Axelar Network Overview
Introduction
A year of 2020 has marked the beginning of the multichain era. Multiple blockchain ecosystems have been emerging on a monthly basis, which now provides unique features that are attractive to users and application builders. Very soon there appeared a term each of us heard many times — interoperability. Not everyone gets its true meaning though. Let me elaborate on it and explain in the simplest way possible. So, there are multiple blockchains, each having a decent set of features. Most of them are ‘stand alones’ at the moment. Now, here is the first thing coming to one’s mind — ‘Is there a way to combine all the best feature setups from each blockchain in order to enhance every single one of them?’. This is what interoperability actually stands for — cross-chain communication.
Unfortunately, various chains cannot communicate between themselves just like that. There has to be someone in between, just like an interpreter, if we put it simply, who will receive some data from one side and hand it over to the other side in a comprehensive language. Besides, we are not willing to create some space for centralization, but the other way around — the solution must be fully decentralized. With that brief prologue, you are now ready to meet this painkiller, the crypto community has been waiting so long for — Axelar Network.
What is Axelar?
Axelar stack provides a decentralized network, protocols, tools, and APIs that allow simple cross-chain communication, enabling applications to communicate across blockchain ecosystems frictionlessly. Axelar protocol suite consists of cross-border routing and transfer protocols. A decentralized open network of validators powers the network — anyone can join, use it, and participate. Byzantine consensus, cryptography, and incentive mechanisms are designed to achieve high safety and liveness requirements unique for cross-chain requests.
Who is behind the project?
The Co-Founders of the Axelar Network are Sergey Gorbunov, founding team member & head of cryptography at Algorand, and Georgios Vlachos, founding team member & head of mathematics at Algorand. The first draft of the Whitepaper was released in January 2021.
Axelar has raised $3,75 million from Binance X, DCVC and some other leading blockchain and crypto industry players during its seed funding round. During the Axelar’s Series A funding round, led by Polychain Capital, Axelar has raised $25 million to scale network integrations for complete industry-wide blockchain interoperability. Later on, Axelar announced strategic funding from Crypto.com Capital. A full list of project backers can be found here.
The network ecosystem partners list consists of: Avalanche, Moonbeam, Terra, Polygon, Ethereum, Cosmos, Keplr, Chainode Tech, Pangolin, Chorus, Cosmostation, Citadel.one, Metrika, P-OPS Team.
Roadmap
The first steps done included releasing the Whitepaper, closing the Seed Funding Round and creating the Initial Designing. The initial integrations with Bitcoin and Ethereum, followed by the Testnet 1 launch have marked the beginning of the interoperability era led by Axelar.
At the moment of composition of this article, the Axelar Network Team has announced the beginning of the mainnet rollout. That means, we are on the edge of decentralized asset transfer dApps launching on Axelar an initial set of assets and chains, allowing applications to integrate with the solutions Axelar provides.
The story will end with a whole ecosystem of applications and solutions built around the Axelar network. All the ecosystems and developers will be able to build on any blockchain and enable arbitrary cross-chain composability via the Axelar’s infrastructure stack.
What makes Axelar different from other cross-chain solutions?
The existing solutions may be divided into 2 groups:
- Projects that have been working on interoperability within their own ecosystems. The issue with that is in order to connect external blockchains that are based on different consensus rules and software stacks, we need new protocols and techniques that Axelar is capable of providing.
- Due to the growing need for interoperability in the ecosystem, there appeared many unproven centralized point-to-point bridging solutions.
What makes Axelar a perfect fit?
- Decentralized and open for participation to anyone
- Universal in its approach to connectivity, enabling scalability across arbitrary L1, L2, Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS) chains
- Capable of performing cross-ecosystem message routing and translation functionalities
- Open to any developer who wishes to integrate on top of the network
Use Cases of the Axelar Network
- The Axelar network unlocks liquidity for DeFi. Given universal asset mobility across the ecosystems, DeFi builders can benefit from more liquidity and distribution channels.
- Developers can build cross-chain bridge applications to allow users to move their assets from one ecosystem to another. Axelar is building a sample application for this use case and we encourage independent developers to create their own.
- The Axelar Network also allows applications to compose across arbitrary chains: Suppose you have a DEX on chain A with assets (X, Y), and a DEX on chain B with assets (Y, Z). If you want to swap X -> Z, you can use the Axelar protocol for general composability.
How to get involved?
There is an ongoing Quantum Community Program, for non-technical members. Feel free to submit your application and become a part of the Axelar’s community, even if you are not a technical individual, every contribution counts, show out your creativity!
For buidlers — Contribute to Axelar’s Network’s development by submitting an ecosystem project.
