Sergey Gorbunov: Axelar – The Blockchain Interoperability Network #433

Transcript

welcome to epcenter the show which talks about the technology projects and people driving decentralization and uh blockchain revolution i'm brian crane and today i'm speaking with sergey gorbanov he's the co-founder of axelr axler is one of the leading interoperability protocols like aiming to kind of uh make all of the blockchains interoperable or or lots of things lots of different diverse product uh protocols very cool project so i'm really excited to to dive into that with sergey now before we do that uh let's briefly go through our sponsors so we have first of all paraswap so parashop is a dex aggregator on ethereum so that means through pairsoft you can

access liquidity on various different decentralized exchanges so the protocol automatically finds the cheapest source of liquidity for you and you know you can get the best price it's also very gas friendly so it keeps your transaction costs low they also added support recently for different evm networks like avalanche polygon bsc and phantom and you can also use it directly from your ledger life and also they've started a kind of dowel so if you want to get involved in that you can do that with their psp token yeah so go check that out that pairs up the io and then second sponsor course one so proof stakes becoming like a major way of securing decentralized networks lots

of different ones including the one we're going to speak about today axelr so course one is running staking infrastructure on lots of different networks allowing you to earn rewards and contribute to network security and doing so in a secure way so it's with billions of people staked on you know around 30 different networks and uh also supporting institutions in participating in the staking economy through you know white label notes so yeah if you're interested uh in staking head over to course.one and start yours taking training there and then before we get started one more thing so my wife has started the podcast

it's called non-conventional and it's really great they have uh guests across like lots of different domain i was a guest on there i think there's some other crypt episodes too but it's like all kinds of things also like entrepreneurship art science etc so you can go and check it out and let me know what you think so you can find it on non-conventional dot show and so with that let's get started uh say gay it's so great to have you finally on epicenter hey brian good to be here pretty excited this is like i have the question of what he was like directly in but maybe you can like take a step back a little bit like how did you

how did you become interested in you know crypto and blockchain yeah so you know i think my background i played with various technologies i think over the years uh originally i worked in the kind of software-defined networking and just distributed systems and then i wanted to um go to grad school to study formal cryptography right so i ended up going to mit to work on theoretical cryptography for a number of years um including you know lattice-based cryptography like functional encryption like multi-party computation protocols and things like that and then you know by the end of the grad school um could i solve a few interesting problems i knew that you know i had enough to

defend my thesis but got a little bit bored right and was looking for a new space and a new uh set of problems to work on and so that's how it started to look at the blockchains and crypto that was around 2014 2015 kind of pretty early days um you know ethereum was still in the early makings and they were figuring out some of the scalability issues and um i started to collaborate with silva mccalley who was a faculty at mit at the time on some of the early designs behind the outground protocol and um you know 2015 i finished um grad school i went to the university of uh waterloo for a few years continuing doing

research there in systems um you know crypto security um and then after that been kind of joined the crypto space full-time right and helped to build out grant uh we took that to the market uh you know two and a half years ago and um since then yeah it's been kind of full time it's uh it's an amazing space to be in i'm pretty excited to build here yeah absolutely there's a pretty pretty unique industry i don't think there's anything like it at least i've not heard of anything like that so one thing i'm curious about so with algorand right you you were part of uh you know like a big blockchain project or a big later one

project now then you went to start axler like your own project so i'm curious like what are the main lessons or learnings that you had from like your time in our ground that you were like okay that's something you know definitely want to do differently or that's like something that's like really important in terms of how you approach launching uh you know crypto protocol yeah great question i mean i think a you know it it is important to say that the timing is probably you know a little bit different right now than when it was when we're launching our grant so you know some of the things that i say uh you know should be revisited right um but i think that being said uh at least building right now over the

last few years i kind of realized that building alongside the community is probably you know one of the most important things right so that as you make in decisions as you're building a network right where you have lots of actors participate in it like validators right you have users you have applications that will be interacting with it um i think getting feedback early getting you know re reacting to the feedback iterating quickly um allowing people to you know contribute and participate and be alongside with you hear their ideas is is kind of quite fundamental right and i and i think this is right now that to me to me that's been one of the most rewarding things i

think building in crypto space and building you know an open network is that um you know we have a core team that that does a lot of development but um i think without the external support of you know folks like uh like you guys chorus one right and other validators and other community members building like dashboards and tools and monitoring services um i think it would be a lot harder to to get where we are so and um we're trying to leverage that i guess to the fullest extent what's your secret to like building the axler community what has worked best i'm not sure if there's you know a specific one secret but i think um being transparent right being open and

