connect, bringing wrapped and native token bridging directly into any application in as few as 3 lines of code. Kriya is using Wormhole Connect to power an in-app bridge on their DEX.
Founders: Aditya Dwivedi
Socials: Website | Twitter | Discord
Payments:
There are two payments projects based out of India that have experimented with Wormhole to enable cross-chain payments and might soon be launching Wormhole integration:
Purple pay app: It is building a borderless payment infrastructure, which will allow you to send and receive crypto seamlessly across the globe. Purple Pay also won Most Scalable Award at Polygon x Jump Pit in Singapore.
Founder: Saumya Saxena, Arunank Divya Sharan
Socials: Twitter
CopperX: It allows merchants to accept payments in Bitcoin, ETH, and USDC seamlessly across various networks and wallets. Merchants get instant settlements, send payouts and manage their business online with a unified dashboard.
Communities
Superteam India
Superteam is a talent community with chapters worldwide and is a community of operators, devs & grantees working on promising Solana projects.
Wormhole Integration: Being one of the most active communities, Wormhole has partnered with Superteam to launch initiatives like:
Wormhole xGrants: Grants up to $10k for building on Wormhole!
Cross-chain Clubhouse: 15-day IRL buildstation in Bengaluru.
It has also produced fun videos for Wormhole, which has gathered more than 325k views on Twitter! Another interesting video was created by a Superteam member, who explained the process of bridging in Hindi!
Socials: Website | Twitter | Discord
Potential Wormhole Integrations for Top Indian Projects:
Let’s now look at some of the potential integrations for Wormhole, which can be done by Indian projects:
Wallets:
Obvious:
Obvious is a Smart wallet, which allows you to pay gas in a token of your choice and approve/sign transactions with a single click.
Wormhole Integration: It can use Wormhole Connect to allow its users to seamlessly bridge from one chain to another, all within the wallet.Frontier: Frontier is a non-custodial wallet for Crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and more across 35+ Blockchains.
Wormhole Integration: It can use Wormhole to add another bridging route and allow users to get an option for a better bringing experience.
Infrastructure:
Flint Labs: Originally started as an investment app to invest in DeFi yields, it has now pivoted to making a suite of DeFi products, with the first product being GasPay, which enables anyone to pay gas fees in any token and is now live on Arbitrum and Polygon.
Wormhole Integration: Gaspay being a multi-chain product (EVM L2s), can very well utilize Wormhole to enable anyone to pay gas fees in one chain while using another chain, abstracting away all complexities for the user.Push Protocol: Push Protocol is a decentralized communication protocol for Web3 that aims to improve the user experience and enable seamless communication between users in the decentralized web. It offers several features, including Push Notifications, Push Chat, Push Group Chat, and Push Video Chat.
Wormhole Integration: Push protocol can power its cross-chain notifications service via Womrhole messaging protocol since it is already a multi-chain project and will soon expand to Solana.Coinshift: Coinshift is a treasury management solution for DAOs and organizations that simplifies treasury operations for users, delivers actionable insights to financial managers, and increases transparency for communities and investors
Wormhole Integration: Coinshift can leverage Wormhole for cross-chain treasury management and payments.RazrFi (previously Solrazr): RazrFi is one of first AI-driven Multichain launchpads, which allows for large allocations and high win rates with the assurance of 'IDO price guarantee’.
Wormhole Integration: RazrFi, a multi-chain launchpad, can integrate Wormhole to power seamless cross-chain project listings.
Huddle01: Huddle is a real-time communication platform enabling cross-chain audio and video communication. It allows developers to integrate real-time communication features into their dApps, including token-gated meetings, instant meetings, recording and storage, multistreaming, and more.
Wormhole Integration: Huddle01 can use Wormhole to power its cross-chain audio and video offerings, and it can also be used for its upcoming wallet-to-wallet communication app for information transfer.
Further, other Indian projects like Mesha, Capx, InstadApp, and Stader Labs can also integrate Wormhole very well.
There are 50+ projects in India that can potentially use Wormhole to go cross-chain; however, keeping the length in mind, we tried to showcase major projects only which can potentially go cross-chain and have a greater impact on its existing user base! Further, we haven’t included any projects whose non-CXOs are based in India as we don’t consider them an Indian project.
Closing Thoughts:
With India being a hotbed of talent, every protocol is bullish on Indian expansion and wants to develop its presence. Being the largest populous country, no one wants to miss out on the great Indian opportunity. Wormhole is taking its first step and still has plenty of room for expanding the Wormhole ecosystem in India - be it by encouraging developers to build cross-chain tools using the Wormhole layer or enabling Indian projects to go cross-chain or tap into a huge userbase for its cross-chain bridge. Communities like SuperteamDAO will be key for enabling Wormhole to tap into maximum developers, projects, and users. We are excited to see how the Wormhole community shapes up in India!
Cheers for staying with us!
Found it insightful? Share it with your friends! If you have any suggestions or want us to deep dive into your project, we would love to connect — Sitesh Sahoo and Yash Agarwal