Axelar: The Gateway into a Cross-Chain Future

Introduction

The 2020-2021 cycle cemented the belief in a multi-chain future. While public blockchain rails enabled the creation of composable financial products for more capital-efficient systems, high gas fees on Ethereum and the desire to be early to emerging ecosystems led to communities forming on other chains.

The migration of users and capital fragmented liquidity, creating poor UX for users transacting on multiple chains, and has made it difficult for developers to reach the wider crypto userbase. This has created an opportunity for cross-chain infrastructure to become core to the crypto stack. Token bridges like Hop and general message-passing protocols like Axelar attempt to abstract away the cross-chain experience to unlock innovation and onboard new users.

Unfortunately, designing trustless cross-chain infrastructure is hard. Each known design today has its tradeoffs and risk assumptions. Due to the complicated trust assumptions of these systems, bridges have been exploited for over $2.5B.

No solution is perfect, but Axelar believes it is the universal network that can handle asset routing, message translation, and security between connected blockchains.

Axelar Overview

Built on the Cosmos SDK, Axelar is an IBC-compatible general cross-chain communication network founded by ex-Algorand founding team members Sergey Gorbunov and Georgios Vlachos. In addition to producing blocks and validating on-chain transfers, validators run light clients for all supported chains and use Tendermint consensus to confirm the cross-chain activity processed by the network.