where we are you know listening to feedback inviting people um and i think you know it's important to help each other out right as we're building this there's a lot of folks that are kind of get into the space trying to learn how to um you know set up nodes or how to perform simple transactions across networks and things like that and uh just listening to that um providing feedback along the side i think that's you know that that worked quite well with us i think the other things that we have done well is we're running a lot of different um community programs where where we try to structure how people engage with axler right so that we've been running this quantum community program over the last um over the last a few months and uh kind of kate uh who is working on our

community developments been doing a lot of driving behind it and there we allow kind of non-technical people to participate right which is something people have asked for a lot which like how do i create content like what type of content do you guys need how do i create documentation like technical write-ups about axler like how to explain it better um and things like that and so you know we we try to put some structure and and give them some ideas how to um how to get engaged and i think that that worked quite well let's take uh maybe step back around axle or so what was what was the original impetus like why did you want to start this project and what's your vision for

axillary yeah i mean you know i think as we're building outground and taking it to the market i think a um quickly realized that a lot of other you know platforms are been built uh in parallel that are going to have traction that are going to have use cases and you know may be optimized for different constraints that like our grant was optimized for for instance um you know some of them build their own different software stacks some of them just target different markets and so definitely we quickly saw that many ecosystems would continue to evolve in the space right um now when you take that as a you know as a given then the first question that asks well how do you interact across those ecosystems right

uh for us the first ecosystems we wanted to interact with from our grant were bitcoin and ethereum right then i think every every proof of stake blockchain that was built around the same time frame had a similar questions like how do you connect to those two networks but you know that on its own you know you can think about like bridges or some some type of a one-off solution and sort of that's fine but um if you take as an assumption that many other ecosystems are going to continue being built continue being developed then you ask yourself a question well how do you make it easier to connect all of them together what are the universal metrics that you have to satisfy at the protocol layer at the infrastructure layer to connect them together um and so that's what we started to do and

the end goal for axler has always been to you know allow users and developers to interact with all of these ecosystems in an easy way right i see an application i have an asset i should be able to go and use that application with my asset which is not really possible if you have to hop across from one network to another you know in in some fashion so if you see in the end like if you see sort of ax lar or interoperability in the long run do you think we're gonna have like lots of different interoperability protocols or do you think there is going to be like a convergence on you know one or two great questions so um

i think there's going to be different protocols but different protocols are going to be across different layers of the stack okay so if you take as an analogy you know how the internet works right interoperability protocols are all about you know how the internet is structured right and it's not a single protocol it's kind of sets of protocols that were built everything from you know routing protocols um transmission protocols application layer protocols um on some of the layers you have a few protocols you know on the core route and infrastructure layer you have protocols like ip bgp right then you have tcp and udp protocols on top of it but then you have many

application layer protocols that are making it easy for the applications to interact and kind of talk to one another right um and at least right now i would think that something similar will happen in the blockchain ecosystem where at the core you know routing or infrastructure layer will probably going to end up with i think a handful of solutions right or maybe protocols and then on top of it i expect to see a lot more application layer protocols that you know leverage all of the core infrastructure to communicate and go back and forth um and that's what you know applications would be exposed with but on the network and route and layer you know i don't think

um we cannot scale if there's just too many protocols right this the system can just going to continue to be fragmented so i do think there is going to be you know a convergence towards a few approaches or a few you know message formats in some sense when you were pursuing that or like you know kind of started working on this on this idea of like having this interoperability solution what did you feel like was i mean what were the main kind of requirements that you had for like the solutions that were produced like what were you trying to optimize for yeah so i think first requirement that we had was to be able to connect with the with any ecosystem in an easy way right so

meaning that in the blockchain space we're seeing lots of different consensus protocols right um everything from proof of work to proof of stake they all have different finality rules they all have uh their way of dealing with uh you know safety and liveness thresholds and so on and so forth and so we wanted to be able to plug in uh in an easy way with any of the ecosystems without having to make you know complicated engineering um you know projects and kind of spend years integrating one platform to another so that was a you know first core requirement um i think the the second core requirement was to be able to um translate right and route across any of

these ecosystems in an easy way so i think you know um the basic problem that comes up as you connect more and more of these ecosystems is that a they all speak very different formats and different languages right so you need a mechanism to be able to you know take a message from one chain be able to translate it and put it as a message on a different chain and you need to be able to route it in an effective way right um like how do you make sure that as new ecosystems have been added there's no additional like latencies or you know hops that are introduces to to connect to those ecosystems so those were some of the core requirements that we um that we wanted to make sure we can satisfy

