Skip to content
Developers
Send Tokens
Overview

Send tokens cross-chain

There are three ways to transfer tokens cross-chain with Axelar:

  1. Call sendToken on an Axelar gateway EVM contract.
  2. Get a deposit address using the AxelarJS SDK.
  3. For tokens not natively supported, build your own Interchain Token.

Call sendToken

Use sendToken if:

  • Your dApp transfers EVM-to-X where X is one of EVM, Cosmos.
  • Your dApp uses smart contracts.

Overview

  1. Locate the Axelar Gateway contract on the source chain.
  2. Execute approve on the source chain (ERC-20).
  3. Execute sendToken on the Gateway.

1. Locate the Axelar Gateway contract on the source chain

Axelar Gateways are application-layer smart contracts established on source and destination chains. They send and receive payloads, and monitor state. Find a list of Gateway addresses for the chains we support: Mainnet | Testnet.

An Axelar Gateway implements the IAxelarGateway interface, which has a public method called sendToken:

function sendToken(
    string memory destinationChain,
    string memory destinationAddress,
    string memory symbol,
    uint256 amount
) external;

2. Execute approve on the source chain (ERC-20)

Transferring tokens through a Gateway is similar to an ERC-20 token transfer. You first need to approve the Gateway to transfer a specific token in a specific amount. This approval is done via the approve method of the ERC-20 interface:

function approve(address spender, uint256 amount) external returns (bool);

Here, spender is the Gateway address on the source chain.

Find a list of assets, their names and their addresses: Mainnet | Testnet.

3. Execute sendToken on the Gateway

Call sendToken on the Gateway contract of the source chain. Example:

sendToken(
    "avalanche", // destination chain name
    "0xF16DfB26e1FEc993E085092563ECFAEaDa7eD7fD", // some destination wallet address (should be your own)
    "USDC", // asset symbol
    100000000 // amount (in atomic units)
)

Watch for the tokens to appear at the destination address on the destination chain.

Get a deposit address

Use a deposit address if:

  • You need functionality not offered by sendToken. Example: Cosmos-to-X.
  • You want to allow token transfers from wallets that don't know anything about Axelar. Example: Withdrawal from a centralized exchange.

You'll find the SDK method to getDepositAddress as a part of the AxelarJS SDK.

IntroductionInterchain Tokens