Exclusive Interview with Sergey Gorbunov, CEO, and Co-Founder, Axelar

Trading in cryptocurrencies is not as easy and convenient as transacting money with a traditional banking system. Technology has progressed so much so that even a toddler can navigate an application on iPhone effortlessly. Cryptocurrency trading is altogether a different story. One needs to have good technical know-how to even start trading on a blockchain network. Axelar, to make dApp development smooth, has come up with a proof-of-stake transport layer-powered cross-platform network, wherein users and developers can transact across networks with just one click. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sergey Gorbunov, CEO, and Co-Founder, of Axelar.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers

Today's blockchain UX is nothing like the web. Users with assets on one blockchain find it difficult to use applications on others. Axelar changes this. Using Axelar as the universal cross-chain overlay network, dApp developers create secure, one-click experiences that access any function, any asset, on any chain. Axelar delivers secure cross-chain communication for Web3.

The Axelar network is an infrastructure that enables dApp users to interact with any asset or application, on any chain, with one click. Powered by a permissionless Proof-of-Stake transport layer, Axelar network allows dApps to communicate across chains.

Axelar is widely supported and endorsed by way of key integrations with blockchain networks and successful funding rounds from prominent investors. Just like the internet in its early development, blockchain technology will reach mainstream adoption through the interoperability of different networks. In this way, Axelar can be compared to other overlay networks, like CDNs, that opened the door to whole new categories of internet applications.

2. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions to the company and the industry.

Axelar was co-founded by myself and Georgios Vlachos. We previously were part of the founding team at Algorand. Among other things, Georgios designed the Algorand consensus protocol and I led the effort to standardize BLS signatures. That standard is now adopted as a draft in CFRG and was followed by Ethereum 2.0 implementations and others. We have been building secure blockchain infrastructure together for more than five years. I'm also an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo.

In total and since inception, we've led Axelar's Series A, Series B, and general funding rounds, raising US $63.8M.

3. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Axelar is the only network building these capabilities on Proof-of-Stake. Secure cross-chain communication over a dynamic validator set is hard. Other projects have taken shortcuts involving optimistic setups and federated multi-sig, but we believe proof-of-stake is the best path to decentralization, security, and beneficial network effects.

In addition, Axelar has built protocols, APIs, and developer tools that make it easy for application developers to build cross-chain — without learning new programming languages. Our value proposition to the developer is that they can build on the chain that best suits their use case and background, while letting their users access anything on the decentralized web, with one click.

4. What are some of the challenges faced by the industry today?

Blockchain infrastructure is still highly immature, especially relative to the use cases that are built on top of it. It's like trying to run Facebook on infrastructure that's barely ready for Usenet.

Given this immaturity, it's not surprising to see new experiments in infrastructure: new blockchains like Avalanche, Cosmos, Polkadot, and Solana are attracting developers and users (among many others). Now, this growing ecosystem is also fragmented. Users and developers who enter via one network are stuck there in a silo. To use other blockchains requires risky third-party applications called bridges.

The blockchain industry needs an overlay network with visibility into all these networks, agnostic to different infrastructure and consensus models, providing secure routing and translation, any-to-any. Axelar is this overlay.

5. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Today, blockchain developers and users largely consider themselves and their applications as components of a single ecosystem, based around a single blockchain network and a token. In the next cycle, developers will build applications that abstract that attachment for the user, letting them use the application regardless of the ecosystem where they own assets and have an identity and history of transactions.

What new use cases will this new form of application development bring? It's likely to be a surprise, much as YouTube was a surprise to a generation of cable viewers, and Airbnb was a surprise to the hotel industry.

It's hard to pay attention to multiyear development cycles when the market is swinging down or up, but that's what we're focused on at Axelar.

6. How have you seen the evolution of the industry?

The main thing to note about the evolution of the blockchain industry is the huge shift in reputation. Many touted Bitcoin as nonsense, and blockchain as a dying fad. That narrative has receded. Many experiments tried today won't be with us for the long run, but a population is growing that sees cryptocurrency and decentralized systems as technology innovations worth building upon and investing in.