Axelar with Sergey Gorbunov | ETHDenver 2023 Interview #1

Sometimes, the frontier is at a crypto conference. One of the most prestige being, ETHDenver! We’re back with a handful of exclusive interviews with some of the most fascinating minds in crypto. Wish you could make it to all the crypto conferences, but don't have the time? Don't worry, Bankless brings the frontier to you. In this episode, we’re talking to Sergey Gorbunov about the purpose of the Interoperability Summit at ETHDenver, the interoperable frontier, the differences between the Axelar and Cosmos and so much more. ------ 📣 RhinoFi | Makes DeFi Frictionless https://bankless.cc/rhino ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 👻 PHANTOM | #1 SOLANA WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:33 Interoperability Summit Vibe 5:20 Communities Represented 6:05 The Interoperable Frontier 6:56 Axelar Explained 8:00 Axelar Blockchain 8:37 Axelar vs. Cosmos 9:41 Chain Fatigue 11:20 Lessons Learned 13:03 Closing & Action Items ----- Resources: Sergey Gorbunov https://twitter.com/sergey_nog Axelar Network https://twitter.com/axelarcore ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance, and sometimes that frontier is at a conference. And here we are, on the very first day of ETH Denver. The actual official ETH Denver event has not yet started, but we are at the Axelar Interop Summit, where a bunch of interoperability conversations are taking place. So what's going on behind me? And I pulled in a ton of guest interviews, like I always do when I go to a conference, so you don't have to go to the conferences that I always go to. And so here at the Interop Conference, we have conversations with people in the Cosmos ecosystem. There's this brand-new chain called Axelar, which I'm learning quite a lot about. And then there's also conversations about Layer 2s and the Ethereum Layer 1. So not only are we talking about the app chain mesh network thesis that Cosmos has,

• 0:56David Hoffman?

  we're also talking about the Layer 2 and Layer 3 and Superchain and hyperfractal scaling, chainy-chain-iness. There's a lot of chains going on, but the Interoperability Summit is all about how do we obfuscate all the complexities of those chains. So in these interviews, you're going to hear me talk to Sonny Augerwald, you're going to hear me talk to Sergey of Axelar, we'll talk to Stryram of Eigenlayer, we'll talk to Steven Goldfetter of Arbitrum, anyone who's anyone really working in the interoperability space. All of these conversations were super fun. They happened right here, so you're going to see a person right here next to me as we talk to them here at the Axelar Interop Summit. So I want to thank the Axelar team for hosting me and all these interviews that we were able to bang out so quickly here on the first day of ETH Denver. Bankless Nation, I hope you enjoy them. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  make all of these interviews possible. Kraken is our strategic sponsor for 2023. Why? Because Kraken has been around for over 12 years and has proven itself to be deeply aligned with the crypto industry. Trusted centralized crypto platforms are hard to come by these days, which makes the few remaining ones even more valuable. With over 9 million users and not a cent lost, choosing Kraken as our strategic sponsor for 2023 was a no-brainer. We need exchanges like Kraken to provide the on-ramps to get people to go Bankless. And Kraken's emphasis on security and transparency makes us feel good about having them as a sponsor. If you're unsure about your centralized exchange or on-ramp, perhaps open an account with Kraken today. And if you're unsure about the rest of Web3, well, then maybe you should get your learn on with MetaMask Learn. Learning about crypto is hard.

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  There's no one out there to hold your hand to get into this industry until now. MetaMask Learn is the best place I've ever seen to send someone to learn everything there is to know about Web3. If you're a company trying to onboard employees, or you're a son or daughter trying to onboard your boomer parents, MetaMask Learn is the place to send them. Interactive and engaging lessons making learning about Web3 fun and easy. Now, once you're through Kraken's gates and you've taken the MetaMask course on what's a DEX, you're safe to make your first stop into the world of DeFi. Where better to start other than Uniswap? Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange for crypto asset trades and swaps, but it's now also an NFT aggregator as well, making Uniswap some of the best decentralizing trading tech that's out there.

• 3:08David Hoffman?

  Uniswap's big announcement at ETH Denver is their Uniswap Wallet, which is waiting to get released to the public as soon as Apple stops being a big old bully about crypto apps in the App Store. Uniswap is basically on every chain that's relevant in the crypto ecosystem. So if you want to use Uniswap, but with the cheapest possible fees, then use Uniswap on Arbitrum. The Arbitrum Layer 2 is the host of Ethereum's most vibrant DeFi and NFT communities. Arbitrum is already surpassing the ETH Layer 1 in transaction volume, and it's not even close to full capacity. With so many vibrant communities on Arbitrum, Arbitrum is a good place to call home for the era of Layer 2s. Speaking of settling into new homes, the Phantom Wallet is now available on both Ethereum and Polygon. That's right, the number one wallet on Solana is expanding into the Ethereum ecosystem. Phantom is the one wallet for everything.

