Sergey Gorbunov on Axelar’s cross chain communication protocol

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have sergey gorbanov the co-founder of axillar sergey welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time to come on thanks for inviting me great to be here you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into axillar as a protocol

0:22really focused on cross communication i think it's going to be necessary for the blockchain space to evolve into the next level i would love for you to kick it off by just giving an overview of axler and some of the solutions that you're providing into the space and then we can dive into the details yeah for sure so xlr is a universal uh interoperability protocol and

0:42infrastructure that allows you to connect uh distinct blockchain ecosystems applications and users right and on the high level um the problem that we're solving is that today we live in a world of many different distinct chains that have been developed each one of them optimizing for unique technical characteristics or target specific markets and use cases right but what's

1:04lacking in the space are good robust interoperability solutions and protocols and that's what we're focusing on uh at the axle by building this infrastructure to bridge all these different ecosystems definitely and yeah it's something that needs to be done i'm sure it will be done and your team's working on it but there also are other projects that have been working on it because

1:26it's an obvious friction in the market where there's all these isolated blockchains that can't really speak to each other especially in the decentralized world trying to move assets across blockchains without having to go through centralized providers is something that has yet to be uh worked out perfectly um so you know there are other projects that are working on this obviously um

1:48it's good to have multiple people working on on to towards the same goal i'd love to know you know what sort of makes xlr different provides a competitive advantage and your approach to getting this cross communication in blockchains yeah so they're really you know a few categories of different projects that you see in the market today one are protocols that allow you to interoperate

2:11uh within certain ecosystems right so for instance uh in the uh polkadot ecosystem or within the cosmos ecosystem they have their own interoperability protocols which work quite well but they only work well for connecting blockchains or power chains that are native to those ecosystems right so at the very core those protocols kind of understand specific consensus mechanisms that those

2:34blockchains are built on and that's what allows them to tick and kind of interoperate within them but external technologies and new protocols are needed to uh really connect blockchains that speak very different languages or have distinct software stacks right so for instance bitcoin and ethereum and avalanche and cosmos blockchains they all have very very different software

2:54stacks and consensus mechanisms and so you need different protocols to connect them and so as a result we've seen a few solutions being developed in the market but a lot of them are very centralized today right so it's it's quite easy for you to go and build you know a centralized bridge with a few uh kind of a buddies to set up like a multi-stick account and transfer assets

3:16back and forth uh but really doesn't solve uh the problem for the ecosystem right to really bridge a decentralized network with another decentralized network like you need decentralized and trustless interoperability protocols so um and that's a that's that's very hard technical problem and that's what we're focusing on at the at the actual network is really building a network that

3:36remains decentralized where anybody can join and and run the protocol um and at the core of it our goal is to be able to plug in an arbitrary software stack right so no matter what the underlying consensus is on your blockchain no matter what kind of a technical decisions the platform builders have made we should still be able to plug it in and connect them with

3:58other ecosystems and so that's that's the approach that the axler's taken by designing this protocol definitely and i like the approach sergey and i think uh that you mentioned development and the development software stacks i think that's super important you know more than just understanding uh trying to move you know bitcoin to ethereum removing assets across chains

4:20is the development of all of these layer one protocols and smart contracts that are on them and the dapps that are on them how are those dapps going to be cross-compatible you know how are you going to have ethereum dapps working on a different blockchain how are you going to have other blockchains that have different programming languages have their dapps compatible with

4:38ethereum and vice versa so maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the cross chain development and and the focus that axler has on the development side for dapps yeah no it's a great question when we talk about interoperability we have to realize that an entire set of protocols and solutions has to be built right we're not talking about just a

5:00protocol that allows you to deliver assets like you said but uh so what we have designed at the actual network is really kind of different sets of protocols right so some protocols are at the very bottom of the layer that are simply responsible for delivering messages and like finalizing transactions on one chain and so on and so forth but then we're also thinking

5:20and working on a set of protocols that applications can integrate directly with right and so those are application level protocols that um if you build your application on one blockchain you'll be able to interact with those application level protocols to compose with other ecosystems right and a simple analogy you can think of is if you're building on ethereum you

5:41can easily interact with different erc20 assets by issuing a few function calls right and so we're trying to create similar set of protocols and standards at the application level where as an application builder you can um you can simply make calls to be able to interact with us assets that are uh belonging to other ecosystems or execute a call to perform

6:00kind of a smart contract functionality on a different chain and so on and so forth and so we need to build those unified uh application level protocols to really enable this composability of applications definitely and what do you think uh should be the specific focus on attracting developers to be actually be using it you know is it just ease of use

6:21or uh breadth of programming languages more sdks you know how are you really going to get developers interested yeah it's a it's a great question um i think two things of course you have to work on usability right so your tooling is quite important you have to make sure the developers know how to use it and so on and so forth and so the approach that we've taken

6:41from the uh from day one was to really allow developers to build on any platform that they want and use the languages and sdk and the tooling of those blockchain platforms and be able to interact with our sort of gateway contracts that are deployed in the tool and in the languages of that platform right so if you deployed a solidity contract on ethereum you'll be able to

