Axelar Network Overview: Empowering Blockchains with Decentralized Interoperability

Introduction

Current state of cryptocurrency is similar to the state of the Internet around 25 years ago. It’s new and exciting, but it still lacks speed and simplicity. It is crucial to connect all of them, allowing all users to communicate with each other and transfer their assets easily. Many modern blockchains still do not have all the functions the user is looking for, it’s usually a lot of pain or even completely impossible to transfer assets from one blockchain to another.

A number of so-called bridges are being created that try to solve the problem of cross chain transfers, but they usually have limited functionality and support only a few assets, in most cases it’s even not a transfer, but exchange of tokens on different networks.

What is Axelar?

Crypto is growing and more projects come to solve the pains. Axelar Network comes to help us with it.

It is a decentralized network that connects stand-alone blockchains, such as the Bitcoin Network and Ethereum, as well as cross-chain hubs, such as Cosmos or Polkadot. Axelar enables cross-chain communication by providing a decentralized network that can be used for cross-chain requests.

Who founded the project?

The project was founded by Sergey Gorbunov and Georgios Vlachos, both are members and heads of Algorand. Whitepaper draft 1.0. was published in January 2021.

Axelar had three funding rounds:

• Seed funding of $3.75 with investments secured from Binance X, DCVC, Lemniscap, Collab+Currency, North Island Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Cygni Labs, Waikit Lau, and Naval Ravikant.
• Series A funding of $25m million investments secured from Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital; Galaxy Digital; North Island Ventures; Robot Ventures; Collab+Currency; Cygni Capital; Lemniscap; Divergence Ventures; SCB 10X; Hypersphere; Zola Global Investors; Nima Capital; and GoldenCoin TS LLC.
• Strategic Investment round led by Crypto.com Capital and followed by Informal Systems Inc; SushiSwap’s co-founder, 0xMaki; Morningstar Ventures; Scytale Ventures and Zero Knowledge Validator.

Axelar has an impressive list of ecosystem partners: Ethereum, Cosmos, Polygon, Avalanche, Moonbeam, Terra, Keplr, Chainode Pangolin, Tech, Chorus, Cosmostation and others.

What about roadmap?

The Axelar team has done big steps during last year, succeeded in:

• Releasing the whitepaper;
• Seed financing rounds;
• Initial design;
• First testnet launch and initial integrations with Bitcoin, Ethereum;
• Support of EVM chains and IBC-compatibility.

The team already announced rollout of public mainnet launch for February 2022. Thus, we are on the verge of a decentralized transfer of dApps assets bringing decentralized interoperability to Ethereum, Avalanche, Terra, Moonbeam and others.

This launch will benefit everyone:

1. Blockhain platform builders can plug-in their blockchain to all other ecosystems;

2. dApps builders can host their application anywhere, lock, unlock, transfer assets, and communicate with applications on any other chain via Axelar API;

3. Users can interact with all applications across the ecosystem directly from their wallet;

It all leads to the result everyone was waiting for: developers from any ecosystem will be able to deploy dApps on any blockchain and enable arbitrary cross-chain composability via the Axelar’s network.

What does Axelar help with?

• “Plug-and-play” integration. Blockchain platform builders will be able to plug in any existing or new blockchain frictionlessly by help of cross-chain protocol easily and with minimal efforts;
• Cross-chain routing. Axelar supports the discovery of addresses across the ecosystems, applications, and routing;
• Upgradability support. No need for blockchain developers to trace updates or changes on any blockchain, our support systems recognize them with minimal effort;
• Uniform language for applications. The used protocol supports simple calls, analogous to HTTP/HTTPS protocols that allow users and browsers to communicate with any web-server.

Thus, Axelar provides new protocols and techniques to connect one blockchain with another and so to have cross-chain interoperability for any developer and builder.

What are the Axelar protocols?

1. Cross-Chain Gateway Protocol (CGP) — connects multiple autonomous blockchain ecosystems and is responsible for routing across them;

2. Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CTP) — serves as the gateway, allowing applications to perform simple queries via a unified API (think FTP, HTTP/HTTPS) to facilitate cross-chain operations.

What benefits does Axelar provide?

• Simplicity, openness and decentralization for everyone;
• Crosschain dApps building, message routing and transfering functionalities. Any developer and builder can start working no matter which blockchain he is used to;
• It enables scalability across arbitrary PoW, PoS, L1 and L2 chains;
• Axelar protocols provide unheard progress in cross-chain operations and routing.

What can Axelar be used for?

• To build cross-chain bridge applications to move the assets from one blockchain to another without any headache.
• To create and connect applications in arbitrary chains.
• To unlock DeFi liquidity due to universal asset mobility across the chains and ecosystems

What do we have at the end?

Axelar solves the problem of modern cryptocurrency networks, it just makes the building and usage of crypto tools and dApps easier for users and developers. Making it possible to build on the best platforms for their needs and leverage a simple protocol and API to access global cross-chain liquidity, users, and communicate with other chains.

by petrprymov#4435