Axelar Expands Cross-Chain Infrastructure With Stellar Integration

• Axelar Network has integrated Stellar, connecting its tokenized assets with the latter’s trading venues and yield-farming products.
• At launch, Stronghold, Solv and Squid are building products spanning yield markets, liquidity routing and asset mobility across both chains.

Axelar Network, a cross-chain infrastructure protocol, has integrated Stellar, enabling applications on Stellar to send messages and transfer assets across dozens of networks.

The integration enables developers building on Stellar to tap Axelar’s interoperability protocol to access broader liquidity and unify their users’ experience across dozens of chains.

In their announcement, Axelar said the integration was long overdue, describing Stellar as the ideal network for applications seeking “efficient settlement, regulated asset issuance and production-ready infrastructure that is already integrated to existing financial systems.” It further lauded Stellar’s low fees, high throughput and native compliance tooling, which it says has made it one of the most popular option, especially for institutional clients.

At launch, three projects have deployed their applications on Stellar. The first, Solv Protocol, which offers DeFi on Bitcoin and is the largest on-chain BTC reserve, is now extending its reach to the Stellar network. Developers on Solv can now issue and manage yield bearing products on Stellar, while tapping into liquidity from BTC and other networks. Users can immediately bridge solvBTC, its wrapped Bitcoin token, to Stellar via Solv’s cross-chain app.

Squid, a cross-chain swap and routing platform built on Axelar, allows users to transfer assets across networks. With the new integration, users can use Squid to transfer XLM to dozens of networks, or transfer other tokens to Stellar.

Stronghold, a financial infrastructure firm that embeds blockchain tools in traditional financial rails, is also now actively building on the new connection. Stronghold has a digital token called SHx, deployed on Stellar. With the Axelar integration, SHx will now be bridged to Ethereum, opening it up to the crypto sector’s largest decentralized ecosystem.

The integration comes just days after Stellar announced a new partnership with TopNod, boosting adoption in emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America, as CNF reported.

Axelar Expanding Blockchain Interoperability

Axelar goes beyond facilitating the movement of wrapped assets from one chain to another, like most interoperability protocols. Built originally as a Cosmos project, and still reliant on the Cosmos SDK, it uses a delegated proof of stake mechanism to offer a decentralized network and gateway smart contracts that connect other chains.

The Axelar Virtual Machine has expanded the network into a fully programmable cross-chain layer where developers can deploy smart contracts on Axelar and execute them on other networks.

This year, the network is under the stewardship of Common Prefix, a blockchain research firm which took over in December. Just days earlier, Circle had acquired Interop Labs, the original team behind the project. The acquisition did not include the network or its AXL token, which led to a widespread selloff.

AXL trades at $0.06049 at press time, and since mid last year, it has lost over 85% of its value. Its market cap now stands at $68 million, a steep decline from its all-time high of $1.34 billion.