7:01interact with our protocols which is just another uh you know set of contracts in the solidity deployed on a similar platform and so you already have the tool and you already understand how to how to communicate with those um apis so that's one thing um but the second one is once the developers understand that kind of this interoperability and cross chain

7:23support allows them to bring more liquidity and more users to the applications and there is naturally uh you know a requirement for them to integrate in order to be competitive in the market right so if one of your competing uh decks is integrated with an interoperability stack and has a lot more liquidity has a lot more reachability and distribution

7:43then if you're building your own decks you have to do the same right you have to bring this liquidity you have to be able to support as many assets as possible and so there is naturally um kind of a networking effect that starts kicking in after some initial integrations take place definitely and speaking of dexes and liquidity i'm curious within xlr you

8:04know how focused is your team on the d5 world and you know that's really been one of the highest growing areas besides nfts in in the blockchain space in the last year what is your team doing within d5 yeah so our goal uh as i mentioned is to really empower these d5 blockchain uh developers right so we don't um we're focused on the infrastructure we focus

8:28on building these protocols and the uh interconnected layer across different blockchain ecosystems and uh we're working with different uh d5 projects in order to give them this uh kind of cross chain uh support composability and liquidity uh across different ecosystems so uh super excited about the d5 and uh and i would love to see it uh go even uh given even further as we enable this

8:52cross chain definitely me too and as well i saw it within xlr that there's also a native token that functions within the ecosystem maybe you can talk about the xlr token what are the main functionalities and does it create a sustainable ecosystem for all the participants yeah it's a great question so um if you want to support any decentralized protocol

9:16that's permissionless you have to have various civil resistance mechanisms right and so you know you see in the proof of stake networks you naturally have uh governance tokens that provide you this civil resistance mechanisms allow people to kind of participate uh and uh um pay transaction fees when they transact and use the protocol and uh earned various uh kind of incentives

9:39for participating in the ecosystem right and so actually protocol itself is a um is a decentralized network and so naturally there is a governance token that will be uh behind it that will support the decentralized protocol allow users to stake uh to run validator nodes and um to pay transaction fees and so on and so forth definitely good to know and there's so

10:04much in the development pipeline i know that you're working with as a big job to connect blockchains and have the right ecosystem for development uh to have all this cross-compatibility especially with the rate that d5 is growing at and trying to keep up just to that and then surpassing that it's a lot maybe you can talk about with your team's goals in the next six

10:27months to a year what are the sort of main functionalities that you're looking to drive into the market yeah great question so currently we are in a test net environment where we're testing the network protocol kind of onboarding various ecosystem players like validators you know folks that are building dashboards wallets around the networks and initial integrations

10:49and uh kind of the roadmap for us over the next six months to a year is to make this protocol robust and safe and secure so we have all kinds of audits that are scheduled on the network where performing more testing uh add in new sets of functionalities and then launch it to the market with initial integrations um to support basic uh asset transfers in a

11:10decentralized way across uh autonomous ecosystems like we talked about great and maybe you can talk about way down the road when you know the main nets out it's fully compatible blockchains are speaking to each other in different languages uh you know where do you see what do you see as the key factors to success in getting axler to that point of you know being the

11:36go-to cross-communication protocol yeah i mean i i think my strong view is that to really enable a multi-chain and uh interoperability across ecosystems it's not about a single protocol right there's all kinds of infrastructure that's missing in the ecosystem like i said from routing protocols to application level protocols to tooling that you need to really

11:58monitor a different blockchain to understand what is the state of different contracts indexing around them and so on and so forth and so it's it's not a you know one year journey or two year journey i think we as an ecosystem are going to have to you know build all kinds of solutions uh and you know axler is going to be contributing across the entire stack from initial protocols to

12:19building tools to really make it simple for developers to leverage this multi-chain ecosystem going forward and for us i think a success really looks like like this i think today we're still talking about all these different networks and different bridging technologies but i think as an ecosystem we have to shift the focus and attention a little bit and

12:40talk a little bit more about assets and applications right and that's what really we want um you know just like we're uh doing a video called right now our information is routed across all kinds of networks and we don't talk about it right there is all kinds of hops and routers that are uh delivering information from you to me at this point and we have to

13:00get to a similar position in the blockchain ecosystem where users get to directly interact with applications no matter where they are assuming they have you know strong security guarantees and they were deployed on um robust networks and so that's what we're working towards definitely and i'm looking forward to that as well sergey and for the viewers

13:19that are looking to learn more about axlr and the protocol and the community what's the best way for them to get involved and learn more yeah i think the best uh starting point would be to visit our website axler.network uh you'll be able to find various links to the discord uh where we have an active developer community we'll have a test network that's running so

13:39you can sign up to participate in that and we have very social channels from uh twitter to telegram where you can come in ask about the white paper ask about some of the blogs or some of the other materials that we uh publish regularly sounds great sergey and i will also leave those links in the description box below all the best with axillary network

13:58moving forward and let's follow up in the near future sounds great thanks ashley