Future of CosmWasm Ecosystem Development

Heads up! Updates for CosmWasm Ecosystem:

Today, we announce the next important milestone for the decentralized future of our ecosystem: InterWasm DAO.

InterWasm DAO will be the organization driving CosmWasm ecosystem growth. It is an initiative by Confio and other CosmWasm based chain foundations to drive community involvement.

History

CosmWasm arose out of a Hackathon in summer 2019 and for the first year was a 1–2 person operation. Around then some larger grants came in and we started scaling out the team. Shortly after, it went live on two mainnets (Terra and Secret) and we also took on the CosmJS project.

Over time, we have built out the equivalent of the EVM (CosmWasm VM), Solidity (CosmWasm std), Geth (wasmd), Open Zepplin contracts (cw-plus), web3.js (CosmJS), as well as a large number of training videos and tutorials. This has been a huge boon to the ecosystem and now many chains look forward to CosmWasm 1.0.

However, CosmWasm doesn’t have a blockchain. No Ethereum Foundation or ICO whales to fund us. It has many blockchains that all want some important features, and there is no way for Confio to meet all those expectations and prioritize them.

Moving Forward

Confio realized the only way to get long-term sustainable funding in this space is to launch our own blockchain. And that is what we are focusing on with Tgrade, built on CosmWasm. We remain dedicated to keeping CosmWasm a highly secure and performant smart contract engine, but do not have the resources to manage all change requests, let alone a repository of standard contracts, documentation, tutorials and tech support. Even if we were paid for that, it is distracting from our larger focus.

Confio will remain the maintainer of all the core CosmWasm libraries, improving them, fixing bugs, and most importantly merging third party Pull Requests. But we can no longer remain the central bottleneck for CosmWasm, we need to decentralize it. There have already been some nice moves in that direction, like cw1155 contracts from crypto.org and a PR to add Cosmos SDK 0.44 support from Provenance. And that is the future we are looking toward supporting.

In order to organize this better, we have co-created the InterWasm DAO to collect funding from many CosmWasm blockchains and distribute them to public goods. At first, we look to hand off some of the more peripheral roles to the InterWasm DAO, such as tutorials and documentation, but look forward to it taking over common contracts and other core toolings like code explorers and IDE support. Many hands make light work and we are happy to see CosmWasm growing up.

Overview of InterWasm DAO’s roles

• Fuel ecosystem growth.
• Produce content and training material.
• Maintain repos.
• Maintain and develop community made smart contracts: cosmwasm-contracts .
• Distribute funds among community good projects.
• Organize cross-chain events.
• Collect data regarding Developer Relations (number of developers, community size, etc) and sharing it with the community.
• Manage social media accounts and market CosmWasm.

Decision Making

Decision-making conversations will take place in CosmWasm discord and GitHub repo pull requests. Each foundation will provide an address that will be used for forming a multisig wallet. Agreeing foundations collect funds under the DAO multisig wallets and smart contract addresses.

Real on-chain smart contract DAO implementation is an idea we will explore.

Initial Board of Members

These are the projects/companies that are currently most active in the CosmWasm community.

• Confio
• Terraform Labs
• Enigma
• Juno community representatives
• Iris Network

Proposals

Proposals are a structured and organized way for decentralized decision-making project funding. Projects can request funding using proposals.

Initially, proposals will be collected under the CosmWasm GitHub organization, under the InterWasm repo.

See more: IWPs

The first grant proposal was made by Oraichain for CosmWasm IDE: https://github.com/CosmWasm/InterWasmDAO/pull/6.

Execution

We want InterWasm DAO to be a community-driven operation. Besides creating proposals for requesting funding for projects, if you would like to be involved in the earlier stages as an organization, team, or individual, please reach out to us at devrelations@cosmwasm.com

First Steps

Here are a few ideas for community project proposals:

• Code and Smart Contract Explorer
• Documentation and Tutorials
• CosmWasm 1.0-rc1 Audit
• CosmWasm IDE by Oraichain
• cw-alarm-clock
• Maintain InterWasm Events Calendar

We are excited to further develop the CosmWasm ecosystem together with the inclusion of InterWasm DAO. The DAO will be an important part of creating, making decisions, and funding important projects and it will no doubt become an example of well-executed distributed decision making.

So jump in with your ideas, teams, and proposals. Keep hacking with us!