Axelar

Sergey Gorbunov and Georgios Vlachos had worked on Algorand's founding team before starting Axelar. As new chains multiplied, they saw developers rebuilding connections to the same liquidity and applications. Their proposal was a proof-of-stake overlay whose validators could understand unlike chains and expose one set of protocols and APIs.

The first public form was deliberately narrower. Axelar's retrospective dates mainnet go-live to January 2022 and says Satellite, its transfer application, followed quickly. GMP reached mainnet in May, while AXL did not become publicly transferable for staking and governance until September 27. The network, programmable messaging and permissionless token participation therefore arrived in three distinct steps.

General Message Passing reached mainnet in May 2022. Instead of only locking or releasing a token representation, a source contract could send a payload to a destination contract. Gateways recorded the request, Axelar validators confirmed the external event, threshold signers authorized the destination command, and any relayer could deliver it.

The division of labor explains both the product and its failure modes. A relayer can be replaced if it disappears, but it cannot repair a false validator attestation or unsafe destination contract. The original whitepaper proposed a 90% safety threshold for withdrawing locked funds or forging state proofs and described optional emergency recovery keys; a footnote allowed final deployment parameters to change. The later Amplifier integration specification expects 2/3 signing, so 90% is design history rather than a universal current setting.

AXL became publicly transferable on September 27, 2022. Its release let holders delegate to validators and vote on governance, while wAXL offered a one-for-one ERC-20 route to connected EVM chains. The project estimated only about 30 million tokens, 3% of genesis supply, would circulate that day.

Genesis had created 1 billion AXL. Backers received 29.5%; the core team 17%; company operations and future employees 12.5%; the community sale 5%; and Foundation-managed community programs 36%. Release clocks ranged from six months for the community sale to four years for the team, so decentralizing validator access did not erase the influence of early allocations.

ITS won governance approval on February 6, 2024 and was announced the next day as a permissionless mainnet service across 15 selected EVM chains. Issuers could choose burn-and-mint or lock-and-mint supply handling. On August 28 governance approved and launched Amplifier with an initial network described as 25–40 AXL-elected verifiers. Cobalt followed on February 25, 2025, moving new-connection rewards to pools funded with existing AXL and burning 98% of network gas fees.

Broader access did not make the Gateways immutable. Legacy EVM code lets governance upgrade, a pauser stop or resume calls without the governance timelock, and a mint limiter set token limits. Amplifier puts upgrades under an owner and expects stable deployments to transfer ownership to service governance; its operator can assist an emergency response but cannot act without governance cooperation and signer approval. These are deployment models, so a user still has to inspect the live Gateway for the relevant chain. Axelar's own transfer interface arrived in May 2026, while swaps, Express transfers and more chains remained announced next steps.