A Chain Agnostic Layer-0 Future with Sergey Gorbunov of Axelar

Today’s guest is Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar. Axelar is a universal interoperability platform that connects all blockchains through a decentralized network and an SDK of protocols and APIs. Using the network and SDK, developers can efficiently integrate their applications across all blockchain ecosystems creating greater access to users, assets, liquidity and other applications. Sergey is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo (2016 - present). He is interested in building cryptographic primitives, protocols, and systems that enable new applications in untrusted and distributed environments. He received a Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a Microsoft Ph.D. fellow and MSc and BSc from UToronto. His Ph.D. dissertation was on designing cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography for which he received the Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Award for best thesis in CS at MIT. He was on the founding team of Algorand where he was involved in various business and technical aspects of the company and led the cryptography group. He also spent some time at IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre. We discuss Axelar, Interoperability, Blockchain Design, DeFi, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing Axelar. Sergey explains how Axelar enables interoperability. We discuss how Axelar is building the infrastructure needed to build a decentralized platform like Binance and Coinbase. Our next discussion topic focused on the proliferation of layer-1s. Sergey explains how the pursuit of scalability influences the development of new Layer-1s and other scalability solutions. Sergey further addresses scalability by explaining the relationship between scalability, application, and design. Sergey stresses the importance of understanding how use cases will continue dictating the design of blockchains. Our next conversation topic centered around the bear market. Sergey shares his experience leading a company through the bear market. Sergey stresses the importance of continuing to build through the b