Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar Good to see you. Hey guys, good to be here. Happy to hear from you. Hey, great. Thank you for taking the time to do this. Been very excited to speak with you. Now, Axelar has been doing a lot in the space lately. Wherever I am, wherever I'm whenever I'm talking to someone, they're always talking about Axelar how it's one of the key interoperability protocols. Let's start there. We've got the holidays coming up and I imagine you're going to be with family. How do you explain to your relatives and your family what you do for work and what Axelar is? Yeah, very simply, we're seeing an explosion of different blockchains in the space, right? Everything from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, many app chains are continuing to explode. And what we do is we provide the connectivity layer to connect them all together so they can act as one ecosystem network of networks. So we've been doing that over the last four years. And with the number of chains exploding, we just have a continued demand for connectivity. And that's what we do. Is that a sufficient answer for your family? Do they do follow up questions like, what's a chain? Why is everything blowing up? Great question. mean, I think on a high level, they get the fact that there are many chains, right? And then they started asking about kind of what's the use case, right? What happens when you connect? And, you know, this is when I talk about, well, you'd be able to have your tokens, you know, trade across different ecosystems, easily be able to interact with applications from one wallet as opposed to having to install five different wallets. So five different wallets and not having to do that. the interoperable world. think something that resonates quite well because a lot of them have been. I've tried to onboard to different ecosystems and or they have onboarded themselves and the pain of switching wallets from one to another and like figuring out gas it's a real. Awesome. It looks like Galen joined. Hey, Galen, how are you? just wanted to make sure Sergey made it in all right. Hi, Peter. Nice to you. Nice to meet you. Yeah, we're recording right now. sorry. OK, good. I know we were late, so I wanted to just check in. Sorry to have been there. Hurry on. Awesome. you know, one analogy I've heard from a lot of folks is how blockchains are cities and then in between cities are bridges. What do you think of that analogy? And do you feel that that works as a story to tell people that are still kind of getting familiar with interoperability protocols? Yeah, definitely. you know, I think you can say that every blockchain is a city, right? And like we need to be building kind of mega highways between them to connect them all together. And we need to be building different types of transportation environments. I think as we get more institutional players entering the space, more projects that trying to tokenize their stable coins in RWAs, I think those types of analogies resonate quite well. Yeah, maybe we can jump into that. I've noticed, when we first met a couple of years ago, at the time, and I think this is probably true for most interoperability protocols, that the primary customer were chains, as well as apps. But it's looking like Axelor has entered into the enterprise space and is working with... multiple Fortune 500s on proof of concepts is, would you be able to share a little bit about what's going on there? Yeah, I think to your point, I think we're seeing a shift where, you know, originally it was the chains that were kind of the customers because they needed to have connectivity to bootstrap their ecosystems every time they go live. But we're seeing now asset issuers talk about interoperability and the need to be able to issue assets, you know, and settle those assets across multiple chains for different reasons in a very, very effectively, right? So we have done work with JP Morgan with Apollo with Deutsche Bank, we've done institutional reports on what interoperability brings to these asset issuers with these players as well as MasterCard, Citibank. And for many of them, think the tokenization is real. It is coming. It's going to improve a lot of latency and settlement and inefficiencies and traditional financial backrails. And in all of those instances, interoperability is a prerequisite before going live. So we find ourselves being pulled into those conversations at very early phases. Sometimes these asset issuers want to go on one public chain, but they want to interoperate with others. Oftentimes they have private chain deployments that they're considering to have more control on the original asset issuers, but they still want to be connected to everything else. And so It's exciting to see those things, know, when I've been chatting with enterprise institutions for, you know, for 10 years or as long as we've in crypto, but I feel like now these conversations are coming from product teams. They're really from the next level of interest. So it's very encouraging to see. That's quite exciting. So are most of these interactions that you're seeing, are they inbound requests or is it a business development effort where it's outbound outreach or maybe both? it's a combination of both, right, as always. But yeah, I would say, you know, kind of about five plus years ago, most of these were with R &D teams, right? And now we find ourselves outside of the R &D teams within those institutions and they're actually like product developments and business unions that