Making Blockchain more Scalable with Sergey Gorbunov

Today we’re talking with Sergey Gorbunov, the co-founder and CEO of Axelar Network. With a background in the tech space Sergey went on to grad school where he studied formal cryptography. By the end of his studies it was 2014, and he got hooked into the blockchain space. He started to collaborate with one of the faculty members at MIT on how to make blockchains more scalable. He says everyone has networks that have been built out, people are building up the community, but in reality the communication between the networks is what's important. Axelar Network is a set of infrastructure, protocols, and API’s that allow the connection of various blockchain ecosystems, applications, and users. At the end of the day the goal is to empower two types of participants. First, for application builders they want to be able to build on the best platforms. For users, they want to empower them to interact with any application and asset that they own no matter what platform it resides on. Say you have an asset on one existing blockchain network. By itself those assets live within those networks only. Suppose there is an application that is built on another platform, as a user there’s a lot of friction you have to go through to use your asset in those applications. One of their first use case targets is to build a decentralized application that will allow the user to move their asset to one of the chains that they want to use an application at. Sergey says they have integrations with bitcoin, Ethereum, and other platforms. Users will be able to move assets from different ecosystems. The company has been working on the project for a little over a year. They did a seed fund in early fall and just last week announced their series A fundraiser. There is currently a team of 15 people working on protocol. Sergey says they're in a test environment, going through various exercises, learning how to send requests back and forth, giving feedback, and thinking about various tools needed for the network. The goal over the next month is to get through the test network, make sure it’s bulletproof, and sign up more ecosystem participants. They’ll also be scaling the team around engineering, business operations, and community development. Then they’ll launch their platform from there. For more information check out axelar.network. -- Divi is creating the world's first closed-loop, vertically-integrated cryptocurrency ecosystem. Much like Apple's ecosystem is anchored by iCloud, the Divi Project blockchain serves as the core of the Divi network of technologies. Thanks to a keen understanding of the divide that separates the mainstream from the crypto world, the Divi team is able to create solutions to the industry's biggest problem: adoption by non-technical users. Divi's user-friendly, one-click solutions aim to bring blockchain-based payments into modernity with great UX. In this podcast, we will cover all aspects of cryptocurrency, hot topics, and technology as worldwide adoption grows.