Here is a realistic price prediction and an honest crypto review for Axelar. In my opinion it is going to zero. This is never a project I would invest in. I have been in crypto since 2014, and I have researched thousands of altcoins. I am tired of seeing people get ripped off on these crappy projects when I could take five or ten minutes to show you why this one is trash. So let's dive in right now.
First, look at Axelar on the CoinMarketCap page. They have a bunch of token unlocks left. At least 20% of the tokens are still unlocking. The fully diluted value is $581 million. This had a big pump earlier last year and then dumped most of the value already. It is a newer project that has not been through a full bull run. But here is the thing: does this have any real value? You have to get beyond the price chart almost immediately.
What does Axelar actually do?
So what is this? The about page says XLR claims to deliver secure cross-chain communication for Web3. What I know from researching thousands of altcoins is that ICP already does that a thousand times better with Chain Fusion, where you can build directly on the ICP blockchain and make transactions on other blockchains. The ICP blockchain is a real world computer. It is capable of making transactions directly on the Bitcoin network without using intermediaries. In my experience, ICP has the absolute best tech for this. So I know right off hand, looking at Axelar, that this tech is weak by comparison.
What does it do? It sends tokens from one chain to another, and there are already plenty of other things that do this. So I personally do not see why I would invest in this. Why would I invest in something I am not using every day myself? I do not believe in investing in something you are not using every day. If you are using Axelar every day to send tokens cross-chain, then it might make sense for you. But if you are not personally using Axelar every day to make token transfers, I do not see any good reason to invest in it.
The founders and the serial-project pattern
If you look at the founders, it was founded in 2020, and both founders were part of the founding team at Algorand. I am not big on founders just churning out projects, or leaving one and starting another. I have seen many times where you have these serial founders who start project after project and none of them go well. They are a hero in the short term, until they start several projects in a row that all fail and go nowhere. So Axelar, to me, has almost no value proposition in the existing market.
Reading the on-chain metrics
Now let's look through the scan. At first the transactions look decent, right? Three million transactions all time. That is not great when you compare it to ICP, and you have to be able to compare things to do real research. ICP is doing thousands of transactions a second. It is hosting entire websites, including my website. To me, ICP has the most transactions out of anything right now in crypto. If you look at the fastest blockchains by transactions, ICP is consistently on top, even above Solana. So three million transactions in the entire history of Axelar does not impress me.
What they are focusing on, though, is volume transferred, which is $10 billion. However, this is a very easy metric to artificially inflate. In theory, I could send $1,000 with bots a million times, and that would be a billion dollars off of the same thousand dollars. Or use bots to send $10,000 a million times, or $100,000 a hundred thousand times, and that would make up the whole volume of the entire network. Right now the average volume per transaction is about $3,600. So this is very easily something that, with a relatively small amount of money, you could massively inflate.
And if you want to be skeptical of my analysis and say, "well, they wouldn't cheat," consider that the norm in crypto, if you are even in the top at all, is cheating. XLR is ranked around 137. What is normal is cheating. What is abnormal is something like Internet Computer and DFINITY not cheating their metrics. That is abnormal, and then everybody criticizes the metrics they have not cheated. So generally, I believe things cheat unless proven otherwise, unless you can see that they are not cheating by going through things in depth. We cannot always tell, but I am just saying that volume is extremely easy to cheat.
Going through the websites
Let's look deeper. They have a pretty deep website at axelar.network. It is colorful, it has recognizable logos, and it uses a slightly different template than you see in a lot of other places. It looks good at first. You have these SDK downloads on different blockchains, and they are talking about JP Morgan. But I am not investing in stuff because of that. JP Morgan was saying Bitcoin was crap a few years ago, and now they are pushing into it. That is not a signal of validation to me.
What I want to look at is where the team is. Can I see the real people behind this project? If you click on Teams, you find a careers page, and disappointingly there is not one single person's face on there. I am huge into transparency, because in crypto and in life generally, people who are doing things they are not proud of like to keep it secret and want to keep their faces hidden. This is why most meme coins do not have a face attached to them, and why even many big projects do not put the faces of the people working on the project out there.
I have talked to crypto developers in person who work on things like this. I do not know if it was this project specifically, but they did not even want to talk about who they work for. They told me they just dump the coins they get immediately, because they have no faith in the project. And that is typical in crypto. So when I see that people will not even put their faces to their work, my first thought is: not trustworthy at all. No way I would invest in this.
I went deeper. I looked at the Axelar Network X account, and it says it is by the Axelar Foundation, which tells me whoever is doing their marketing is not thinking this through. The foundation account has 3,000 followers and a website. The first website, axelar.network, looks like serious effort was put into it. But then you go into the Axelar Foundation website, and it looks like somebody took ten minutes to put up a crappy little site. Again, there is not one single person's picture on it. That is a problem. There is no transparency. You do not know who is actually working on this, which to me equals not believing in the project. It feels like they are just here to scrape people for money as easily as possible. As a crypto investor, this gives me no confidence when this is the foundation page.
Compare that to the DFINITY foundation page on Internet Computer. It is described as the largest research and development team in blockchain. Look at all the pictures. Look at the quality of people: Jan, Dominic, tons of engineers, infrastructure, software engineers, data services. The level of talent there is amazing. They have people, faces, and names, and that is what I am looking for. Meanwhile, the Axelar Foundation site's copyright says 2025. You can often spot crappy, lazy projects by sloppy details like not having the copyright updated a month and a half into the year.
Follower counts and artificial reach
Their main X account at x.com/XLR has over 200,000 followers, which fits the crypto cheating playbook. Part of that playbook involves artificially boosting your follower count so people think you are popular, using bots and ads. You can see through it by looking at the reach on their posts. I have about 10,000 followers on X, and with twenty times as many followers as I have, they are getting about the same amount of reach on a post. For as many followers as they have, it is pretty clear they have used bots or something else to artificially inflate their account.
So none of this looks good to me. Not one thing I see about this project looks good. To me, this is an extremely high risk crypto investment, and it is very unlikely to return more than Internet Computer. This is my honest opinion and how I personally evaluate these projects, not investment advice. If you want to see how I think through money and crypto in more depth, I share a lot of that thinking in my Money playlist.