are involved in trying to figure out how to leverage the blockchain technologies. And that's really when you know it's beyond proof of concept and it's no longer within a skunkworks group within an enterprise, but real. So that's really, really exciting. What can we, I guess what can we expect from some of these in the next, I don't know, 12 to 24 months? What are you expecting? I expect more tokenization, right? So stable coins, I think we're seeing a lot of new assets, new types of stable coins being issued, know, yield bearing stable coins, regulatory stable coins, stable coins being issued by specific financial institutions for, you know, saving the kind of the fees on the classical payment route. So I think there's going to be an explosion of these going live over the next, you know, 12 to 24 months. I do think some other assets in the RWA category will also continue to see growth of adoption, right? So we see if you go to rwa.xyz, there's pretty good statistics about which assets are being tokenized right now. You know, I do think we're going to see a continuing growth of, you know, some of the other instruments like Treasurers like that. But I would say next, you know, 12 to 24 months, it's going to be service table coin renaissance. That's really exciting. Yeah, I know looking at different asset groups across kind of asset families, stocks, treasuries, all of those make a ton of sense. What about title deeds? Real estate is a massive market. I've always been curious about what that looks like and how to get title deeds on chain. Is that something that you guys are also looking at? I mean, we've seen some projects that are trying to do that. I think it's a very hard vertical to penetrate, right? And I definitely think there is a benefit from having publicly globally accessible, immutable access to these records, right? Even like an example for myself, I kind of moved from Canada to US back in the day, then I had to work with kind of car title movements. And it's complicated, you know, and you have to do a lot of work to get it done even across the, you know, the two nations that are neighbors to each other when the car is manufactured across both sides of the border anyways. Completely unnecessary, like completely, you know, legacy inefficiencies that need to be eliminated. So I do think we'll come to it. think we've seen, you know, California tokenizing some of the car titles and things like that. I think it's going to be slower on those verticals. There's a lot of, you know, regulatory work that has to come in. And the benefit for, I think, some of the people that are tokenizing is a little bit less immediate. So whenever we're talking about using a stable coin to process your backend settlement and move money globally, if you have financial institution, if you're a payments institution, the benefits are clear. Instance settlement, match faster. settlement, cheaper fees, global distribution. Whenever you're talking about these more traditional use cases where blockchain as an immutable ledger comes in more important, I think, you know, you have to go down and do the math to figure out how much you're saving and who is saving what. And I think that's not a, you know, it's not a trivial exercise from what I've seen. Yeah. Now going back to the asset, you mentioned asset issuers earlier. You know, one frustrating thing that, you know, lot of participants in DeFi have, for example, is that they have to deal with multiple kind of wrapped assets on from different chains. So, know, USDT on Tron, USDT on, you know, Ethereum. How does Axelar deal with a situation like that to make it more user friendly for the participant? Yeah, that's the whole point of interoperability stack and what we're doing at Axelar is to make sure you get USDT or USDC period, right? And you don't have to think about different representations of it. You don't have to think about what chain it lives on. You can seamlessly send it back across to different applications on different chains with one click, right? And so kind of interoperability stacks like Axelar are key enablers of that because it allows you to have asset issuance that serve fungible. can go back and forth in a chain agnostic way, allows the wallets to aggregate all of that information display just one asset, you know, to the consumer. So yeah, we'll have the products as an example, interchange token service that allows asset issuers come in, issue an asset in a chain agnostic way, have the same address, the same symbol. have it fungible to be so you can go back and forth and send it across deposit into the apps and unifying all of that. So I think we're seeing both asset issuers looking for this technology and kind of adopting the chain agnostic way of issuing assets, as well as the applications like while it's embracing the new developer paradigm and saying, now with these interoperable assets and protocols can aggregate all of that as one folded into one. And then no matter what the user transaction is, whatever chain they want to go in, there's a way for me to submit that transaction to the blockchains and being executed regardless to what chain the asset or the app lives. And they could live on different chains in that execution process. Now to be able to use that, do you work specifically with the chains themselves or with the apps themselves or both? Yeah, great question. So we designed our protocol from the ground up so that it's plug and play for the chains. So chains never have to do anything to integrate with Axelar. And the framework