• 3:52David Hoffman?

  Displaying NFTs, making NFT trades, swapping tokens, staking tokens. So if you're a multi-chain surfer or an NFT power user, then the Phantom Wallet is for you. It also comes in mobile. Check it out at phantom.app. Now, let's get into the interview. And since we are at the Axelar Interop Summit, we're going to start this conversation, start these interviews off with Sergey, the co-founder and CEO of Axelar, which is a brand-new chain that does a lot of the interoperability that spawned a lot of these conversations. So, we're going to get to Sergey and Axelar. Bakersfield Nation, we are here at the Axelar Interop Summit, and I'm here with Sergey, the co-founder and CEO of Axelar, and also the host of the Axelar Interop Summit. Sergey, how's it going?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  It's going great. How are you?

• 4:32David Hoffman?

  Good, good, good, good. So, this is quite the full event of the Interoperability Summit. What is the vibe? What is the point of this conference?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  So, the vibe is awesome. I think we have a lot of builders that are here. We have a hacker stage back there. We have a gateway stage up there. People are learning about interoperability. People are learning about what are the tools available. At the end of the day, what we try to do is try to think about what is the future of Web3 needs to look like. And from our perspective, the future is interoperable, where users get to interact with any asset, any application, any chain with one click. But to get to that point, we actually have to build a lot of things along the way, right? And so, the goal for the conference was to kind of come together, all the different ecosystems, all the different players, figure out what are the missing pieces in the stack? How does the developer experience need to look like? How does the user experience need to look like? And talk about the future of Web3.

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  And what kind of communities are represented here? So, this is, of course, ETH Denver is what's going on all week. But I think the Interoperability Summit has attracted a specific type of builder. Who's represented here?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So, actually, I think we have folks from all kinds of communities. So, we have a lot of different Layer Ones that are participating in the event, right? A lot of Ethereum layer, Ethereum folks, a lot of Layer Twos as well. Every Layer Two needs interoperability as well. We have folks from Avalanche, new ecosystems that are emerging, kind of Abdo, Sui, and so on and so forth. So, those are ecosystems that are represented here. And then, we have a lot of developers, right? Developers actually want to learn how to build these interoperable applications. And it requires new types of software. It requires new types of stacks to be built. So, we have an amazing lineup here of developers that are actually learning from all the participants.

• 6:04David Hoffman?

  And what kind of problems are people running into? Like, what are the solutions that people are looking to get solved here? Or what's the new frontier of innovation that people are really working on?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think, to me, I think the big innovation is like, how do you actually think about developer experience building in the interoperable future? Right? So whenever you're talking about it, it's not just how do I deploy my contracts on one chain? But it's about how do I get my application to be accessible from any chain, from any wallet? Right? And so a lot of the questions that developers have, what is the architecture of this? Right? And we're talking about things like hub-and-spoke model, peer-to-peer contract, calls to each other. What are the interoperability protocols underneath it? What are different security assumptions between them? Right? We've seen a lot of hacks in this space throughout the last year behind various like centralized bridges and things like that. So think about the security, right? How do we continue improving it? How do we continue to increase in the bar? Those are some of the questions that are here.

• 6:56David Hoffman?

  And what is Axelar? And how is Axelar fitting into this whole vibe and interoperability stack that we're talking about here?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so on a very high level, Axelar is actually a full-stack interoperability solution. Right? So the way to think about it is there is the Axelar network, which is a decentralized network that's responsible for connecting different ecosystems and moving messages across them. Okay, but then on top of the network, we have a layer of services that are built around it. So things like relayers, things like gas services, right? So to enable you to interact with any application across any chain, we actually don't want you to have to pay gas on multiple chains. Right? So there are things like gas services where you can pay in one click on the source chain. And even if your transaction needs to execute across five other layer ones or layer twos, it will still go through. Right? So it's almost like account abstraction types of techniques. And then on top of it, very simple kind of monitoring tools as decades that developers actually interact with.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Right? So that's what we've been thinking about at Axelar is like, what does this stack needs to look like? What are the different layers? And it's a lot more than just, you know, kind of pairwise protocols. How does A chain A talk to chain B? This is just one of the components that needs to be built along the way.

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  And you said Axelar is an interoperability network, is a blockchain, blockchain network.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  It's a blockchain network itself, yeah. It's been designed, though, to move information across other networks.

• 8:08David Hoffman?

  So it is meant to service cross-chain composability, interoperability. Not meant to be a blockchain in of itself, kind of like how Bitcoin and Ethereum are. But is a blockchain meant to serve other blockchains?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. It's services to scale interoperability, right? So we actually just announced yesterday that we're going to be launching a virtual machine on Axelar, not with the purpose of building applications, but to help you manage new connections, to help you manage your application deployments across other chains. So you can think of it as a service network. Its job is to help the ecosystem be more united.

