The Internet of Blockchains for Beginners

Are you new to the world of blockchain technology? We will explore what the Internet of Blockchains is and how it differs from the traditional Internet, as well as its potential applications and benefits.

Published in

Lum Network

11 min readDec 13, 2022

Note:
This article is written for educational purpose.
Its goal is to explain the Internet of Blockchains as simply as possible.
If you like what you read, you can deep dive in the resources at the end of the article. Enjoy the ride 🪐

Thanks to the Cosmos account for amplifying this article through a retweet 🙏

Introduction

Before diving into the Internet of Blockchains, you will need to be familiar with a few notions.
Let’s start with an overview of where the Internet of Blockchains comes from.

What’s Internet? 🌐
This can make you smile, but it matters to remember:
“A global computer network providing a variety of info and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.”

What’s a Blockchain? 🟪
It is the expression of the desire to remember human activity at a long-term scale. Think of it as a public and decentralized ledger.
“Decentralized” simply means that there is no central control point. No single entity has control over the processus.
A blockchain is a collective, public and decentralized memory.

What you need to know about a blockchain 👇
- It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network composed of machines (mostly computers called nodes) that hold and maintains a copy of the registry. The nodes interact together.
- It is immutable: once something is written, it can’t be erased
- The transactions are impossible to falsify
- It guarantees a mutual and collective trust thanks to a consensus mechanism. The nodes make sure the consensus rules are respected.

Consensus mechanism ✅
A consensus mechanism refers to rules used to achieve agreement, trust and security in a decentralized network.
It allows the network to agree on a single version of the story.

Bitcoin 🟡
In 2009, Bitcoin is the first blockchain using a P2P technology and operating without a central authority.
The management of the transactions and the issuance of money are done collectively by the network.
How to be sure that money is only spent once? This “double spending” problem is what Bitcoin solves.
You can copy/duplicate any digital file on your computer. Well, it was important that no one can duplicate digital money.
That’s some of the Bitcoin basics.

Ethereum ♦️
The next evolution after Bitcoin was Ethereum, with its Whitepaper published in December 2013.
Ethereum is an open-source platform built on blockchain technology allowing developers to create and deploy programs on it.

Problems are rising 🤔
Even if Bitcoin and Ethereum were each significant (r)evolution, major technical pain points were quickly identified:
Blockchains are slow, they can’t communicate between each other and they are hard to build.

A new vision to solve these issues emerged with Cosmos, The Internet of Blockchains.

Chapter 1: A Cosmos Hub story, the blockchain to connect them all

Rome was not built in a day. It has been a long way to reach the 50 blockchains connected today. And it is only the beginning.

The origins ⚛️
In 2014, Jae Kwon thought about a new consensus mechanism for blockchains. This new consensus allows blockchains to go much more faster.
Then in 2015, Ethan Buchman joined Jae Kwon and together they developed further this consensus mechanism that became a foundation of The Internet of Blockchains.

The genesis 🌱
In 2016, Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman became the founders of Cosmos and introduced a Whitepaper “Cosmos: A Network of Distributed Ledgers”

Important: That’s why the Internet of Blockchains (or “Interchain”), is also called the “Cosmos Ecosystem”

In April 6th 2017, 16.8 millions dollars where raised in only 30 minutes with an ICO (raising money with cryptocurrency).
It was one of the most successful fundraise in crypto until then.
The funds were used to boost the development of all the core technology of the Cosmos ecosystem.

Launch of the Cosmos Hub and IBC 🚀
On March 13th, 2019 at 23:00 UTC the first blockchain of the network launched, the Cosmos Hub.
The blockchain to connect all the blockchains was born.

Important: The Cosmos Hub is the first blockchain of the Interchain.
The Cosmos Ecosystem makes reference to all the blockchains.

It then took another couple years to see the protocol that allows blockchains to communicate with one another take life.
The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol launched successfully in April 2021.

A steady growth 📈
The growth of the ecosystem since then started to skyrocket.
Former CEO of Tendermint (a company working on Cosmos development) Peng Zhong declared in November 2021 that 22 blockchains supported IBC.
Today, December 2022, there are more than 50 chains connected according to Mintscan.

