1/ NEAR was built with interoperability with other chains in mind from day one. From the ground up NEAR is designed to enable such interoperability.
Now that other bridges, such as Wormhole, are announced, it's a good time to see how the designs differ
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2/ On NEAR for another chain to prove any statement about the state or history of NEAR chain, they only need to download and validate two block headers per day, and are secure for as long as no more than 1/3 of the total stake of NEAR validators is corrupted.
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3/ In other words, any NEAR bridge running on another chain has the same security assumption as the NEAR chain itself. For as long as NEAR is secure, each bridge on each other chain is secure as well.
It is different from oracle-based chains such as Wormhole.
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4/ To prove some statement about the state or history of Solana on another chain, Wormhole uses a separate set of Oracles, who do a multisig on the statement. It is a very different security model from a model in which the bridge is as secure as the chain itself.
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5/ To use Wormhole, trusting Solana security is not sufficient. A completely separate set of participants with different incentives is securing the bridge.
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Replying to
so:
1) I agree NEAR's bridges are great
2) note that in the _particular_ case of wormhole I think a bunch of Solana block producers are the ones securing the bridge so it is in fact mostly the same set of participants.