• 8:37David Hoffman?

  For Bankless listeners that are familiar with the Cosmos app chain, mesh chain network, how is Axelar similar or different to that? How does that fit in?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Cosmos has traditionally been powered by IBC protocol, right? So IBC protocol, you can think of it as a pairwise protocol that tells us how you and I can talk to one another, right? But whenever we're talking about interoperability, it's really like this full stack that we have to think about from a perspective of developers and users, right? And so pairwise connectivity and the protocols beyond that is just one piece of it. But then there are all these other things like how does routing happen across hundreds of networks, right? How does the gas services work across networks? How do you build an application to actually leverage these protocols in a simple and efficient way? And so those are the things that we're talking about. I think one of the lessons that we learned throughout the last year working with a lot of developers is that not a lot actually building an energy chain, but they're all thinking about it.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  It's actually hard to build. And so we're thinking about how to make it easier, right? And so with the solutions around the Axel network, that's always the goal with developers in mind, providing those services around the network.

• 9:42David Hoffman?

  On a recent episode we did with Jesse from Coinbase about the base chain, we talked a lot about the chaininess, as well as we had the same conversation with the optimism team. And people are like kind of getting chain fatigue, because there's so many chains out there. And having to navigate and remember where your assets are across chains was once fun and is now an encumbrance. And it sounds like that's really the same kind of problem that Axelar is going after. So you have the blockchain network, but then really the infrastructure on the top of it is really to promote abstraction away of all of this chaininess, so we can stop being so chain-focused. Is that perhaps the point of Axelar and also the Interoperability Summit that we're here at today?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I certainly think that for us as an ecosystem to scale, we have to have more and more chains, okay? Like, we have to isolate resources, we have to make sure applications can customize their deployments and things like that. But from a user perspective, it's kind of impossible to interact with all of them, like you said. And we've seen it throughout the last, you know, bull cycle, right? Where people kind of are flipping between different wallets, figuring out how to get gas on one chain to another, just to execute a single transaction. We actually lose a lot of adoption as an industry because of that.

• 10:47David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And so I think figuring out the right abstractions, figuring out how do we change the developer experience, how to change the user experience to abstract all of this away is the goal, right? In the same way as you're building an application like in the cloud today, whether or not you put it in AWS Cloud, you know, Microsoft Azure Cloud, other clouds, other networks can still interact with the application, right? People from different regions, different geographies can still access your application. But that's not the case today in the blockchain space today. You deploy it and you only have distribution for that network and for that users. We need to connect it. It gives us better distribution, better UX at the end of the day.

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of similarities between what's going on on top of the Ethereum Layer 2 space.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:26David Hoffman?

  With like the optimism superchain is the same kind of vibe where we're like many, many chains, but also mainly standards and abstraction layers to make that just one seamless experience.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:36David Hoffman?

  Cosmos is trying to do the same thing. Sounds like Axol is also trying to do that between all the networks. And I'm really seeing this kind of a meta shift in towards this focal point of more chains, but less complexity.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:47David Hoffman?

  And that kind of seems to be what this focus of this interoperability summit is here today. For, thank those listeners that weren't able to make it here today, what would they have walked away with, or what would you have hoped they had walked away with if they had attended? What lessons have you learned? And what conversations have you had that you thought were valuable? And overall, just again, for people that weren't able to make it, what should they have walked away with if they were here?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think from a developer's perspective, back to your point, I think a lot of developers are kind of tired of thinking about which chain to think about, right?

• 12:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And so I think kind of what we're trying to say, okay, let's start to think interchain altogether, right? New developer abstractions, new developer paradigms, new way of building applications. And so, you know, I think the whole conference is going to be recorded, so it's going to be accessible on YouTube. You can see some of the workshops, you can see a lot of the folks that are building around the interoperability. ...future SDKs, stacks that have been built and kind of start to think interchain, right? I think we have to solve this problem to continue scaling as an industry. If we don't, I think we're not going to be able to attract more users. And so I'm really, really positively excited to see all the different ecosystems that previously been kind of fighting against each other, right? In some sense, becoming more and more united to understand that, you know, it's good to have whatever 20,000 developers that shuffle from one ecosystem to another,

• 12:57Speaker 01

  but it would be much better if we can attract many more thousands of developers to the ecosystem to actually solve real problems.

• 13:03David Hoffman?

  Certainly. Well, Sergey, thank you so much for walking us through the Interoperability Summit and also hosting it in the first place.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for coming by.

• 13:08David Hoffman?

  If listeners want to learn more, where should they go? Where's the top of the funnel?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so A, you can go to interopssummit.com. You'll be able to find a lot of speakers and kind of panels from it. You can learn more about Axolotl at axolotl.network and take it from there.

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  Thank you so much.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 13:23David Hoffman?

  Cheers.