Intro
“At first, there was Bitcoin, out of the entropy soup of the greater All. Then, there was Ethereum, which was created in the likeness of Bitcoin, but made Turing complete.
Among these were Tendermint and Cosmos to engineer robust PoS and IBC. Then came Gno upon Cosmos and there spring forth Gnoland, simulated by the Gnomes of the Greater Resistance.”
The quote above, derived directly from the gno repository, encapsulates the historical background behind Gno.land’s creation. Bitcoin has achieved decentralization of value, Ethereum has achieved decentralization of systems, and Cosmos has achieved interoperability of decentralized systems. Each generation has brought significant improvements to the blockchain space, making it a friendlier environment for both users and developers.
The birth of the Tendermint and IBC has enabled robusticity of consensus between untrusted parties and the simplicity of creating independent blockchains that are fully customizable while being interoperable by nature. Today, a significant number of Top 50 blockchains by market capitalization are built on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint. It is clear that the Cosmos Ecosystem is flourishing and the multichain future envisioned by Cosmos is turning into reality.
However, the set of ideas that serve as the pillars of the Cosmos Ecosystem’s architecture is slowly drifting away from its initial philosophy: Hub Minimalism. The founders of the Cosmos Hub believed that the functions of the hub should be as few as possible, with main reasons being: 1) preventing non-cross chain transactions from flooding the network, 2) keeping the functionality of zones and hubs separate, and 3) simplifying the hub to boost security (the recent halt of Juno Network validates this argument).
The deployment and the failure of the Gravity Dex on the Cosmos Hub coupled with the success of the Osmosis as an emerging dominant Hub created controversy within the Cosmos community. According to Map of Zones, Cosmos is ranked 3rd by IBC volume, and 4th by IBC transfers, which suggest that users prefer Hubs with more functionality such as Osmosis and Terra. Arguments that the Cosmos Hub should enable permissionless CosmWasm smart contacts or adopt a unique feature that can help Cosmos Hub regain its position as the leading hub are starting to confuse the community on where the Cosmos Hub should be headed, and if the tokenomics of ATOM needs modification.
Other blockchains are also faced with notable challenges: Ethereum users are suffering from unaffordable gas fees, Solana users from relatively frequent downtimes, and Terra users from the over-reliance on the performance of a single dapp that holds a majority of its native stablecoins.
Among the chaos, Jae Kwon, a core contributor to the Cosmos and Tendermint has been designing a new blockchain called Gnoland with the goal of optimizing the consensus process between validators, the completeness of the smart contract language, and the sustainability of the tokenomics.
Scalability Matters
Smart contract platforms serve as decentralized virtual machines run by untrusted nodes that validate transactions or run open source applications called smart contracts under economic incentives. Although leading blockchains have enabled several thousands of applications that serve millions of users to be deployed, the development environment and user experience have yet to be optimized.
Gnoland adopts a new language called Gnolang, a fork of the Golang. A clear advantage of Golang compared to other languages is apparent when dealing with concurrency. While a majority of programming languages such as C++ or Java use multithreading for running concurrent programs, Go uses Goroutines.
Multithreading is where multiple threads are run in parallel within a single process. This could be your browser playing music and running a search engine at the same time, or your word processing software displaying your input while checking the grammar. The issue with multithreading is that it requires context switching, where the OS scheduler manages the switching between processes and threads. This often causes overhead and consumes excessive resources. Goroutine, on the other hand, takes the burden off the OS by implementing Go Scheduler, a run-time native scheduler. Creation and destruction of Goroutines consume seemingly less memory (as little as 0.2% of threads) and fully utilizes all cores of the hardware.
Almost all blockchains in existence are single threaded, meaning that processing multiple transactions simultaneously will lead to double-spending or a conflict between states.
Gnoland provides the most viable solution to this, which is integrating goroutines by supporting Golang as the smart contracts language.
The most commonly used languages in the current blockchain development environment are Solidity for EVM-compatible networks and Rust for Solana and Cosmos SDK-based networks; both Solidity and Rust are inspired by C++. Although all of the above are excellent languages, Gnolang inherits faster compiling speed, more concise grammar, and resource-effective concurrency from Golang.
A Case for a Sustainable Token Model
The initial model of the Cosmos Hub involved a fee token called PHOTONs, which limits the usage of ATOMs to governance and staking. Upon launch, the concept of the fee token has been deprecated, and today, ATOM serves as both the governance/staking token and the fee token. Not only Cosmos, but also most layer 1s in the blockchain space such as Ethereum, Avalanche, and Solana run a single-token model.
Gnoland on the other hand, is looking to adopt a dual token model similar to the initial Cosmos idea where the “fee utility” is stript off from the governance token.
As suggested by Jae Kwon, a dual token model that uses a fee token with a fixed-constant-inflation (not exponential as in staking tokens) will have the following advantages over a single token model:
- Majority of end-users are tech-ignorant, meaning that most of them are clueless to which validators they should be supporting and how to evaluate governance proposals. Simply put, the dual token model mitigates the operational risks by offloading the governance responsibilities from the end-users to nodes, validators, and network stakeholders who have an actual understanding of the blockchain.
- The point of the governance token is to be staked on the Network for the security of the blockchain. What’s ironic about a single token model is that the more traction a blockchain gets, the more tokens are likely to get unstaked to be used as gas fees, which leads to a decrease of the security of the Network. Having a dual token model addresses this issue.
- A fixed-constant-inflationary fee token that’s solely dedicated to fueling the contracts of the blockchain will allow users to hold the token in a wallet for future usages without worrying about the value of tokens getting inflated away.
We’re researching more on the dual token model suggested by Jae Kwon, and ways to implement it on Gnoland to maximize sustainability and usability of the tokenomics.
Conclusion
Slow, expensive, unintuitive — these are the stereotypical traits that come to mind when using or coding applications on existing blockchains. Despite the heavy inflow of capital into the blockchain scene during the recent years, developers that are focusing on decentralized apps that run on smart contracts are quite scarce. The likely reason behind this is the lack of an efficient smart contracts platform for developers to commit to. We believe that Jae Kwon is building Gnoland to introduce a performant blockchain that’s capable of running smart contracts that fully leverages the advantages of Golang and the advanced hardware of modern computers.
We, as Gnomes, look forward to exploring ways to contribute to the development and adoption of Gnoland, a scalable blockchain that we believe will onboard millions of developers that will deploy innovative applications, accelerating the transition of the internet to Web3.
