Published in Confio·Mar 16Authz and Ledger signing — an executive summaryDuring Confio’s work on CosmJS, I was made aware that it is currently not possible to sign authz message types with the Cosmos App on Ledger devices. In this write-up, I’ll summarize the status quo for executives and users. We’ll close with a look into the future. Authz The authorization module…Cosmos4 min read
Published in CosmWasm·Nov 11, 2021CosmWasm 1.0 code audit startedWe released CosmWasm 1.0.0-beta as a version of the software that we consider feature complete but unaudited. The missing code audit is now ongoing. CosmWasm consists of multiple different software components written in Rust and Go. The audit is broken down into the following scopes of work: Scope 1: cosmwasm…Cosmwasm4 min read
Published in CosmWasm·Aug 9, 2021Wen CosmWasm 1.0?Before we answer the question of release dates, let’s recap what CosmWasm 1.0 actually is. The CosmWasm smart contracting stack consists of many different components that expose all kinds of APIs. The crate cosmwasm-std is used by contract developers to write contracts, cosmwasm-vm is the host environment to execute contracts…Cosmwasm3 min read
Published in Confio·Mar 2, 2021Introducing Confio GmbH — the happy devs companyConfio’s mission is “building trust”. On the one hand, this statement is so open that it even has multiple meanings in “building”. But it also means something unique in the blockchain space Confio operates in: the goal is to build systems in which actors can to some degree trust each…Blockchain Development2 min read
Published in CosmWasm·Dec 23, 2020Wasmer 1.0 integrated into CosmWasmTL;DR: It’s faster and safer and nicer. Earlier this year we learned that the WebAssembly runtime that powers contract execution in CosmWasm was going to get a major refactoring. At that point, it became clear we cannot release a CosmWasm 1.0 that depends on an unmaintained Wasmer 0.x. …Webassembly3 min read
Nov 5, 2020When your blockchain needs to roll the diceMany of the applications we use every day depend on randomness, from to lotteries over scientific application to leader election or private key generation. Today we talk about public randomness, which more precisely refers to values that are unpredictable until revealed but then immutable and available to everyone. On blockchains…Blockchain Technology4 min read
Jun 23, 2020CosmJS — The missing pieceWhen I joined Ethan Frey at IOV, he asked me to work on a pretty interesting library project. It was an abstraction for crypto currency handling of very different account based blockchains to power a multi-chain wallet. In about one year we built a set of libraries that connected Tendermint+Weave…Cosmos4 min read
Jun 17, 2020A cluster of blockchains to solve scalabilityAccount based blockchains are hard to scale, primarily due to their sequential nature. A transaction can only be processed after the previous one is done processing, as you need to assume the transactions depend on each other in general. When a credit card provider processes a payment, they don’t necessarily…Blockchain Technology5 min read
May 11, 2020Signature determinism for blockchain developersDuring my work in the blockchain space, the topic deterministic signatures comes up from time to time, along with misconceptions and sometimes even severe security flaws. But what exactly are deterministic signatures and why would you want them? The rough non-academic interpretation of a deterministic signature is: if the same…Blockchain Technology5 min read
Published in CosmWasm·Apr 20, 2020CosmWasmClient Part 2: WritingIn the first part of this duology, we saw how to use the class CosmWasmClient from CosmWasm JS for reading data from a CosmWasm blockchain. This article is all about writing, i.e. crafting, signing and sending transactions. A simple token send transaction This part works for all Cosmos SDK chain with the bank module enabled…Cosmos4 min read
