Project Tracker — Issue 11
What a month in Cosmos. While facing major questions about ecosystem structure and tolerance for diverse viewpoints, projects building on top of Cosmos have continued to build, and several have stepped up where IBC, Tendermint, and All in Bits may have been unable to move forward.
I’m not going to post my opinion on the drama that’s unfolded…well yeah I am actually. Realistically, EVERY public consensus platform project has faced contentious and dramatic conflict. People choose a side and join into Crypto Twitter drama. I’m not joining a side, but I am acknowledging that brilliant engineers may not have the managerial tools to build and scale revolutionary global public infrastructure without massive support.
That said, I think in Cosmos the support is there. It comes from the community of projects and the culture of building an internet of blockchains. Maybe Zaki and Jack can’t work with Jae, but Regen can certainly work with IRIS and push forward critical work. That is happening now, and so I am still confident in the technical capabilities of the Cosmos ecosystem to deliver on its promises.
Before the bulk of the updates (which are a bit light this month due to many factors), I’d like to introduce readers to Elizabeth Barnes, who is helping to manage the efforts of the Project Tracker. Elizabeth has been a friend for several years, worked in Comms in the blockchain space in 2018, and is focusing on her Master’s Thesis on digital privacy and technology. She’s incredibly smart, and I’m lucky to have her jump on to help out.
On to the updates!
Major Updates
Akash
Major news from Akash is they launched an incentivized testnet, where you could participate in deploying an app to their decentralized, globally distributed cloud compute. It’s not up at the time of this writing, but I’d expect a few more testnet opportunities if you want to get involved. their supermini program is extremely compelling so keep an eye out.
Also I just saw this before publication time, Akash is being extorted by ICO Rating. Greg posted some screens of emails showing how they are clearly trying to extort ratings for money. Be careful of predatory “services” and make sure to communicate with the community to keep tabs on offenders. Good luck Akash team.
Althea
Althea has a new android app! Not just that, but it’s got some major user-requested updates that let users transact with other users AND their routers, so you can set up your router to send payments to your neighbor or whatever you need for your individual situation. This is part of their Beta 11 updates, and is a needed and excellent addition to Althea’s capabilities.
Althea also promoted Deborah Simpier to be their new CEO. Deborah has been with Althea since 2018, knows ISPs & the Althea mission, and is a welcome addition to bringing this project continued success. From their post on Deborah, she “ has been instrumental in all relationships around user growth and partnerships,” which is Althea’s latest push the past few months, so she knows the strategy moving forward with user acquisition.
E-money
E-money announced a DEX on their platform, which is something sorely needed in the Cosmos ecosystem. I like that the Trust Wallet and Binance are trying to make these tokens accessible, but the UX is really crap and the fees are abysmal. E-money says that “When IBC is enabled, any fungible token in the zone is tradable. Until then, only the currency-backed tokens and the NGM token are tradable.” Those currency-backed tokens are EUR, CHF, SEK, NOK, & DKK. So it’s not the grand DEX I’ve been hoping for, but it is a step closer, and it’ll be off the Binance chain and hopefully allow for lower fees once IBC comes around.
E-money also announced their token presale.
E-money also launched 5th & final tesnet, and are prepping and starting comms for their token presale. Bets of luck to this team, you’re showing some major progress and have an interesting use case.
Forbole
Forbole has been working on their Desmos blockchain with a first MVP for a social media application that has live betas now. It’s a Twitter take called Mooncake, and there are a couple people on it helping test. I’m there, so come say hey.
➡️ Android: https://mooncake.space/download
➡️ iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Zh9mWFk
IOV
IOV is finalizing their starname system. You can preorder names now for €25.00, which seems hefty to me for some of the names that will be in less demand, but could be a steal for names in high demand. There’s some very interesting competition in this space across networks including ENS, Unstoppable Domains, and the recently launched Handshake protocol.
IRISnet
IRIS continues to contribute to critical updates moving toward IBC and refine their own platform. They reached one year of live mainnet, which is pretty amazing and means I’ve been doing this for almost a year.
Honestly, without projects like IRIS, Cosmos would not work. The network needs a community of people working across projects to function, and the IRIS team continues to give us incredible value every month.
KAVA
KAVA seems to be ramping up their comms as we’re seeing some rereleased AMAs with CEO Sunny Aggarwal focusing on DeFi. DeFi is such a hot topic at the moment that it makes sense for KAVA to jump on the what’s going on in Ethereum with a Cosmos take on DeFi. They’re integrated with Cosmostation wallet along with IRIS now, so it’s clearly one of the flagship projects. Although I am curious to see how it plays out on a POS network since staking is generating about as much as MakerDAO projects, ~8% for ATOMs, and IRIS is around 11% the last few months, so it will be interesting to see what additions come to Cosmos DeFi — maybe less risk of holding tokens?