Unlike a majority of crypto related projects, the Cosmos developers built in silence and had a really strong focus on the tech to complete its vision of the Internet of Blockchains.

We now have seen the key terms and made an overview of the history, but what is the Internet of Blockchains all about?

Chapter 2: The Principles

The Internet of Blockchains will have hundreds of sovereign blockchains communicating between them in a decentralized way.

The over centralization of data 🔴
Right now, millions of users are interacting with Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and all their data are centralized at the same spots.
Imagine a future where each app is a blockchain.
All your data would then be decentralized with no single entity having the control on it.

A common blueprint 🗺
Cosmos has provided a common blueprint for designing all these application-specific blockchains.

Instead of surfing on centralized servers owned by single entities, you navigate on a decentralized web where each app is a blockchain.
That’s the Internet of Blockchains.

To build this open ecosystem of blockchains tailored for mass adoption, two key principles are established:
- Sovereignty
- Interoperability

Principle 1: Sovereignty 👑
At a world-wide scale network, it is impossible to get everyone agreeing to a single set of rules to govern. It just makes sense that you can’t apply the same governance rules to people creating a financial product to the ones making art.

The blueprint allows each blockchain to have a self-governing state.
The creators have the freedom to determine how the governance structure works in their chain. Independence matters.

Principle 2: Interoperability 📡
All the computers applications didn’t scale until they could communicate with each others to finally become the World Wide Web as we know it.

Many projects used to define themselves as “Bitcoin killers” or “Ethereum killers”. At the opposite, the Cosmos vision is to focus on acceptance and collaboration.

It is trough shared communication that ecosystems can develop positively and emerge to world scale.

A Philosophy 📖
Behind sovereignty and interoperability, in the Internet of Blockchains are hidden the roots of society: social coordination.
Cosmos gives people the freedom and the tools to experiment and build together.

To conclude, a quote from Ethan Buchman about Cosmos principles:
“The right for communities to be sovereign over their own infrastructure and app, and for sovereign communities to be able to peacefully interoperate with one another.”

What are the technological innovations that made this possible?

Chapter 3: The Tech Foundations

Cosmos has changed the blockchain game. Its core technology made blockchains faster, easier to build and interoperable.

Tendermint Core 🟢
We previously mentioned that in 2014, Jae Kwon worked on a new consensus mechanism. It is called the Tendermint Core and it’s the one that works on every blockchain of the Interchain.

Tendermint Core can support 10 000 transactions per second and can create block about 5 to 7 seconds.
To compare, Bitcoin can proceed 3 to 7 transactions per second and creates one block every 10 minutes.

But speed is nothing without security.
It is important to specify that the Tendermint Core is Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT). It simply means that the network can keep working well even if there are a part of bad actors.

Tendermint Core also allows the developers to write their blockchain application in any language. They can choose a language adapted to the needed use case. And that’s beautiful.

Cosmos-SDK 🧰
The other tech pillar of Cosmos is the Cosmos-SDK.
SDK = Software Development Kit

The Cosmos-SDK is a free package of tools that makes it easier for developers to build their own blockchains and applications.

It contains everything needed to create a blockchain and is becoming increasingly popular, even being used by industry leaders such as Binance.

There are three layers required to build a blockchain from scratch, and Tendermint Core and the Cosmos-SDK complete them:
- Networking (Tendermint)
- Consensus (Tendermint)
- Application (Cosmos-SDK)

We now have seen how Cosmos makes blockchain faster and easier to build. But how are they interoperable then?

Chapter 4: The IBC Revolution

Blockchains are talking to each other, and it isn’t science-fiction.

Blockchains bridges 🌉
The original problem in blockchain communication was:
If you wanted to transfer tokens from blockchain A to B, it was a really hard task to accomplish. So Blockchain bridges were built to enable the transfer of tokens from one blockchain to another.

But blockchain bridges are one of the largest vulnerabilities in the whole crypto environment. Between July 2021 and October 2022, around 2 billion dollars have been hacked in bridges.

