Bankless - Axelar with Sergey Gorbunov | ETHDenver 2023 Interview #1

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

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 

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 in the very first day of Heath Denver. The actual official ETH Denver event has not yet started, but we are at the AXLR 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 Axilar, which I'm learning quite a lot about. And then there's also conversations about layer twos and the Ethereum layer one. So not only are we talking about

the app chain mesh network thesis that Cosmos has. We're also talking about the layer two and layer three and super chain and hyper fractal scaling, chainy-chaininess. 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 Ogrewald.

You're going to hear me talk to Sergei of Axler. We'll talk to Streerom of Eganleier. We'll talk to Stephen 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 Axlar Interop Summit. So I want to thank the Axler team for hosting me in all these interviews

that we were able to bang out so quickly here on the first day of East Denver. Bankless Nation, I hope you enjoy them. But first, a moment to talk about some of these. fantastic sponsors that make all of these interviews possible. Cracken is our strategic sponsor for 2023. Why? Because Cracken 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 Cracken as our strategic sponsor for 2023 was a no-brainer. We need exchanges like Cracken to provide the on-ramps to get people to go bankless.

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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. Uniswap's a big announcement at Eith Denver is their Uniswap wallet, which is waiting to get released to the public as soon as Apple stops being a big old bully

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or an NFT power user, then the Phantom wallet is for you. is for you. It also comes in mobile. Check it out at phantom. Now let's get into the interview. And since we are at the Axler Interop Summit, we're gonna start this conversation, start these interviews off with Sergei, 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 gonna get to Sergei and Axler. Bagelus Nation, we are here at the Axler Interop Summit

and I'm here with Sergei, the co-founder and CEO of Axelar and also the host of the Axler Interop Summit. Sergey, how's it going? It's going great, how are you? 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?

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 web 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 Web 3? 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? 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 an event, right? A lot of kind of Ethereum layer, Ethereum folks, a lot of layer twos, as well.

Every layer two needs interoperability as well. We have folks from, you know, Avalanche, new ecosystems that are emerging, kind of Abdu, SWE, 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 intraoperable applications. And it requires new types of software. It requires new types of stacks to be able.

built. So we have an amazing lineup here of developers that actually learn it from all the participants. 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? 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'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 wall, it, 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 the space throughout the last year behind various like centralized bridges and things like that. So thinking 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. And what is Axelar and how is Axelar fitting into this whole vibe and interoperability stack that we're talking about here. Yeah, so the very high level Axler is actually a full stack intropability solution.

So the way to think about it is there is the Axelah Network, which is a decentralized network that's responsible for connecting different ecosystems and moving messages across them. But then on top of the network, we have a layer of services that are built around it. So things like relays, 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. 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. So it's almost like account abstraction types of techniques. And then on top of it, very simple kind of monitoring tools, SDKs that developers actually interact with, right? So that's what we've been thinking about at Axler is like, what does the stack needs to look like? What are the different layers? And it's a lot more than just kind of paralyzed 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. And you said Axilar is an interoperability network. It's a blockchain, blockchain network. It's a blockchain network itself, yeah. It's been designed, though, to move information across other networks. 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.

What is the blockchain meant to serve other blockchains? 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 Axler, not with the purpose of building applications, but you 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. For bankless listeners that are familiar with, like, the Cosmos, App Chain, Mess Chain Network, how is Axelar similar or different to that? How does that fit in? Yeah, so Cosmos is traditionally been powered by kind of IBC Protocol. Right, so IBC Protocol, you can think of it as a Paraguish Protocol

that tells us how you and I can talk to one another. But whenever we're talking about intraoperability, it's really like this full stack that we have to think about from a perspective of developers and users. 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 kind of lessons that we learned throughout the last year working a lot of developers,

is that not a lot actually building an energy chain, but they're all thinking about it. Right, right, right. It's actually hard to build. And so we're thinking about how to make it easier, right? And so with kind of the solutions around the Excel network, that's always the goal with developers in mind, providing those services around the network.

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 cross-chains was once fun and is now an encumbrance. And it sounds like that's really the same kind of problem that Axler is going after.

So you have the blockchain network, but then really the infrastructure on the top of it, it's really to promote abstraction away of all of this chaininess so we can stop being so chain-focused. Is that kind of the, perhaps the point of Axelar and also the Interoperability Summit that we're here at today? Yeah, absolutely. I certainly think that for us as an ecosystem to scale,

We have to have more and more chains, okay? 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 flipping within different wall is 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.

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 build 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, people from different regions, different geographers can still access to 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. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of similarities between what's going on on top of the, like, Ethereum layer two space with like the optimism super chain is this 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. Cosmos is trying to do the same thing. Sounds like Axlars also trying to do that between all of the networks. And I'm really seeing just kind of a meta shift in towards this focal point of more chains,

but less complexity. And that kind of seems to be what this focus of this interoperability summit is here today. for bankless 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, again, for people that weren't able to make it, what should they have walked away with if they were here? 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 change to think about, right? And so I think kind of what we're trying to say,

okay, let's start to think interchained altogether. New developer abstractions, new developer exams, 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 intraoperable future, SDKs, you know, 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, you know, 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's shuffled from one ecosystem to another, but it would be much better if we can attract many more thousands of developers to the ecosystem to actually solve real problems.

Certainly. Well, Sergey, thank you so much for walking us through the Interoperability Summit and also hosting it in the first place. Thanks for coming by. If listeners want to learn more, where should they go? Where's the top of the funnel? Yeah, so A, you can go to interruptsummit.com. You'll be able to find a lot of speakers and kind of panels from it. You can learn more about Axler at Axler.network and take it from there. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having it. Cheers.