Axelar

Axelar is a blockchain network designed to connect other blockchains, allowing decentralized applications and their users to interact with assets and services across different chains through a single interface. The problem it addresses is fragmentation: today, different blockchain ecosystems largely cannot communicate with each other natively, which limits what developers can build and what users can do. Axelar positions itself as general-purpose infrastructure for that cross-chain communication layer.

Axelar operates as its own proof-of-stake blockchain, where validators produce blocks, participate in multiparty signing, and vote on the states of external chains they are bridging. The AXL token is used to pay transaction fees on the network and for governance, and token holders can delegate their AXL to validators, earning a share of rewards minus the validator's commission. Notably, end users of applications built on Axelar do not need to hold AXL directly, as fee conversions from source-chain tokens into AXL are handled in the background.

Fees on the Axelar network are paid by users of cross-chain transactions and denominated in source-chain tokens, which are then converted into AXL on the back end and distributed to validators and token holders. The network also issues inflationary rewards that increase the total AXL supply, though the protocol description notes a transaction fee mechanism that could, under certain conditions, make supply deflationary over time. On a 24-hour basis, turnover stands at 17.07% of market capitalization, and the 30-day average daily volume represents 10.82% of market capitalization, reflecting how actively the circulating supply of roughly 1.25 billion tokens is trading relative to the network's roughly 67.9 million USD market capitalization.