A vision for Osmosis, and how Axelar is uniquely positioned to enable it

Osmosis has the potential not just to be the primary DEX in Cosmos, but eventually grow into the most valuable DEX in the world, catalyzing DeFi innovation and becoming the fundamental driving force of open finance globally.

Axelar’s mission is to create the most secure and seamless cross-chain communication platform for web3, with a commitment in building and enabling truly decentralized structures, like the ones pioneered by Osmosis and Cosmos.

Axelar seems fully aligned with the vision of Osmosis to create the optimal DEX user experience, superior to the most successful CEXs out there.

The world of blockchain interoperability moves fast. In just a few short months, we’ve gone past conversations about pairwise bridges and into conversations about cross chain interoperability networks.

Designing cross chain apps was so much easier before

As this complexity hits us full force, we’re missing is a useful framework for evaluating the architectures of cross chain interoperability networks. I think we have the beginnings of it in a post published last week by Sergey of Axelar Network. I will be expanding on it with my own musings, ready to apply it to some cross-chain projects in Part 2 and assess their security along the way.

Crypto + Axelar = Libertarian WeChat

In the future, users only have one private key. They sign a transaction on their resident blockchain, and Axelar forwards it to the application's blockchain. Bridges become back-end only tools for devs, and some devs building interop on Axelar will choose to do without them entirely.

Axelar Network allows a user or a smart contract to sign and forward a transaction to any other chain. As the network goes live it will create the fully open, trustless internet of blockchains which we’ve all been dreaming of. The whole of crypto will become one super app at our fingertips.

Bridges were so 2021. People are beginning to understand what cross-chain and multi-chain means, but one thing is less obvious about the whole thing: multi-chain is more than just bridges. Multi-chain is moving complicated chain mechanics into the background.

Axelar Network is its own layer 1 (built with Cosmos), with some super powers which allow it to sign transactions on any other layer 1.

A “bridge” at this point in crypto has essentially meant the ability to "wrap" assets. Like wrapping Bitcoin or fiat dollars onto Ethereum, or an ERC20 onto Avalanche.

A litany of bridges have appeared, some protocol to protocol, some built specifically by app-chains. This pattern tricks us into thinking that bridges have to be standalone projects. What Axelar will reveal is that bridges are a subset of cross chain interactions, which can exist on a general cross chain layer.