and the final one was to really think about it how do we make it easy for the users to interact with all of these solutions right i think we are still so early at the interoperability space where we're talking about you know core pipes and infrastructure but we do have to get to a level where you know applications integrate with this infrastructure so that the users can go and just use the application that they that they want across the ecosystem and so building a stack that would allow for that user experience is actually quite fundamental and quite important and you know we spend a lot of time thinking how to make those um you know those design decisions that would down the line optimize for this user experience and make it easier

for the users to uh to talk to all of these chains cool and so can you describe the you know what's the architecture that you ended up arriving at like what does ark's law look like on a high level yeah so on a high level you know axler is a proof-of-stake network that's built around cosmos sdk right and what it runs is that it runs a uh kind of cross-chain uh consensus protocol that we have built and um what happens under the hood is that a set of validators are collectively monitoring different blockchains and they're monitoring special exit points

on those blockchains right we call them axle gateways so think of a gateway as a special account or a set of accounts or a smart contract if you're talking about um you know a smart contract compatible chain information can come into this gateway account the validators collectively reach a decision of what needs to happen with that information right where it needs to go where it needs to be routed or translated along the way they perform those functions collectively they vote on it and then they produce a message uh that can be posted on the destination chain and that message then gets executed right um and so the basic idea is that you have this axle or consensus protocol and the validators that are executing

all these cross-chain functions um you can onboard more chains you know more validators can join it's an open network you can keep on adding more protocols and you get all the benefits of having this you know universal overlay network across all of the all of the blockchains that does all the core functions right and and just uh to maybe kind of contrast this a little like like one one interoperability solution that people may be aware of is uh you know something called ibc right which exists in cosmos and in ibc basically you have like okay let's say cosmos hub and osmosis and you have a light client of the cosmos hub running in osmosis and the like

likelihood of osmosis running the cosmos hub or you know the these lifeline proofs are basically accepted and then you can connect this way now of course the problem is that doesn't really like work easily across like lots of different chains right for example like how is the bitcoin chain gonna like verify uh it like climb proof some some other chain so then here you basically you have a set of operators now that are like running full nodes that you then trust yeah exactly right so i guess yeah like you know what you mentioned is

quite correct right like i think ibc is a you know great protocol and i think it works really well um but it wasn't a very heavy engineering undertaking right even for tendermint base chains to you know integrate and implement integrating for some other chains even proof of stake chains like like i'll grant or avalanche i mean a lot of the stack would have to be rebuilt to do that right which is um you know kind of would be years of work and engineering and so um i think that's one thing and two you are always going to be in the need of maintaining these like lines and these connections right if you create ibc connections so if i'm upgrading my proof of stake blockchain and i'm modifying

consensus because i have a better algorithm or i want to change the way i'm you know creating blocks or headers that means all of the connections that i need to manage as an operator of this network i would have to go and write the like clients for them they may have to be produced in different languages like solidity you know rust consensus layer whatever that is i have to go and upgrade them uh maintain them and so on and so forth so i think we we try to optimize a little bit more for engineering ease of use and onboarding uh in some sense than um i would say kind of a i know ibc is almost like uh you know the the ideal

model but it's uh you know but it's but it's very hard to scale in practice and um if you're talking about diverse ecosystems maybe you can talk a little bit about the security aspect of interoperability right i mean i think we have seen some of the biggest hacks and and sort of misfortunes have happened around interoperability i think there was something on ethereum i don't remember what it was called now but that was like a few months ago that was like a really huge one and then of course we had wormhole more recently like why is the security of interoperability in your u why is this so hard yeah no great question

at the very core kind of any interoperability protocol works as follows right you you need to you have let's say you have to do blockchains right on the very high level any blockchain is a is a database plus a network right so they'll think of it as a database so your goal is to get to synchronize two databases in some sense right so what is the way of synchronizing a state across two databases well the most standard approach is that you know you lock a state on a source chain you replicate it on a destination chain right so whenever you're talking about moving assets across different blockchains most of them effectively uh lock the state on the source chain of an asset and then you replicate the state on the

destination chain and the destination chain can work with that state and then you go back and forth right so it's a similar how you know on the internet we're doing messages across different systems where you know um a message is sent you can put databases you know you can block information one database or another you can manipulate it and so on and so forth so that effectively creates a big um challenge is that how when you lock the state on the source chain how to make sure the nobody can unlock it right without being authorized without getting authorization to unlock and um you know in in ibc for instance model what allows you to surf lock or unlock

are these proofs right that you pass around from um kind of source chain to destination chain and that proofs allows you to verify that information uh on a different chain has entered a certain format and therefore it can now be manipulated on this uh destination chain right uh with the most interoperability protocol that's in similar way it's the question is what is this proof the question is how compact is the proof how easy it is to generate it and so on and so forth um and because a lot of these interoperability protocols are built across many complicated software stacks it's just non-trivial to do this uh to do this the right way

