This post supports a proposal that will be made to the Axelar network with the purpose of deploying the Interchain Token Service (ITS) Hub. Axelar’s ITS went live on mainnet a year ago, allowing native-like capabilities for tokens across blockchains connected to Axelar. Subject to on-chain governance approval, ITS Hub will enable developers to interact with a single CosmWasm contract that lives on the Axelar Network itself when sending tokens cross-chain.
If approved, ITS Hub will deliver significant improvements and additions to the features ITS currently allows. Most critically, ITS Hub will enable teams to issue tokens on chains outside of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem. As Axelar’s Interchain Amplifier integrates new non-EVM chains into the Axelar ecosystem, ITS Hub is intended to serve as the key product those ecosystems rely on to send assets in and out of their blockchains. If approved by on-chain governance, ITS Hub will also allow for significant scalability improvements within the EVM ecosystem. By routing through a central hub, token bridging is simplified and protected by an invariant that tracks the total balance bridged per chain per token, rather than a pairwise model that tracks supply on a per-chain basis.
ITS Hub has been audited by NCC, Ackee, and Code4rena.
Migration will include:
- Instantiation of the Axelarnet Gateway: A contract that allows apps on the Axelar Network to send/receive cross-chain messages to/from other chains
- Deprecating Nexus Gateway
- Instantiation of ITS: The contract that allows apps to transfer tokens, deploy interchain tokens, and track token supply across chains
- Adjusting permissions for deployed contracts to Axelar Multisig
- Storing all contracts
- Migrate the Coordinator contract to v1.1.0
- Migrate the Multisig contract to v1.1.1
- Migrate the Service Registry contract to v1.1.0
- Migrate the Rewards contract to v1.2.0
- Migrate the Router contract to v1.2.0
- Migrate the Gateway contract to v1.1.1
- Migrate the Multisig Prover contract to v1.1.0
- Migrate the Voting Verifier contract to v1.1.0
For more info view the full changelog.