Axelar's General Message Passing Launch with Sergey Gorbunov, Zaki Manian, & Steven Goldfeder

Bankless Nation, we got an extra show for you today. Here we got a panel of cross-chain experts. We got Zachy Manion from Cosmos, we got Steven Goldhutter from Arbitrum, and new to Bankless, Sergei Gorbanov from Axelar. Axlar is a newer IBC chain on the scene. It's been around for a while, but it's new to me. And it is working on interchain composability. So not only is the world of Cosmos and IPZ chains a world of interoperable mesh network of Cosmos Layer Ones, but also Axlar specifically is working on interoperability beyond the IBC realm. And so the announcement going out today is that Axelar's new technology, what they are calling general message passing, is connecting the world of Arbitrum to the world of Cosmos, which is why Steven Goldfeder from Arbitrum is on this panel as well. So previously we have been skeptical at Bankless about cross-chain bridges. Generally, the position that everyone that we've seen so far is fundamentally insecure. And I am still cautiously optimistic about Axelar, but there is a lot of new technology that they are bringing to the table. And so they are able to produce what seems to be a meaningful integration between Cosmos and Arbitrum that has both communities pretty excited. And

Uh according to Sergei from Axelar, the interconnections between different chains doesn't stop there. Because if you can connect the IBC language of Cosmos to the EVM language of Ethereum, you can actually kind of connect any languages from any blockchain, or at least that's the idea.

And so if you are into the world of the many layer one landscape with it with bridges connecting all these things, this episode is definitely for you. And so we are going to get right into that conversation with Zachy, Steven, and Sergey. But first, before we talk to Zachy, Steven, and Sergey on the show, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible, especially Bankless Nation. We have two returning guests and one new one, Zaki Manion from Cosmos. Zachy, welcome back to the show.

It's great to be here.

And Steven Goldfetter from Arbitrum. What's up, Steven? How's it going?

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

And also the new entrant into the Bankless Nation, we have Serge Sergei Gorbanov from Axelar. And this is the center of this announcement. Sergei, welcome to Bankless.

Hey, good to be here.

So today we're we're talking about chains and bridges and a particular new type of expressive bridge that Axelar is bringing to the table. So, Sergei, since you're the new one of the bunch to the Bankless uh podcast, uh could you just explain a little bit about Axlar, what it is, and you can just TS up for this announcement that we are going to be talking about here on this episode today.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, high level Axelary is a network that connects other networks, right? So it's a decentralized uh you know blockchain technology that allows you to

connect different layer ones and layer twos and send information across them, right? And so uh we build a kind of a full stack of interoperability that allows you to compose your applications across different ecosystems, right? So you can have smart contracts on one chain, talk to smart contracts on another chain.

And really enable kind of very simple developer and user experience to interact with multi-chain ecosystem that we live in now, right? And so Axel is a decentralized layer that enables a lot of this functionalities.

And Axelar is a Cosmos IBC chain. Uh, and so, like many of the other Cosmos IBC chains, it just fits right in into that mesh network landscape of Cosmos chains, correct?

That's right. Yeah. So Axel is powered by kind of a Tenderman, right? And a lot of the

rules around the consensus have been customized to go beyond Cosmos, right? So be able to connect different ecosystems like Ethereum, like layer ones, like Arbitrum Optimism, and so on and so forth, and kind of really be the connector across different software language stacks.

Right. And so this is uh this is where the explanation for Axelar kind of gets a little funny because we have Cosmos, which is a network of chains, and then we have Axelar, which is supposed to connect the Cosmos network of chains to other chains. So can you can you just like open up that that can of worms and help explain that a little bit?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think Cosmos has been built with interoperability mindset at its core, right? And so kind of IBC protocol,

you know, can be used quite well to connect a lot of the Cosmos ecosystems, right? But

the reason IBC works and everything else is because the Cosmos stack has been designed

with interoperability in mind, right? So IBC is kind of a very

uh native to the Cosmos ecosystem. All of the chains speak the same language.