but i would say that it's a kind of a no different than well it is different but it is very similar to how we were just learning how to build let's say like different defy applications in a secure way three years ago right i mean i think you remember you know 2017 2018 2019 um lots of applications were shipped um people just experimenting blocking you know millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity there were some attacks where well some chains even decided to to fork right to prevent uh to uh kind of resolve the the ex incidents um but uh it was the same problem that people just didn't know how to do it securely people didn't pay attention to the audits right uh people still learning the kind of edge

cases of some of these software programming models with interoperability you're talking about a much more complicated problem uh where you're talking about different many different ecosystems you have to you know create those proofs in an efficient way you have to relay them but you know i do think it's a solvable problem you just have to be much more thoughtful how you think about security how you think about audits you know emergency mechanisms and so on and so forth it's a full stack that you really have to sort of embrace if you're actually trying to solve this and do you think there is you know kind of like a fundamental difference in sort of the level of security between you know like this kind of light client based approach versus approach where you

know you have basically a set of operators who run full nodes on on each chain and sort of observe the state i mean there are definitely you know differences if you look at uh you know kind of a one connection at a time right but i think if you look at the ecosystem from a broader perspective then you kind of realize the following um a suppose we're going to be in a world with hundreds of thousands of chains okay which okay not even an assumption anymore right i think we're definitely going to be in a world with with hundreds of useful chains um maybe thousands down the line um in that model you cannot have pairwise connections

across every single chain period right because then every chain will have to manage you know 100 other connections you know you're going to need to have you know almost n square connections across all of these chains who's going to manage them who's going to you know update all the whatever protocols like clients deal with emergencies and so on and so forth so no matter what i think if you're in a world with many different chains then you're gonna have to trust some intermediary you know hubs along the way that will route your information right and whenever you trust in some intermediate hub to route some information through whatever protocol you're gonna be trusting you know the validator set of that hub and on the internet as an example um we are you know on average taking like

six or seven paths um across any different network when we send the packet right and so the you know if you were to replicate it to the um you know to the blockchain ecosystem imagine taking six paths which i don't think we should by the way i think we should try to minimize the number of hops you know we'll go from any two blockchains for this reasons is that every time you would take a hub you're going to have to trust you know another set of protocol or another sets of assumptions along the way so it's a never rule that you're going to have to trust some intermediary unless you're big enough to manage you know hundreds of thousands of connections yourself right which nobody wants to do so um so i think that's not really you know an

issue uh you would rather trust actually somebody who can do a diligent job of of being this sort of security provider for you right and being this hub that can um you know securely connect you with hundreds of different chains and so that you know that if something goes wrong um this network provider knows how to deal with it right and has the operations in place has the protocols in place to deal with emergencies you know and react to it i think that's one thing i think the second thing which is i think quite important to note is that most blockchains today run across the same validator set right um you know it's the kind of chorus

right figment you know i can i can name you know a couple dozen validator sets and you know a lot of them have the majority of the stake on most of these protocols and so whenever you're talking about you know trusting this network or that network um at the end of the day you trust in the validators and most of the time you trust in you know the same validators so um you know i hope we continue to decentralize them um for right now it's not even a problem of kind of how many nodes the protocol can support it's more about how much we can decentralize the stake in some sense right um while still while still making it economically attractive for the validators to continue operating the networks so i think that's actually a bigger challenge than um you know how many nodes your

protocol can support at this point yeah and then of course one of the interesting aspects of like uh you know i remember in the in the past i i don't hear this argument so much anymore but you know people are often saying like oh in cars and i was like how is it going to be safe and secure because like you have so many different chains and you know isn't the market cap enough and things like that but then like it of course we haven't seen right like in in ethereum classic we had this thing where like you had the majority of the mining power will basically do this 51 attack and like roll back the chain well this has not happened in a proof of safe

train and like okay why not i mean i guess various reasons right first of all like this economically it's just like so much more expensive it just doesn't make any sense to basically ever do that but then i think you also have the factor right that now okay you have all these different validators and if they did something malicious on one chain well they would like totally ruin their whole business on like all the chains right so i think it means that even smaller chains right can be pretty yeah you have this kind of like additional trust through you know reputation and in in a way like the aggregate stake that's with them yeah i mean i i i'm totally with you