we're actually rolling out a new framework called amplifier. It's fully permissionless. You don't have to think about underlying consensus, more contract, you can work with any of them very easily to connect to your chain. And that was a very hard requirement because we've seen in the history whenever you have requirements for the chain to interoperate. Those requirements are never met. And then neither the chain can upgrade, nor interoperability stacks can upgrade, and you have very tight coupling that's hard to break. making sure innovation can happen at the chain itself and in the interoperability stack and seamlessly coexist in the plug and play has been a key design goal for us and we achieved that. And yeah, so most of our work is with asset issuers, with applications. telling them how these stacks change the developer experiences, how they change the user experiences so they don't have to think about multiple coins on every chain. yeah, just to have a sort of chain abstraction finally take place in the crypto space, which I think is happening now. Now with amplifier, is that separate from the Mobius development stack or are they both self-serve features of Axelor? Yeah, so Mobius Development Stack includes Amplifier, right? So Amplifier is the framework for connectivity that's fully permissionless, fully decentralized. Anybody can come in and plug and play their protocol. Mobius Development Stack includes other products like Interchain Token Service that I mentioned that is similar with different class of developers that allows them to issue their assets across all the chains in one click, right? So, yeah. Yeah. Having worked with multiple chain, multiple, interoperability protocols, it's a very hands-on process. And I think having amplifier and the Mobius development stack making it self-serve frees you guys up to be able to serve more customers. it's, it's a similar transition that, that I saw Chainlink and other oracles go through, you know, it was a very, very hands-on, very intensive white glove kind of approach. And then they created their own self-service program also. and it feels like more and more, protocols that are, that are shared, that are, that have almost become like a must have for a lot of these chains become end up transitioning that way. do you still now for, guess, high value, all clients and all chains are of high value, but of those that would like more hand holding and white gloves support, do you guys also provide that? Yeah, definitely do. Interop Labs is a developer in the ecosystems. We have partnerships where we help make certain types of integrations. There are many other developer ecosystems and developer teams that are also building integration. So there is Common Prefix, there is Eiger. So you can definitely find a team to help you onboard yourself, to help you with that integration in the actual ecosystem if you don't want to do kind of the work yourself and we see some teams sponsor other types of, you know, developers to be able to connect to Accelerate ecosystem. It's quite exciting because it feels like crypto is really maturing. Here you're building, you've got your business development, your growth, you've got customer success, you've got integration folks. It really feels like we're kind of growing up. how do you see growth at Axelor in terms of both organizationally as well as the growth of the protocol? What's your views on that? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for us to kind of to continue to lower the barrier of integrations as an ecosystem is like an important goal, right? And like the analogy that I like to make is that, you know, interoperability is not a new topic in some sense, right? So throughout the history of the internet, we've lived through interoperability, right? And it started out by every major company like Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, all trying to roll out their interoperability stacks and like selling them as services that they do. And then what ended up happening is that the open stacks like TCP IP, know, and HTTP that took on because it allowed anybody to build their systems around them, contribute to those standards, not have to work with a vendor and scale. Right. And so this is the transition that we're going through Axelar and interoperability stack where now everything is open. We have multiple contributors to the ecosystem. We just partnered up with Open Zeppelin that's standardizing the semantics around Axel to be a part of every Open Zeppelin library. So you'll be able to, if people don't know, Open Zeppelin standardized things like ERC-20 for the whole crypto ecosystem, which was one of the most important standards, of course, and many, many other primitives. So we're working to make sure that the interoperability standards are also vendor agnostic. We're helping them do that. And yeah, everybody can just come in, build their solutions around them, help grow and scale it. So I really believe that next few years is just going to be the transition from single chain focused developer experience to multi-chain focused developer experience. It means change in these libraries. It means change in some of the integration points. It means change in the way the wallets sort of aggregate and display things to the user. And then interoperability and the sort of the middle layer of this stack has built really becomes the default way you're kind of a building because going and frankly, one of the most frustrating things I think still we'll have to deal with as a