Osmosis Lab Guest #1, Dec. 8—Sergey Gorbunov, Axelar
Osmosis Updates from the Lab occurs every Wednesday at 10am EST (3pm UTC) on the Osmosis Zone Twitter Space. We go over all the latest news and plans for Osmosis with hosts Dynamicmanic and kevin and co-founders Sunny Aggarwal and Josh Lee.
Our guest on the Dec. 8th edition will be Sergey Gorbunov, co-founding engineer of Axelar, a protocol that aims to provide scalable cross-chain communication.
Sergey is an assistant professor at Waterloo University in Ontario, a founding member of Algorand (as is co-founder of Axelar, Georgios Vlachos), and his thesis on designing cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography won the Sprowls award for best CS dissertation at MIT.
What does Axelar do? According to their FAQ, “the Axelar protocol provides a uniform solution to cross-chain communication that’s designed to be interoperable with any chain, satisfy plug-and-play connectivity with almost no work to integrate a new chain, and is decentralized by design. Axelar stack includes both cross-chain routing and application-level transfer protocols.”
I am eager to hear how Axelar will interact with the IBC protocol, how it will provide easier access from Cosmos SDK chains to EVM chains, Bitcoin (already achieved on testnet), Doge, and more.
The team announced in August that they were entering into a partnership with Keplr to integrate the wallet into the Axelar network, allowing users to transact, stake, participate in Axelar governance via Keplr web and mobile wallets. Likewise, assets from external blockchains will be available in the Cosmos ecosystem the Axelar network.
Where are they on their roadmap? They are currently iterating their testnets, working on supporting arbitrary EVM chains, and achieving IBC compatibility. The next steps include launching their mainnet, where dapps will be able transfer assets cross-chain in a generalized, decentralized way.
According to their whitepaper, the Axelar chain will be delegated-proof-of-stake. According to their Telegram, there is no detailed information on Axelar’s tokenomics, but expect the question to be asked next Wednesday. We invite questions during our meeting! You can propose them ahead of time to Dynamic and Kevin on the Osmosis social media channels, or raise your hand to speak during question time.
Hope to see you there!
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