that right then i think the only thing that we have worked to protect the ecosystem has been to try to maximize decentralization right um you know it's still i would say not sufficiently you know decentralized yet i think we'll have to continue working and getting you know more validators kind of included in these sets and having them uh you know given them enough voting power and things like that uh but but like you said that's the only thing that has kind of proven to work right where um you have dozens or maybe hundreds of of different actors and uh coordinating between them like an attack which we all know who they are right like they don't put their labels on you know uh websites uh so um and and i think just a huge credit i

think you know to all the validators communities on that because i think they have powered a lot of what we've seen in the blockchain ecosystem today let's dive into a bit more so for so far right interoperability in crypto has mostly been around token transfer right like you have you know bitcoin and you want to put it into d5 so now we're going to use like wbtc or you know you have in cosmos you have like different tokens and you want to put them on osmosis you know you want to put atoms in like liquidity pool and osmosis or like what do you think are the use cases like beyond token transfer that you

think are most exciting yeah so you know i think there's a lot right that like i think token transfers in some sense is just uh kind of a need and that's why we've seen a lot of interoperability been centered around it but um more generally you can just ask can a user you know directly interact with an application with the tokens that they have on a different chain right and interaction with an application may or may not involve the token transfer but it often involves like other information that needs to be passed along right so let me give you like an example suppose you have you know a stable coin like ust on a cosmos chain

right on terra right and then as a user you want to get directly let's say eth on the ethereum chain right um so the ideal user experience from a user perspective is then just going to their wallet right you know making a one-click transaction where their tokens if needs to be routed across from you know terra blockchain to ethereum swapped on the destination chain for eth and then the user receives eth right away in their wallet right so this is a one click experience where a token transfer is augmented with some other information the user um the user may include

like um what is the destination address where they need to receive the token what is i don't know the slippage that they're willing to tolerate during this exchange and so on and so forth right um so i guess going beyond tokens what we're asking is that can the users and applications composed with one another across this ecosystems right and that often requires passing messages um like you know slippage information whatever exchange rate that you like to take um amount you know your source destination addresses that you want to communicate across and so on and so forth um so i think that's you know just a layer above i would say you know the token transfers which is still mostly uh still

centered around token transfer use case i think from there um sort of the sky is the limit in some sense right any acid that's being created like nft will effectively need interoperability because users want to um interact with those assets across different ecosystems and finally the applications want to interact with one another and compose right today if you're building on top of ethereum you are taking interoperability for granted right but the the reason that we're seeing defy and you know ethereum or other proof of stake blockchains emerge is because they allow developers to talk to one another right on the same blockchain they can execute you know function calls they can perform swaps

one another and so on and so forth um and so that's what when i want to enable across different blockchains right where applications can talk to one another uh send information um pull you know rewards uh incentives uh liquidity mining um rewards and so on and so forth and you know i i do think it's important to understand that that model we're gonna have to change the way the development is done a little bit um you know and we can talk more about that but it is a new programming model in some sense and and developers will have to embrace it but i think it's sort of inevitable that i think it is going to happen yeah let's get into that because that was one of the topic i wanted to discuss

with you so has often been brought up as you know one of the core you know strengths of ethereum and you know the advantage of ethereum over let's say something like the cosmos ecosystem where okay you have all the smart contracts on like a single chain and then it's pretty easy for me to you know create some other application that like uses the different chains and another in other aspects of this that has been often brought up as like okay this is like a you know really core advantage is that i can make you know transaction that interacts with different blockchains and different smart contracts and you know either the whole transaction

succeeds or it fails uh so this like atomic transactions and and flash loans on ethereum right there's like this this paradigm example where flash loans basically allow you to kind of borrow money like use the money in a bunch of transactions and like repay the money like in the same transaction uh in the same block so then i basically you know there's like no capital risk right the money is basically almost like instantaneously taken and given back and uh of course that's like pretty unique and kind of strange use case so yeah how is that going to change like do you think these atomic transactions is

is that something that's like that important or how how is that going to play out in the in a sort of axillar cross chain context i i think you know before maybe we we we just answer that i think just taking a slight step back i think it's it's kind of important to understand that it's sort of inevitable that applications you know and sort of cross chain will have to be a reality to just continue scaling the ecosystem right because why aren't we build continuing building all on on top of ethereum right well you know because it's it's one network it's one database and it's congested period right and i think if you look at a lot of other blockchains no matter how much you

surf you know throughput they process um however fast they are if it's a single database if it's a single network at some point it's going to be congested once you're talking about you know even a handful of major applications that need you know thousands of transactions of throughput running on top of it right so in some sense to continue scaling the ecosystem and to continue you know surviving like we're gonna have to have more networks um so i think that's inevitable but then in that model um you know you ask well how do i talk to to one another right then and i think like i mentioned the the model changes were instead of having a transaction that may be you know atomic whenever you execute in a single programming environment