developer or as an asset issuer is think about what chain to launch on, right? Like 50 % of the time. It's like analysis of different chains, thinking through the security, then thinking about migration to another chain, right? Like what if it's an asset, is it fungible, not fungible? We're gonna be stuck if we don't get past through that. I really, really work, you know, and I think we have to work as an ecosystem to go past that, to give a simpler answer to everybody that's trying to enter the space. And I think we're doing that. And so I think as Axel Network, as an open project, as an open network, with lot of partners, with a lot of integrations. I think we're going to get there very soon. Yeah, it sounds like it. Let's talk about the Open Zeppelin partnership. That sounds very, very strategic because I can't think of a place where Open Zeppelin does not touch. I mean, it touches everything in blockchain. How did you guys come to think of that? Because it's a very strategic move. And from Open Zeppelin's perspective, are they also doing this for other interoperability protocols or competitors of yours? is it not unique, but exclusive to Axelor. Yeah, so the goal with Open Zeppelin has really been kind of twofold. I think from their side, they saw a lot of pool and asks for, you know, what does the cross chain look like? What does cross chain messaging look like? Right. And I think from our side, of course, we have, you know, over four years of experience building and understanding what that is. So the collaboration really came about as trying to say, okay, let's make sure we can standardize these interfaces that to be sort of vendor agnostic. Right. And I always say that kind of what Axel does. So I always think of interoperability as a number of layers. At the very top layer, you just have API semantics that developers need to know to talk to other chains and other dApps. Those semantics are simple. It's like, here's a message. I want to send this from A to B, from chain X to chain Y. It's a simple semantics. And for a while, I've been saying to every interoperability project, we should just standardize that so the developers can build. assuming a very simple API they can rely on. Now under the hood, how you actually facilitate message delivery and security is where all the kind of secret sauce of different project comes in. We have an open network, we have an open protocol. That's what actually instantiates that protocol, right? Provides insecurity for it. It provides delivery of messages. And this is where differences between the interoperability projects kind of come in and they can continue offering their unique services of how they do that and provide their unique approaches and takes. And so what opens up when we just said, let's standardize this top layer, which is simple, every developer can rely on. We as Axel, of course, instantiate that with the strongest security that we can offer through an open and decentralized network. If other people have other approaches they want to instantiate that semantics, they could do that as well. But the layer... connectivity and sending messages needs to be simple so that again like others can build their tooling wallets tokens around it and so we can kind of move on as an industry and not have those debates anymore Now, going back to the maturity comment I made earlier, I mean, this sounds like a lot of organizations, they eventually form some kind of coalition. So like an interoperability coalition where OpenZapplin and Axelor works with the other interoperability protocols to agree on what those functions are at the API level. Is that something that's happening? I think we're seeing more and more of that, right? And I think that Open Zeppelin, as you said, there is no place where they don't touch. And so they have a lot of partners and they have lot of like layer two projects as well that are every layer two, by the way, is a chain with a bridge to Ethereum in some sense, right? And so they also want to be able to standardize those semantics. They want to be able to standardize how layer two's talk to one another. You see a lot of those initiatives now being done at the Ethereum Foundation. And I think Copa Zeppelin definitely wants to make sure, and I want to make sure that, you know, we're not replicating things. You know, we can, yeah, I agree and kind of, as I said, like move on as an industry on that topic. So yeah. Now, I'm reminded of a time when a friend and I went to a conference on the Microsoft headquarters. He was telling me that he was part of a kind of a security council. This was very, very early with Ubiqui and all the politics involved in getting all of the security companies together to agree on a set of standards. Are you envisioning some kind of I don't know, some kind of delegate, kind of a more political approach. I don't even know how to, this is not like the world that I live in, but I imagine there's going to be some infighting or fighting back between back and forth and agreeing and disagreeing and all of that. Yeah, so I guess like two points, you know, I've worked on standardization of other things in the past as an example, I led standardization of kind of a BLS signature draft that's included in the Ethereum, you know, 2.0, right? And I think when I started working on that, like even Ethereum ecosystem, like, couldn't get their clients talk to one another because they couldn't agree on the signature format, right? And, you know, it was pretty clear that when we needed to standardize that we had a very