Builder Stories: Why Axelar Chose the Cosmos SDK
Cosmos SDK Builder Stories highlights innovative projects that are building with the Cosmos SDK. In this fourth edition, learn more about Axelar and how the world’s leading toolkit for building appchains is helping them achieve their goals.
Axelar: The ‘Web3 Interoperability Protocol’
Axelar is a leading blockchain interoperability protocol that provides an open stack to connect all blockchains, enabling cross-chain communication and transfers across networks. Axelar delivers chain abstraction for users and developers with minimal overhead and connects more blockchain ecosystems than any other interoperability provider today. Co-founder Georgios Vlachos comments, “A lot of people think of us as a bridge, but Axelar is a cross-chain messaging platform.”
Axelar enables developers to build “all kinds of cross-chain applications.” A Layer 1, for example, could use Axelar to build primitives like a decentralized exchange, a money market, or an NFT marketplace. “Axelar enables you to do all those things,” Georgios explains. “You send an asset on one chain, and it gives you a different asset on another chain. You can build a cross-chain money market where you can collateralize some assets on Osmosis and get a loan on Avalanche or Arbitrum, or a cross-chain NFT marketplace where with one click from your wallet on Solana, you can buy an NFT on Stargaze… So it’s really a platform that gives you the ability to build any kind of application.”
Pioneering Chain Abstraction
“The problem Axelar is solving at its core is user experience,” Georgios says. “The way we envision the future is one where users can access web3 the same way they access web2. If you go to your phone today and you want to use WhatsApp, you just open the WhatsApp application. You don’t really care what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s the same future vision with web3 where users will have just assets and applications… abstracting away the chain.”
He describes the points of friction that users face today when interacting with web3, connecting wallets, buying gas, or taking actions unique to single ecosystems. “You should never have to think whether you are using Solana or Avalanche. All that has to be abstracted away. That’s what we’re enabling applications to do, build chain-abstracted user experiences so we can replicate the user experience of web2 and really onboard this billion users that we’ve been talking about for a long time.”
Onboarding More Developers
Axelar aims to connect with every single developer in the space and help them to build the best user experience possible, empowering them to easily construct their own connections, and customize factors like security, latency, and other cross-chain rules in an open framework. Growing quickly, Axelar has already facilitated more than 2.3 million transactions over 60+ blockchains and more than $9 billion in volume.
“Any single application in the space, whether you’re building in-game gaming, real-world assets, DeFi, or NFTs, you need to offer a good user experience. So, really all the work we’re doing is about providing the best developer experience and then connecting with all of those developers… My day-to-day work is just talking to as many developers as possible, and educating them on the possibilities and this new paradigm of building applications.”
— Georgios Vlachos, Co-Founder, Axelar
Why Axelar Built Using Cosmos SDK
Cosmos SDK, the gateway to the Interchain Stack, is a flexible, open-source toolkit for building application-specific blockchains. Enabling developers to create custom chains from scratch with native interoperability, its modular design allows them to tailor their blockchain applications to their specific needs by adding custom modules or switching out consensus engines. This building block approach makes Cosmos SDK an attractive option for building flexible and customizable blockchain solutions. Georgios states:
“Anyone who wants to build a sovereign chain today, you have to go with the Cosmos SDK. There’s no other option.”
Enabling Axelar to Scale with Custom Modules
Cosmos SDK enabled Axelar to build a scalable and customizable tech stack that connects over 60 blockchains today. Georgios says, “On the implementation side, the Cosmos SDK had a lot of the components we needed.” One important feature was the ability to implement threshold signatures into the validator set, which is necessary for Bitcoin interoperability. If you want to create a wrapped version of Bitcoin on Osmosis, for example, you need some validators to secure the asset on the Bitcoin chain, and create a wrapped representation of that asset on Osmosis.
“The most effective way to do that is by using threshold signatures for Bitcoin. The Cosmos SDK really enabled us to build the module in the chain that allows all the validators to collectively create a threshold key and also collectively sign transactions.”
— Georgios Vlachos, Co-Founder, Axelar
A Thriving Ecosystem Connecting Developers
Another reason Axelar chose to build with Cosmos SDK was its large and thriving ecosystem of builders. Georgios explains that they needed a solution that was established, well-maintained, and continually iterated on. “We didn’t want to work with a solution that is going to be developed and improved over a long period of time,” he recalls, “it was pretty clear even back then that there was a ton of development in the ecosystem… that was a key decision driver for us.”
“It was really a combination of the big ecosystem around the Cosmos SDK, and also the flexibility that the Cosmos SDK gave… It was pretty obvious that it was the best solution.”
Integrating CosmWasm to Enable Smart Contracts
Axelar is currently adding smart contracts on top of the platform using CosmWasm. “This will allow us to add a lot of new chains like Solana, Sui, Stellar, Ripple, Flow
Georgios says, “This is only possible because we can enable CosmWasm and allow those teams to permissionlessly build their own connections to Axelar. I’m really proud that we built a technical stack that really scales and I’m very happy we used the Cosmos SDK.”
What other plans does Axelar have on the horizon? Georgios says, “In terms of adoption, I think we keep doing the same thing. Just talk to all of the application developers out there and get as many people to adopt this solution to offer seamless user experiences to all of their end users.”
Stay tuned for more Cosmos SDK Builder Stories coming soon and follow our developments on X.