you will be interacting in a more of a message passing way this is similar to how a lot of the networks uh on the internet again right and the traditional web 2 applications have scaled they all run behind different networks or different database instances in the back end right and they send messages to exchange to one another and we have protocols for reliably sending messages unreliably sending messages right and then you build your application logic around those messages that tells you what to do when you know the message hasn't arrived right or it needs to be retransmitted um or you know in this case it would be what to do when the transaction doesn't go through right or you know the asset is not delivered on

the destination chain or whatever the swap that you want to do on the destination chain doesn't go through what you want to do with it um you're gonna have to put some some code in around it and you're gonna have to put some rules right and that's where i think this layer of application layer protocols will have to be built to you know to almost think about like what are some of the good examples and use cases that we want to have with stronger properties that you know just a message passing right like do you want to revert transactions across different networks you want to um allow people to uh you know retransmit and replay and what types of fallback mechanisms that you have you want to have those are all kind of application specific cases that you have to think through um but you

know i don't think it's that hard um well it's it's not trivial we'll have to think that through it but it is a solvable problem and we have solved it in the past and um you know in this case um i think yeah it's inevitable that we're going to need this and you know and i think in some sense it's never ruled that developers will have to adjust to this programming environment along the way do you think is is there have you thought about the idea of where like whether ax law could provide some kind of like atomic transaction guarantees across chains so that like you know i can i can make a transaction on chain a and i wanted transaction chain b and

like you know i only want to transaction chain a to execute if i if also the transaction chain b executes what are your thoughts on that i i i think it's a great question so uh we have we have thought about it and you know it is possible and i and i think this is where i think one of the architecture decisions that we made for building axle becomes you know pretty fundamental and necessary in some sense is because axler itself runs on top of uh you know consensus and a blockchain system right around cosmos sdk so that means that whatever cross-chain transactions you want to execute you can sequence them right on the axle network itself right and then you can

build your protocols around it and you can say um you know because there is a sequence of events uh and because you can rely on the actual network to give you the surf ordering of the transactions that need to be executed across different chains you can then execute them in a you know in a specific order and only trigger uh you know if and only if some other conditions have been satisfied if you were you know in contrast if you were to work uh and try to satisfy this without survey a consensus layer in the middle right without an ordering service um this becomes a lot harder right you would have to um you you you would have to replicate a lot of this functionality at the application layer uh which uh you know it is pretty painful to do

yeah it's it's it's a very interesting uh topic and as there was actually two podcasts i did just in the last like weeks where we kind of talked about this and you know one was with dean tribble of agorik and he made the interesting claim that i don't think i'd heard before but he kind of made the claim that like okay if you have actually these different chains and if you don't have these like atomic actions across chain that that actually leads to a much more kind of you know robust ecosystem because uh the risks and the failure modes are more contained you know you'll have like

okay something goes wrong and uh but there's sort of you know a little bit of an isolation of that do you see that as well or like yeah i mean it's an interesting point i'll have to think a little bit about it um it is definitely i guess easier to build systems in that way right where you know you have like this asynchronous model and then uh you know if one system goes down you know you can continue operating the other models um you know is this sufficient for applications that i'm not sure then i think we'll have to think but but again i think from a systems perspective i do think that that's the way you know we're going to have to build things in some

sense but i do think you can build you know application layer protocols on top of it that serve you know some specific needs um whenever you need to satisfy some of these you know atomic operations but on the network layer or interoperability layer in some sense it needs to be um a little bit more decoupled and loose for these reasons for right where if one network or one systems goes down like you can't take down everybody else right like you have to isolate it and you have to contain the damage in some sense yeah yeah and the other let me just also mention briefly because i just did the episode yesterday with the near guys and this was also something that like we discussed a little bit and i was not aware of that before but right on here

you have like different charts and then even if you have like two smart contracts that are on the same chart they actually still don't they still function is asynchronous way right where you don't have this atomic transactions and they were like okay that's sort of their design choice so that the developer doesn't actually have to care about which charts the thing is in and then the contract can be moved around and it that doesn't really change anything but then of course it also also has that implication that you know functions in this different way so i i thought this was very interesting because maybe in the past maybe this is also something that the ethereum community has like emphasized so much about like oh this is so crucial this is so crucial because it was

uh maybe that's not really the case i i like i think you know back to what i was saying earlier i think you know near right and dean and agori guys they thought about how to scale the ecosystem you know for years to come right and i think they quickly realized the only way to scale it is to continue you know sharding right or scaling horizontally in some sense and whenever you scale it horizontally through many shards or many blockchains or whatever that um you know architecture that you choose you're going to have to switch to this asynchronous communication model right um so i think you know that's probably i would say one of the reasons those guys are embracing this model

