Tim Fries
On Monday, February 27th, Axelar introduced its new virtual machine aimed at helping developers deploy their dApp across multiple blockchains more easily. The company also announced a $5 million developer grant for building with the virtual machine.
Axelar Introduces New Virtual Machine
According to a blog post from Monday, the Axelar Network is launching its new Axelar Virtual Machine. Axelar is a network aimed at helping developers create and launch their dApps across multiple blockchains and its new Virtual Machine represents a major expansion of its existing offering.
The virtual machine will launch with two key components—an “Amplifier” and a “Maestro. The first of these is aimed at simplifying the connection to Axelar’s interchain ecosystem and the second is meant to automate costly and complex tasks such as multi-chain app configuration, management, and coordination.
Axelar is also offering a $5 million grant to developers interested in working with the Virtual Machine. According to the company’s blog post, the program is intended to design interchain orchestration templates, boost security, and build new connections across the ecosystem at scale, Axelar is hoping to work with selected teams that are described as ideally having “a deep understanding of consensus protocols and cryptography, and a strong software engineering background.”
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Why is Axelar Launching Its Virtual Machine
According to a blog post from Monday, it is currently prohibitively expensive and complicated for developers to deploy their applications across multiple chains. In an effort to solve these issues, Axelar is introducing its Axelar Virtual Machine which will help developers to build their dApps only once and deploy them on any of the 1,000+ blockchains in existence.
The company is comparing its Virtual Machine to Google’s Kubernetes—a toolkit helping developers scale their projects on web2. Axelar has already partnered up with numerous well-known names in the industry including Celestia, zkSynch, and Coinbase’s recently-launched Base.
With the rapid growth of the digital asset sector, a trend toward enabling interoperability between traditionally separated platforms has emerged. Perhaps the most visible example comes in the form of NFT aggregators which aim to give their users access to tokens spread across multiple blockchains and marketplaces. Recently, one of the newer aggregators even surpassed OpenSea after it launched its long-awaited Blur token.
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About the author
Tim Fries is the cofounder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate on the investment team at RW Baird’s US Private Equity division, and is also the co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.
