Guardians
Wormhole relies upon a set of distributed nodes which monitor state on several blockchains. In Wormhole these nodes are referred to as Guardians. The current guardian set can be seen in the Wormhole Explorer.
It is the guardians role to observe messages and sign the corresponding payloads. Each guardian performs this step in isolation, later combining the resulting signatures with other guardians as a final step. The resulting collection of independent observations form a multisig which represents a proof that a state has been observed and agreed upon by a majority of the wormhole network. These multisigs are referred to as VAA's in Wormhole.
Last modified 4mo ago