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 https://twitter.com/solana/status/1314190920024125440?s=20

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.

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.

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.

5/ To use Wormhole, trusting Solana security is not sufficient. A completely separate set of participants with different incentives is securing the bridge.

6/ Different chains are built for different use cases, and in the World of 2021 applications will be running on a wide variety of different chains with different properties. Interoperability between such chains will be of crucial importance.

7/ No matter how secure Ethereum, Solana or NEAR are, any complex multi-chain system running on them will only be as secure as the underlying bridges between them. Protocols designed with Interoperability from day one will naturally have more secure bridges.

8/ Learn more about NEAR<>ETH bridge and its security assumptions and guarantees here: https://near.org/blog/eth-near-rainbow-bridge/