One month ago Axelar announced that the signups for the incentivized testnet had opened, to incredible support from the community. We appreciate the overwhelming interest in Axelar and wanted to thank everyone who signed up!

Within 2 hours of releasing the announcement, our submission forms had received over 1500 applications from participants from across the globe. Within 2 weeks the submissions had skyrocketed to over 6500. The community engagement we’ve received in not only the submission process but in our developer Discord channels is a testament to the excitement and eagerness for cross-chain solutions.

Over 23 validator communities including Solana, The Graph, Mina, and more are already participating in the Axelar’s incentivized testnet and working through the exercises. The latest testnet release included an array of network improvements such as support of the latest Cosmos-SDK making the Axelar Network IBC-compatible, introducing weighted threshold signatures meaning that validators with more stake get more voting power, and more.

An Axelar testnet transaction showing bitcoin being sent over the ropsten test network.

We will continue onboarding new participants on a rolling basis as we scale the operations and the tech, in order to release more features and work with our community to ensure that the Axelar network is robust and secure on our journey to mainet. We are thrilled by our community’s involvement, from the number of signups to the feedback from testers and the enthusiasm of our community moderators. We are currently working to scale our resources and add more exercises and support for the network.

Testnet Community Recap was originally published in Axelar on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.