because it's you know it's sort of inevitable maybe talk us through a bit like what's the uh what's the status of axler today like what has been developed and yeah like what's yeah so you know we spent a little over a year uh i think today to kind of build in the core network and technology um we've run been running you know test nets for over eight months with our community and uh you know last month we just announced that we're starting a phase roll out of the main network so that means that you know in the first phase we already started to on board uh you know early validators um

getting them connected with different ecosystems i think we already connected uh i think six or seven different ecosystems uh through axler um and we're slowly going to be opening up different functionalities on top of the network right um we already opened up uh functionality to transfer some assets so you can move things like luna or ust across many evm different ecosystems um through uh kind of front-end applications that we build on top of it um and you know the coming year is gonna be pretty exciting as we're gonna continue opening up these is working with developers and working with the community to uh start scaling this right and uh you know along the way we'll have to build

better documentation better apis you know sdks think about those application layer protocols that we want to that we want to work with with our partners um and you know what ecosystems will continue um integrating down the line so super excited i think for the for the coming year so one interesting question i have so you know like let's say now we have like chain a and like you make the example right so you have ust right which is the stable coin that originates on terra and then you have some evm chain let's say avalanche and you want to like use it on there and then you know axler is like a solution that so that somebody can move it over

but of course axle is also its own blockchain so do you do you think like what what kind of things do you see like running on the axle chain itself did you ever see for example people developing like i don't know let's say putting something like a permissionless cosmos in there or general smart contracting environment or like yeah like what what kind of functionality can the axler chain you know can be put in there in the future yeah great question so you know i think the core problem that we're trying to solve is interoperability right so and the way we

want to see the future is that developers get to decide where they want to build how they want to build but underneath it they have a set of protocols you know and infrastructure they can rely on to go cross chain right so this is our ultimate goal uh so in that model right we want to build the infrastructure and stack where developers are empowered to go and build you know on evm chains right on cosmos based chains on whatever they they really want and you know and actually just helps them to communicate and go cross chain and be um you know a service provider network in some sense that they can they can do those things um on top of the actual network itself would developers be able to build uh you

can certainly build uh some things and you know i think we may open up uh kind of cosmosome for the purposes that we want to customize some of the application layer interoperability protocols uh and things like that down the line and allow people to onboard new chains easier um right now if you want to onboard the new chain you know if it's an avm chain like we build it so like you cannot board in 10 minutes so it's pretty straightforward for bitcoin we have a module that we're working on uh for cosmos you know it's ibc compatible so it's kind of integrated at the protocol layer um for other chains you may need to push another module but uh you know we want to make it easier so that uh you know maybe as a developer you can just write another smart contract that allows you to

translate this message from a particular ecosystem to be routed by the axle network with all the other networks that are connected with right uh without having to write like a full cosmos module and pass a governance proposal down the line and things like that um but on its own kind of solving interoperability and cross-chain messages is just a such a demanding requirement and you know you need a lot of throughput you need to optimize for this use case and you know we're designing actual network to kind of optimize for this use case uh as opposed to as a you know as another uh you know developer environment i think there's a lot of projects where optimized for you know javascript development or solidity development or you know rust development

and i think they're a lot of they're doing a fantastic job so we want to you know connect those ecosystems um on the actual network itself already processing you know tens of thousands of transactions per day just for cross-chain message passing i wouldn't necessarily um you know start building the application on that and i think we want to remain as a service provider in some sense yeah that makes sense i mean one application is that you know we've had a bunch of conversations on it's kind of like an interesting i think um sort of product on ethereum you have something like hypnosis safe right which is the smart contract wallet and you know that's pretty nice because you can have you know multi-sig you can

have uh you know maybe some sort of programmability you can have like different types of things but you know it's an ethereum thing it doesn't function cross chain and in general like you know cross chain wallets don't i mean there's no great solution right there's not like one wallet you can use across like different ecosystems you have you know on cosmos you have something like kepler okay functions great on cosmos chains but like doesn't function anywhere else solana yeah phantom great over there but like doesn't really do much else you know ethereum you have a meta mask and so this this idea of like okay can you have like some kind of universal programmable wallet and of course i guess one way of doing

that might be that you have actually like a chain or some place that custer these assets on all these different chains and then you know i could just have one private key uh on that chain and i send a message to that chain and then that emits like uh transactions on another chain to like you know for example stake ethereum or or like you know swap ethereum on unit swap but like so this is like an interesting i think an interesting kind of product a year have you thought about this and how do you see that sort of playing with the axillary

