Cosmic Validator partners with Cosmic Compass (CoCo) — delegator technology, Cosmos IBC economy participation & more
Cosmic Validator joined the Cosmos Hub active validator set over eight months ago after receiving delegation from the Interchain Foundation (ICF) and other well-known validators, Tendermint employees and Cosmos community members showing their trust in Cosmic Validator. While managing the validator, the team has been developing other products in stealth mode and today, we announce the partnership with Cosmic Compass (CoCo) Network Navigator. In addition, we are participating in GOZ, have launched extensive documentation about the project including API documentation and to test the CoCo Console there is an Early Access Program (EAP) that has closed for applications on April 25, 2020.
We are proud and delighted to announce that Cosmic Compass has now come outside of stealth mode to announce its collaboration and partnership with Cosmic Validator. This collaboration will be strengthened further with additional offerings with the ‘Cosmic‘ brand that will be developed in the future.
As part of the announcement, we are providing below an overview of the team background, why we chose Cosmos, which other networks we are planning to join, the progress review since we joined the active validator set and the next steps and strategy for 2020.
Partnership Highlights
assets/fund management+ infrastructure = better technology, security and diversification of portfolio for investors/delegators
Cosmic Validator, being a non-custodial asset management company, already has 235,234 ATOMs in delegations, worth USD 661,007.54 (as of 26/Apr/2020, 9am UTC).
Cosmic Compass launched just last month (March, 2020) and has development going on at a rapid pace, both at an infra layer and at the app layer.
A few highlights of the partnership are listed below:
- Cosmic Compass (CoCo) will bring tools such as Staking dashboards, Portfolio Management, etc., to Cosmic Validator’s investors and delegators
- Cosmic Validator will run a CoCo Full Node (with Cosmos Hub & other supported chains) to reduce friction for on-boarding developer and dApp communities (or) SaaS integrations with the Cosmos Hub
- It will pave way for Cosmic Validator to explore participation in the IBC infrastructure ecosystem. CoCo will enable Cosmic Validator to run Cosmos IBC Relayers with supported chains
Why we chose Cosmos
Our strategy is to select carefully the networks we choose to validate through an extensive due diligence process rather than validating a large number of networks that we do not understand well. We believe that to provide the highest possible security for our delegators, we must understand the underlying technology of each network we validate to a very advanced and in-depth level. In the Cosmic Validator medium blog you can find several articles, the content of some of them has been reviewed and commented for improvements by both Jae Kwon and Gavin Wood.
We have been following Cosmos and we were involved in the community since 2017. While still many think that proof of work (PoW) is Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm, we understand well that it is just a block proposer selection mechanism, and the consensus rule is the longest chain. We realized that Tendermint was offering a consensus algorithm that had been tested for several years and well-known and used within institutions. With the announcement of Libra and the Binance chain we further confirmed that Tendermint was really the leading consensus algorithm and those projects like Libra greatly based their consensus algorithm on Tendermint.
Additional tools like the Cosmos SDK were also seen as positive and while IBC is taking a bit longer than expected, we believe that IBC will be a major breakthrough in the blockchain industry.
Beyond the above mentioned points, another reason why we chose to validate in the Cosmos Hub is because as the central router within the Cosmos ecosystem, once IBC is enabled and traffic among the different connected chains increases, validators will get a percentage of those transactions fees which are expected to be significantly larger than block rewards.
This is related to our decision to join the Sentinel hub as well. While validating zones connected to the Cosmos Hub or other hubs could be considered, our focus currently is in validating in the main ‘routers’ within the Cosmos ecosystem. Sentinel already has a working product and tens of thousands of downloads on Google Play and positive reviews, which puts the project ahead of Orchid even without the institutional capital support and network.
We are also planning to join the Polkadot relay chain, which will be the central router of the Polkadot ecosystem connecting the different parachains. There are however certain differences in the Cosmos and Polkadot models in terms of the role of validators, the shared security and other topics, so once Polkadot launches we will evaluate whether to keep a larger focus on Cosmos or start growing also within the Polkadot ecosystem.
We are also delighted of the success of our Cosmic Validator telegram group, which quickly became one of the largest Cosmos validator community groups. In addition, some of the members told us that our Telegram was by far the best source of information related to crypto and blockchain that they had we were very happy and proud to hear that, and glad that we can add value to our community.
Moreover, Cosmic Compass was extremely well received recently, and we are looking forward to continue adding tools and value to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Progress Review
We think that the decentralisation of stake within the Cosmos Hub validators is essential. The raise of the active validator set from 100 to 125 was positive, however the amount of stake of the lower part of validators is negligible compared to the largest validators. We also saw several validators abusing of the Interchain Foundation (ICF) and Tendermint by quietly raising their commission to 100%, knowing that these entities do not undelegate or redelegate frequently. Not surprisingly, all their other delegators left them quickly but they have been accumulating a large amount of atoms from the ICF and AiB. Thankfully, the strategy of ICF and AiB has shifted and they will now base their delegations on clear contributions done to the Cosmos ecosystem and reviewed regularly.
When we joined the active validator set there were many validators offering 0% commission and in order not to drop from the active set we were forced to also lower our commission to 0%. We promised our delegators that we would keep 0% in the medium term and we have kept our word while many other validators offering 0% have now raised their commission. We will continue putting effort to offer 0% commission to our delegators and once we decide to raise the fee we will inform them with enough time.
We also want to take the opportunity to thank the ICF, the Cosmos community, network communities, Tendermint employees and some leading validators for their initial support to help us join the active validator set and for their continuous trust and support.
We will apply for independent grants to continue developing Cosmic Validator, Cosmic Compass and additional tools. Once we slightly raise the commission in the future, we hope to have a sustainable business model with the support of our delegators.
Next steps and strategy
We are very optimistic about the upcoming developments this year including the progress with IBC, the coming launch of Polkadot and the Sentinel hub, the Bitcoin halving or the first phase of the launch of Ethereum 2.0. In addition, Libra is accelerating the testing of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and in general the institutional interest in blockchain and crypto assets is quickly increasing.
The next steps for the Cosmic team are to continue applying for independent grants and funding for each service and product, so that we can continue developing tools, supporting the Cosmos ecosystem and providing the best possible service to our delegators. In addition, we are planning to increase our institutional focus with our professional crypto OTC service and managed staking for large or institutional delegators. We believe that our professional OTC service, well-known already within the crypto community, provides a differentiating advantage for our delegators compared to other validators.
We will continue providing regular updates about our progress and growing the Cosmic brand and ecosystem. For any feedback, comments or to talk with us regarding any questions you can join our Telegram community! :)
Cosmic Validator website: https://cosmicvalidator.com
Cosmic Validator on CoCo: https://cosmiccompass.io/cosmoshub-3/validators/cosmosvaloper1de7qx00pz2j6gn9k88ntxxylelkazfk3g8fgh9
Latest version of the explorer based on CoCo’s APIs: https://CosmicCompass.io
Documentation about Cosmic Compass: https://docs.cosmiccompass.io
API documentation: https://apidocs.cosmiccompass.io/