amazing group of people, Vitalik and Justin from Ethereum Foundation, everybody was joining and participating. And we got the draft to a good state that everybody signed off. Every person that was implementing Ethereum client moved on, and now that's been used across the industry. Worked on other things like homomorphic encryption standardization, which is more advanced, like the whole other ball game. Yeah, so I've seen a lot of these things go both sideways and, you know, upwards, if you do things the right way. I think interoperability is a little bit unique because definitely a lot of parties have, you know, opinions of how it should be done. But I do think it's sort of almost like it's a standardization by adoption that we're going through now, right? Because there are solutions that exist. Many of them, at least on the very high level API are actually pretty close to one another. There's not, you know, and so if you find the commonalities, if you can extract those and, you know, present them in a vendor agnostic way, which is what, you know, opens up Linus doing, I think you can get to a resolution, you know, pretty quickly and kind of continue from there. And that makes sense. And I think that'll be very positive and really push the industry forward. Let's talk about growth again. I'm curious about some of the metrics that you track internally that give you a sense of we're moving in the right direction. you, and nothing proprietary, of course, but would be interested to see what kind of metrics you guys track. Yeah, so we look at things like volume through the network and TBL of the network, right? The volume is pretty self-explanatory. The more transactions there are, the more value we exchange, the more valuable as a network we do. TBL is similar, pretty self-explanatory, right? The more assets rely on Axelor directly or indirectly, the better we do as an ecosystem. So an example in TBL, I think I looked at a couple of weeks ago, we marked just above, like, 600 million of real TVL, which puts us in the top 20 of all chains, just below optimism there, which is really positive to see. And then secondary metrics include things like how many chains have we connected, right? We have over 70 chains being connected now through the stack. I think there's pretty deep works to connect over 30 over the next year. So that's going to be very exciting to see explode. know, number of developers that build on test nets, main nets, how many people launch kind of tokens through access. So those would be the secondary matrix, right? And then the primary metrics are volume and TVL, I would say. And those make sense. What about your marketing campaigns? Because some of these metrics are not in your control. They're primarily owned by the apps as well as the chains on which the TVL is on. Do you run marketing campaigns to optimize on these metrics that you guys follow or track? And do you work with the apps and chains to do that? Yeah, I mean, we definitely do your point. think one of the biggest benefits of interoperability is that we have a lot of partners and like a lot of chain partners. And every time we talk about kind of go to market, we think how to do jointly to maximize the success on both sides, right? Are there campaign, you know, liquidity campaigns that need to need to happen? there marketing campaigns to the particular? you know, wallet holders or token holders of an ecosystem that need to happen. And all of those are being done kind of as well. So yeah, I think every time a new integration goes live, the networking effects can exponentially go up, right? And so the more you could do and, you know, various teams and ecosystems think very carefully about how to maximize, of course, the the outcome for all of these metrics whenever an integration goes live. Yeah. Now going back to the Fortune 500 proof of concepts, I imagine that a lot of these enterprises, they care a lot about privacy and have to adhere to privacy laws. How do you work with that specific requirement? I know privacy is important to Axelor, but I think there's a prior additional requirements that these Fortune 500s have to adhere to. So how do you guys deal with some of that? Yeah, so great question. So I think there are two things there is like one, we actually do work with some privacy preserving blockchains, right, like Alio is an example and kind of working on integration there, which offer solutions to be able to launch, you know, privacy preserving assets that are still composable with other open ecosystems, right. So you can almost think about it. I get to transact on these public systems, public ledgers. If I need privacy, I send my transaction to like Alio as an example, right? Within Alio, it's a closed system. So almost like as a bank, you you have your private space and you have everyone else, right? And you get to decide when to go between your private space and everything else through this firewall, right? So in this case, like you can think of Axelar and the utility that provides is almost like a kind of a firewall. that allows you to go between private and public. We similarly see financial institutions launching private chains as well that want to talk to other either private chains or public chains. And then again, then you can view interoperability as this gateway or firewall that sits in the middle that you can use to control which messages can go to the public chains, which messages can go to other private chains. And then the private chains that you instantiate gives you the privacy requirements