stack yeah no i think kind of a building universal cross-chain wallets you know is is one of the top i think use cases of interoperability right and it kind of goes back to the things we talked about earlier is that you know allowing users to interact with all of these ecosystems and dapps in an easy way from a single wallet right um and i think the way that this um you know will play out is that you do need a combination of i guess acid transfer and message passing to make those universal wallets right and i think you know it seems like you already have some great design ideas brian right but uh you know i i think you know if i were to envisage this or similar right where you have

um potentially some smart contracts that are living on different chains where as a user you know you authorize to interact with those smart contracts right then those contracts allow you to have your balances you know on different ecosystems uh maybe even um the way people send money to you is through you know a universal um like handle and that you know can be used to uniquely identify you right or universal identifier qr codes whatever you want um and then underneath it the the wallet providers or the dapps and the user they get to interact with those contracts shuffle liquidity back and forth if there needs to be shuffle messages if they if they need to be and you know all of that experience is a lot

smoother so i i think it's a great example and i do think we're going to see something like this to start appearing over the coming years yeah i mean i guess one one i don't know if that one way one could build it maybe right might be as a cosmos chain and then you could you could maybe use ibc to connect with other cosmos chains and use something like xlr to connect with like the rest of the blockchain universe but who knows i mean yeah definitely i mean and in that case i think um you know you can build it like on the cosmos right and then kind of use the ibc axle or stack to talk to other networks uh similarly you can

build your logic wherever you want right like you can you you can build it like an avalanche or solana if you want and then again you know use like the actual protocol on to send messages to other ecosystems right so so in that sense as a developer of that wall this is really allows you to pick wherever wherever you want to host your logic right which application layer logic where your core functionality is going to live and then use the interoperability protocols to communicate and uh you know interact with other ecosystems so when you look to the future of axler what are the hardest problems that are ahead

yeah i mean you know i think it's a combination of continuing to build technology right in a in an efficient way continue to integrate more chains uh more assets uh improving security along the way um you know reducing the gas costs um reducing latency um and uh you know working with a lot of the developers to to teach them uh and to educate them how do you write applications in a cross-chain environment right how do you how do you think in this new uh different paradigm uh programming model yeah so i i think all of those things are you know um challenged but also that's where you know the rewards and opportunities are

right um and you know to us that's what's certainly exciting the exciting aspect of it is that we we get to change the way um the ecosystem can scale and i think it is quite quite needed um to continue growing can you talk also a little bit about you know kind of like the road map or you know like the rollouts that are coming uh you know you mentioned evm chains right so i think there's like one of the initial focus on these evm chains like yeah so talk a little bit about like you know where's that at and like what comes afterwards and what would be you know kind of the ways people can actually interact with axler in in the coming year

yeah so um you know the initial rollout that we um started doing focuses on connection between cosmos chains and avm chains right so you know cosmos chains we can easily onboard through ibc kind of pretty straightforward for evm chains we also program that on the network layer so you can onboard uh any vm chain you know in 10 or 15 minutes assuming the validator is supported right so it's incredibly easy and uh very straightforward to do and uh you know we're continuing to work on a bitcoin module that would allow to onboard uh you know bitcoin and similar types of proof-of-work uh kind of legacy um ecosystems um and we're you know opening up the

sdk and a set of apis that would allow developers to interact and talk across all these different uh chains right so this is something i'm pretty excited about um right now if you want to integrate and move assets back and forth um there is a simple uh you know javascript sdk that we're going to be releasing that allows you to do those uh those calls in a niche in an easy way you know you can integrate like bridging functionalities in your dex or your defy application um but then from there we're gonna uh enable this sdk that will allow you to talk directly to the gateway contracts right or directly from your dap front end and talk with other ecosystems so that's something we'll be uh starting to roll out soon and um that's how we

envisage most of the developers will interact with axler and other ecosystems well thanks so much sergey it's been really a pleasure to like have you on to like learn about actual arts and and kind of share this with our audience and i think it's been it's been exciting to like follow along and i'm i'm super yeah excited to see see how it evolves i mean i i think for me with what has actually been interesting about interoperability was that when like ibc launched i was really surprised how good the user experience was and and of course that's still pretty limited right because it's just uh it's just cosmos right it doesn't really work well and then it gets much worse when

you have like let's say interoperability between different i don't know because often you have different wallets on each side and stuff like that so i'm i'm excited about you know what things like axler will enable by having this like smooth seamless interoperability cross chains because i think it's just going to be enormous like what that enables yeah for sure well it was great chad and bryan and thanks for all the questions uh always a pleasure chatting with you cool thanks