And so you know IBC helps you put uh packets back and forth across them.

Now, if you want to go outside of Cosmos, right, to EVM chains, you know, to Arbitrum and so on and so forth.

You have to speak a different language, right? And you have to have a different protocol in mind to connect those chains, right? And so this is where Axela comes in, right? So our protocol,

you know, can be used to connect an arbitrary EVM stack,

um, you know, and then uh be able to compose those ecosystems with each other, right, and with other sort of Cosmos chains, right? So and you can think of Axela

acting as a sort of a translation layer in that in that process, right? So you have

messages of transactions that can be executed on.

Uh EDM chains that can uh be translated into the sort of the packet formats or messages that can be executed on Cosmos chains and vice versa, right? And so Axela sort of allows you to connect these software stacks that speak very different languages and you know sort of unite them together.

So uh previously, generally on Banklist, we were critical of cross-layer one bridges. Uh, generally, as a form factor, we kind of think as a as a structural pattern that they are insecure. Um, they tend to kind of collapse down to just a multi sig. Uh so how how is Axelar different in that respect?

Yeah. So can Axela is one of the only, you know, one of the very few networks that's sort of fully decentralized and then the powers interoperability, right? So it's powered by Tenderman, it's an open, you know, valid data set. Anybody can participate, anybody can join.

You know, and security is something we took very seriously kind of from the ground up, right? So a decor network in layer,

you know, the network is decentralized. It has robust security policies like quadratic voting, right? For processing cross chain requests, you know, validator key rotations, and so on and so forth.

So that's sort of the base layer, right? It's a very secure, very decentralized network. Um,

on top of it, you know, if you think about security for cross chain, you have to have.

Very robust engineering practices, right? So everything from, you know, we've done over 40 audits on the network, right? Multi-million dollar bug bounties, you know, lots of rigorous like unit tests and so on and so forth. So you have to have the operational, you know, um excellence, right? If you want to ship anything cross chain.

Um, you know, and then finally, what I call is like application layer security add-ons, right? So if you are transferring value

between chains, then in your code, right, or in your

uh functionality, you maybe want to have things like rate limits, right? That would prevent you know, worst case disaster attacks, you know, the networking layer.

So that's how we think about security, kind of a from the ground up

uh full stack approach, making sure you have multiple robustness protocols in place uh throughout it. And the rest, the end of it can be actually a very, very secure, you know, and scalable architecture.

Um, you know, and the final point I'll mention there kind of a new paradigm, things like you know, general message passing that we have a lot of applications building with actually enable you to build.

Different class of applications that don't rely on explicitly token bridges, right? Don't rely on token transfer in particular. And those designs can be a lot more secure. And you know, we can go into the details of it, but I'd say that's the new wave of how cross chain

applications will be built out is using kind of general message passing paradigms that enable a very new architecture and design space that's more secure by default.

And that that's the subject matter of the announcement that's going out of Axelar today, correct? That that is the the big thing. So, like.

There's a big thing happening. There's an announcement that Axlar is making. It's called uh Sommelier. Is that correct?

Similier.

Sommelier. I'm not French. Sommelier. So, Zachy, maybe I'll maybe I'll turn to you. Can since you're the one wearing the uh Sommelier shirt, uh what is this announcement and technically what does it do?

Yeah, yeah. So co-founder of Similier. Similier is a project that I started with my uh with Christy,

uh, my co founder,

back in like

sort of early 2021, right around the time when IBC was launching. Um,

but it was really,

you know, it's been a passion project about

the combination of Ethereum DeFi and EVM DeFi and Cosmos Tech.

So

The idea was to build

a decentralized active strategy manager. So, like essentially, like think of it as urine 2.0.

Um, it was like

you want to have because urine strategies, anyone who's used them has seen a pattern. You know, you start out, APYs are really high. You put more, as more money comes into them,