that you need. That's really interesting. I'm not familiar with Alio. I'm curious, are they EVM or? It's not an EVM. You know, have to work with a different language that's sort of optimized for privacy and for efficient generation of zero-knowledge proofs around it. What about there's a lot of talk on the bit in the Bitcoin ecosystem recently, know, lot of prior in 2025, we're going to see many Bitcoin L2s, you know, spin up. And of course, there's Runes protocol, which is, know, the kind of the meme coin kind of meta protocol of Bitcoin is Axelar is are you guys looking to support Bitcoin or do you already? Yeah, so Bitcoin integration is in the works, both native to Bitcoin as well as through Stacks. So all of those should go live. We also have a number of L2s on Bitcoin that are looking to connect to to access directly. So yeah, think as those protocols are being rolled out, we're going to see Bitcoin ecosystem just being interconnected with the rest of the Web3 more and more. And think that's going to be very exciting to see when you will open up new use cases of your Bitcoin assets that were not possible before. I'm very excited for that. the liquidity on Bitcoin is massive and the number of holders and whales there are really looking to do something with their assets in a safe and reliable way. And there just hasn't been an option. Yeah, exactly. like, I think last, you know, a few months, we saw an increased pull to get the Bitcoin integration live, especially when we saw, you know, all the kind of back and forth and drama around RAPTVTC, right? You know, and support for that. think to your point, think whenever you're Bitcoin user, you want to make sure it's safe. You want to make sure whatever protocols you rely on are decentralized and you can always get your Bitcoin back. Yeah. And so you need the open permission, let's kind of decentralize protocol like Axel to connect. So you're not relying on a custodian, you're not relying on an intermediary to do the operations on the backend. You want to sort of trust the map in some sense. You know, and I was thinking about this the other night as I was laying down thinking that, you know, even if, you know, all the Bitcoin holders just decided to, you know, hold 99 % of their Bitcoin, but then with 1 % of their Bitcoin, they decided to, you know, let's do something productive with this. That would be a massive flood of liquidity. And whoever can help make that happen, I think would greatly benefit. Let's talk about flywheels for Axelor. This podcast is really focused on growth and metrics and business development and marketing and identifying what these flywheels look like for Web3. Have you guys identified any flywheels that have helped you that's repeatable, reproducible, and has helped Axelor grow? Yeah, I mean, think two points there. think there's a, you know, technology and sort of go to market flywheel in some sense, right? On the technology flywheel, I would say one of the core differentiateds we made in the early days of our stack is making sure it offers many to many connectivity, right? So in other words, every time a new asset or a new chain connects with the Axel protocol, it's automatically in trouble with everything else that's been previously done. So in contrast, you have a lot of interoperability stacks that are very pairwise. And so what that means when two and two is put together, does not mean three and four can talk to two and two. And so you still have to do more work for that. And for us, everything's server hub and spoke. You connect once, you talk to everybody else. So that sort of technical flywheel has been very beneficial, I think, for lot of chains that want to interoperate with X or for a lot of asset issuers. you come in, you get to go everywhere at the cost of one. It's huge benefit on your distribution, huge benefit on management of your integration and assets. And then similarly, I would say, kind of up the stack, when it comes to the go to market, know, flywheels, I think what we found really well is that working directly with, you know, different foundations with different ecosystem projects, when we go live, works really well. So when we have a joint go-to-market campaign, when we have a joint activation programs, when we have joint, you know, liquidity incentive programs, when everybody is incentivized to get the most value out of these connections, it works really, really well. And so I think the Axel ecosystem and the partner ecosystems are putting, you know, good work into those channels. And I think we've seen that repeatedly kind of pay off. Yeah. Has there been a marketing campaign in the last few years that you've been running Axelor that has exceeded your expectations, like in a positive way? I think the one I remember that really exceeded my expectations was this campaign that we called Cosmos Trucks. So I don't know if you know it, but we connect a lot of the Cosmos liquidity, right? And a lot of activity, we'll work with Lesmosis, DYDX, kind of help them interoperate with other ecosystems and other Cosmos projects. And yeah, there was more campaign. of kind of a trucks that, you know, almost like you can imagine, a little view assets kind of help you move it left and right. And I think the team did really well on that. A lot of partners had their own like branded sort of trucks that they will post it on Twitter, retweeting kind of commenting on the value of it. I thought it was silly. I thought it was cute, but never thought of the kind of, you know, the impact that would