Security＃
Global Accountant＃
The Global Accountant is a defense-in-depth security feature that checks the integrity of every token transfer. It ensures that chain balances remain isolated and more tokens cannot be burned and transferred out of a chain than were ever minted.
This feature ensures native asset fungibility remains in 1:1 parity. At no time will assets coming from a spoke chain exceed the number of native assets sent to that spoke chain. The Guardians, with their role in enforcing accounting transparency, provide a reassuring layer of security, attesting to a Native Token Transfer (NTT) only if it passes integrity checks.
Contact Wormhole contributors if you are interested in configuring the Global Accountant for your multichain deployment.
Governance and Upgradeability＃
Integrators should implement governance mechanisms to manage the addition and removal of transceivers and to upgrade contracts using proxy patterns, as demonstrated in the upgrade functions in the NttManager contracts. These processes can also set thresholds and rules for attestation and message approval.
The registry component of the NTT system is crucial for maintaining a trusted list of transceivers and managing their status. Governance processes for the following actions can be submitted directly to the corresponding contract on-chain, whether it is one or multiple of the bridging contracts or one of the token contracts:
- Adding or removing a transceiver address from the registry
- Setting the token contract address on a bridging contract
- Setting the Wormhole Core Contract address on a bridging contract
- Setting the registered bridging contract address on the token contract
This governance model ensures that the system remains secure while being adaptable to new requirements in any environment where it is deployed.