What is Axelar?

Axelar delivers secure cross-chain communication for Web3. Secure means Axelar is built on proof-of-stake, the battle-tested approach used by Avalanche, Cosmos, Eth2, etc. Cross-chain communication means you can build a complete experience for your users that lets them interact with any asset, any application, on any chain with one click.

In the last few posts (I, II) we looked at the existing interoperability landscape and the properties needed from scalable cross-chain communication networks. In this article we’ll introduce Axelar network, our protocol stack, and platform. For more details, please see the whitepaper.

Axelar network is a scalable cross-chain communication platform. Blockchain platform builders can use it to seamlessly plug-in their blockchains to all other blockchain ecosystems. Application developers can choose the best blockchain to host their applications and use Axelar’s cross-chain communication protocols to lock, unlock, and transfer assets, as well as communicate with applications on any other chain. By connecting dapps with multiple blockchain ecosystems, the Axelar platform empowers users to interact with all applications across the ecosystem directly from their wallets.

Axelar Stack

On a high level, the Axelar network is a permissionless system which anyone can join to participate in various roles. The network is designed specifically to handle cross-chain requests with high safety, robustness, liveness, and governance. At the start, the network will power two foundational decentralized protocols:

• Cross-Chain Gateway Protocol (CGP) is responsible for cross-chain routing and delivery across autonomous blockchains that may run based on different consensus protocols and finality rules, heterogeneous tech stacks, and even blockchains without smart contracts.
• Cross-chain Transfer Protocol (CTP) is an application level protocol that serves as the gateway, allowing applications to perform simple queries via a unified API (think FTP, HTTP/HTTPS) to facilitate cross-chain operations. Dapps can send CTP queries to special gateways hosted on various blockchains, and CGP is responsible for their cross-chain delivery to the correct destination blockchains, and returning the results to the sending applications.

Let’s take a closer look into each of the core protocols:

• Transaction 4

• Transaction 3

• Transaction 2

• Transaction 1