have. I thought it was, you know, definitely exceeded my expectations in that in that moment. That's good. Now, speaking of Mindshare, I want to separate actual metrics from Mindshare. And Mindshare is really, really important, especially in Web3. When I think of interoperability protocols, I think of maybe four or five. Axeler, I think of Layer 0. I think of Wormhole. I think of Polyhedra and Hyperlane. And there's probably more out there, but those are the five that I'm familiar with. And I'm familiar with that because of what I've seen online, what I've seen on and I've listened to in podcasts, et cetera. How do you think about mind share because, and how do you always remain top of mind? Because Axelar is always in top of mind when I'm talking to people about interoperability protocols and bridges, know, Axelar is always in that list. Yeah, so 2.1, I think we are already in the space where the number of players that I think can effectively continue executing scale, we're down to a handful. So if you look at the number of chains, there's a lot more competitors, a lot more choices you still have to think through and kind of a pick from. I think one of the, first of all, reasons for that is it's not easy to build these stacks and it's not easy to scale them. And so I think the capital that's required to build an ecosystem like this, the effort and the dedication, it takes years. So as a result, we only see a handful of projects in this final phase. But yeah, I would say most of the stuff is just continue to do the good work and continue to build the products, continue to build integrations, work with our partners, work with asset issuers. Yeah, I think we've been fortunate in the sense that when we're starting out the project, we had to explain to people what connectivity does to you. And I think over the years that shifted from people understanding what that is and pulling us into the conversations. So I think we'll find ourselves in a pretty fortunate position as a result of it. And just continuing to build, continuing to do the good work with our partners, with our developer shops, I think is all we can do from our side. Definitely kudos to you and the team because Mindshare is very hard to get and very hard to keep. And Axelor is always top of mind whenever I'm speaking with people about interoperability protocols. Let's talk about entrepreneurship really quick. This is your, I believe your second startup. Is that correct? Well, third one, think I had a first one that didn't go too far, but it was one of the best probability experiences. But yeah. Yeah. So your third one, so Al Grand and then the one that you started and then now Axelar. What I guess what's driving you to keep founding and starting companies and building from the ground up? To me, it's two things. One, I love working with small, highly energetic, technical creative teams. There's nothing more I would say that you can ask for. There's a big vision we have, hopefully the vision that changes the history for the better. And then assembling a team and working with the team around it to try to execute on it. You might fail. you know, you hopefully will not fail but succeed. But I think there's nothing more rewarding than working in that grinding through that and trying to carve out the path when most cases there is no path right then like trying to pull the strings sometimes left and right. So I don't know, I just love that, you know, process I love. I love the, you know, creativity that has to be put into that I like I love the grind that has to be put into that love with people that are typically often like minded that are willing to join early stage companies, right, that are willing to adopt themselves often, right, and they're often lifestyles to, you know, to accomplish a common goal. So yeah, I think the whole, it's the process in some sense that I love. You've definitely assembled a good team and I've met a number of Axelor team members and they all believe in the mission and the vision and they're on board. Before we end, we'd love to hear some, know, what you look forward to in 2025 and what we can look forward to seeing Axelor accomplish. I think one of the big things that I'm looking forward to is probably kind of the mood swing that we've been experiencing already over the last few months with new administration and new players entering the space. I think it's a little bit unfortunate that we had a lot of the crypto incidents a few years back with FTXs of the world. I think they took us back by quite some time. you know, and the recovery path, I think, for a lot of projects and for a lot of teams has been, you know, not an easy one, right? That being said, I think it's interesting. The benefits of this space are clear, right? Like, you know, I think 10 years ago, when people were asking me, like, what's the end goal look like? Cheaper global financial rails, access to financial instruments for everybody is the end goal. Like it does not exist today, right? And I think We now at the verge of everybody outside of crypto starting to realize that, right? You see BlackRock talking about tokenization. You see, know, Fidelity is doing ETFs of the world. So the benefits are starting to be more and more clear. And I think with the open regulatory regime and clarity, whatever that is, and less hostility, I think we're going to be, you know, on the on the edge of technology and what we can deliver to the end users, which I'm very excited about. Amazing. Sergey Gorbunov from Axelar. Thank you. Thanks for having me.