KAVA also continues to do updates including updating private key management, but nothing changes for most end users unless you’re recovering and address.
KAVA also announced a Commun partnership for some Kava Community points in Commun. Commun is a social media play where you can get updates and participate in community around specific topics. It’s not clear exactly what the reward is, but it’s always interesting seeing another crypto-based take on social media.
Persistence
Persistence is a new project. They came out of stealth mode after developing and doing bizdev for some time, and it must have been significant time because they hit the ground with projects building on their blockchain — Comdex and IXO.
In my assessment, Persistence defines itself with their public/private validator solution for enterprise adoption. They’ve figured out a way to verify the quality of a validator to give prospective projects and clients peace of mind about using a public ledger. They’ve done this with traditional due diligence, but while that is often inefficient, it’s really the only way to know for sure that tech works. Regardless, they did the lifting there and are now working to bring in more projects in Asia and India mainly.
A south Asia and India focused blockchain is a pretty compelling idea. The Persistence team is focused on matching real-world assets to blockchain/digital ones for trading and marketplaces. If there is some solid work with oracles (which we are seeing in other projects like LINK), then this is a very real solution with incredible applications.
They’re also working with the core IBC teams to test and bring IBC transactions to life, and claim they did the first once with their Comdex client.
Finally, Persistence CEO Tushar Aggarwal went as a guest on The Bitcoin Podcast and talked about their strategy and plans to move forward.
Regen Network
Regen had a month of pretty standard updates and a new testnet, they continue to move their project forward and are releasing a number of podcast transcripts.
But beyond strictly Regen, they have taken leadership with the Cosmos SDK and cosmwasm — a cross-chain smart contract system built to complement IBC functionality. Additionally, developers from Regen have used their own time to contribute to IBC upgrade modules and key management, tooling to help validators and stakers visualize and make transactions.
The IBC launch was on many project, investor, validator, and enthusiast minds since IBC is kind of the big lynchpin of the Cosmos vision, and the drama between Jae Kwon and Zaki brought that to the forefront at the start of the month. Regen was announced to be stepping in to lead with resources (dev sweat) and leadership in making strides forward. It’s an important role, not just contributing, but taking community leadership to ship tech and keep building.
No real announcements on this next bit yet, but Regen, Persistence, and the Cosmos teams are starting to talk about how NFTs are going to be part of Cosmos. Maybe we’ll get some Tenderkitties by EOY.
THORChain
THORChain released a Beta wallet to prepare for their mainnet launch. They are continuing to work on the testnet and have ramped up their bounties program. I don’t see a lot of buzz on this project around Cosmos or on Crypto Twitter, maybe I’m looking in the wrong spots. The potential of a decentralized liquidity pool/market for cross-chain and IBC needs seems like it should be a part of the core IBC protocol, so it seems like they’re fulfilling a pretty important role in my humble opinion.
Additional Updates
Bitsong
Bitsong launched a third testnet, which has well over 40k blocks and 40 active validators. Bitsong continues to test and prepare for a mainnet.
Hashgard
The more we check in on this project the more it looks like an exit scam. The devs are MIA except for a couple who have started working on different projects. If you have these coins, sell sell sell and buy some CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED IRIS (not financial advice but seriously gtfo of this Hashgard bullshit.
Hyperledger
Burrow, the Cosmos implementation for Hyperledger seems to be plugging away. They have zero comms, so we can see that updates are happening on github, but not seeing anything shipped or announced, so there’s that. I bet Hyperledger is just making sure they have a functional product in case Cosmos takes off in the coming years.
Minter
Hosted a hackathon and updated their testnet. As usual, this project seems really busy in Russia and doesn’t seem to care much about updating their English comms. Maybe that’s really good news since they are active and seem to have an engaged community in Russia. They do say they are going to release hackathon results later, so hopefully we see that in March to see what kinds of projects are being built with Minter.
Sentinel
Sentinel is in user acquisition mode. They have a working product so now their updates are about adding more end users and real use to their business, joining organizations like the Blockchain Privacy, Security, and Adoption Alliance, and building partnerships. They are in full blown go-to-market mode now.
Vega Protocol
A public demo of the Vega testnet is being presented at a conference. This probably means the testnet isn’t ready for hands-on work, but it’s good to see Vega is pushing to show something. Sometimes that pressure to present and demo and ship is all that keeps a team moving through tough problems.
Summary
These project updates were researched from git repos and project blogs. If you have a project that’s active but not listed here, please reach out to the Cypher Core team to make sure your update is included in future posts. Cypher Core is dedicated to the Cosmos ecosystem and community and is here to help as a validator, as well as to help projects solve business needs like getting your project the sunshine it needs to thrive.
Until next time Cosmonauts, keep shipping!