Hub and Zones model 🛞
Before jumping into the communication protocol, we must take a look to the blockchains organisation’s in the ecosystem.

Each blockchain is either a Hub or a Zone.

A Zone is a regular blockchain and a Hub have the role to connect the Zones together and to facilitate the transfer of transactions.
A Zone connected to a Hub can automatically access to every other Zone connected to the Hub.

This architecture allows the Interchain to scale the communication across many blockchains. The Cosmos Hub is the first blockchain in this ecosystem, designed to connect them all.

Internet Communications 🖥
Does TCP/IP ring a bell to you? You are using it every day without really paying attention:“Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol”
It is a set of standardized rules that allow your computer to communicate on Internet.

The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol 🛰
In the same way TCP/IP spreads the messages over the Internet, the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) is a universal interoperability protocol that allows two blockchains to communicate with each other.

All the communication between Zones are made through the Hub they are connected thanks to IBC. The Hub is responsible for checking if money is not being spent twice.

IBC also allows for the connection of non-Cosmos chains to the network.

The Cosmos-SDK and Tendermint Core made blockchains faster and easier to build, IBC makes them interoperable at a worldwide network scale.

It is often considered that IBC is the key revolution into the Internet of Blockchains. Compared to classic blockchains bridges, IBC has not been hacked yet.

Finally, the ecosystem brings with it a new democratic structure.

Chapter 5: The Cosmos Democracy

The Internet of Blockchains is building a new digital decentralized democracy. In order to understand this system, we must first take an overview of decentralization in Cosmos.

Decentralization ✨
Decentralization refers to the idea that a network or system must not be controlled by a single entity or group of entities.
Instead, it should be distributed amongst many different entities, so that no one group has too much control.

It is important because it helps to prevent centralization of power, which can lead to abuses and inequalities.

In Cosmos, decentralization is achieved thanks to Tendermint Core.
It allows the different nodes to reach consensus on the state of the system without the need for a central authority. This ensures that no single entity has the ability to control the network.

If Internet was called the information highway, the Internet of Blockchains would be the decentralization highway.

Governance 🗳
The second aspect of the Cosmos Democracy is governance, which refers to the process of making decisions and managing the network.
In Cosmos, governance is accomplished through a system of “validators” who participate in the consensus process and maintain the integrity of the network.

The governance model is similar to a representative democracy.
You can choose as many as representatives (the validators) as you want by staking your tokens to them. By staking to a validator, you become a delegator.

The voting power of validators and delegators is determined by the number of tokens staked.

When a new proposal (= law), is up for a vote, both validators and delegators can cast their votes.
As a delegator, you inherit the vote of your validator(s). But if you don’t agree with their vote(s), you can override it by voting yourself.

This allows for a decentralized and flexible governance system.
It is like you can go to the parliament and express your voice against your congressman if you don’t like his move.
Also, you can freely decide to delegate your tokens to any other validator when you want to.

In the end, validators are incentivised to act in the best interests of the network.

It is important to note that the blockchains of the Interchain are still very centralized, with the top 5–7 validators able to create serious disruptions on almost every chain.
The path to a higher level of decentralization of the Internet of Blockchains will take time to be fully achieved.

Outro

The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working at CERN.
CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain in 1993.

The Internet of Blockchains started in 2014, the first blockchain went live in 2019.

If several majors innovation focusing on security and economic development are coming very soon to the Interchain (Interchain Security, Interchain Queries…) and 2023 is looking very exciting, the ecosystem is still very young. It will take years before reaching to maturity and full potential.

Internet revolutionized how we communicate, share information and conduct business in the world.
The Internet of Blockchains will bring more transparency and decentralization to society and more power to individuals.

Thanks a lot for your time, I hope you liked what you read!
Special thanks to Alexis Gourdol for reviewing this article.
If you want to learn more about what you just discovered, there is a list of resources and a little guide to start on the Internet of Blockchains below.
See you, space Cosmonaut 🧑‍🚀

Resources

Start in the Internet of Blockchains

If you want to begin your journey in Cosmos, follow this little guide:

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