Chapter Three: Partnering with Axelar

So, after looking at two important things — the team and peeking behind the scenes of the Sei Network, you and I have safely reached the next stage — the partnership with Axelar.

For the reference:

Axelar

Website: https://axelar.network/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/axelarcore

Co-founder: Georgios Vlachos

Twitter: https://twitter.com/yorgosv_

And we begin this review by quoting Georgius about what Axelar is today and what his own background is like:

“I am one of the founders of the Axelar project. And I have a technical background. I have a degree in computer science from MIT, along with my co-founder Sergei. We were also part of the founding team of the Algerian project, which was one of the first to prove the feasibility of loan-stacking.

I am personally developing the consensus protocol that we ran on the core network of the algorithm. Sergey has done a lot of fundamental work in the field of cryptography. First, he led the standardization of BLS signatures, which will be the main signature scheme for ETHERIUM 2.0 and many other large blocks in the future, and in the last two years we worked on Axler, which is the first decentralized and secure interoperability network to go into production. Algrant, where developers wanted to build on the new platform, did not have access to much assets from Ethereum, but right now it is much more, and the goal is to allow developers to build their applications on the best platform of their choice, giving access to users and applications on any other team.

There are about 30 people in the team. As I mentioned before, 20 of them are engineers, so for the last two years we have been focusing on safety.

Axelar is not the bridge you hear a lot about in Cosmos. In fact, it is an interaction platform, which means that with Axelar you can send messages across any two chains in the blockchain space, and we actually have about 20 integrations at the moment.

Now, what is a messaging protocol? A messaging protocol that you can think of as a platform on top of which you can build crosschain applications. For example, a bridge, like the ones that many teams before us have built, can easily be built on top of a messaging protocol, essentially locking one asset on one side and then messaging the other side to create another asset. Or by holding pools of liquidity in different chains and doing some cross-chaining.

So you can build all kinds of generalizable logic on top of auxiliary logic, and I think the easiest way to explain what a gas pedal is is with a few examples. And maybe I’ll start with something that I’m particularly concerned about in terms of Cosmos.

So, one very interesting process that the Cosmos team is implementing with us allows users in any blockchain to do inter-chain exchanges. For example, suppose you are a user of the Film blockchain, you have something in your metamask, and you want to get some matik in the Polygon blockchain.

The way this will work is that the user sends only one transaction from his metamask on this side and on the opposite side. What happens is that Axelar is going to bypass Cosmos blocks. Cosmos has liquidity for both it and the Matic, which means it can do an atom transaction to swap the #MATIC, and then the #MATIC asset will be delivered through the gas pedal back to the user.”

You must agree that this is a very decent picture, both from a technological point of view and from the point of view of the company’s ideological direction. Because, as we have already found out, the key to the successful development of any idea is a unified vector of movement of all its participants.

Which, in fact, once again confirms the words of one of the founders of the Sei Network: