Cøsmos Network: Stargate soon, Starport v0.11 is here, Ethermint v0.2.0 released, Tendermint’s new tier delegations, HackAtom India deadline extended, Terra’s Columbus-4 has launched, Oasis Mainnet Beta is live, Kadenaswap announced, Paradigm’s interview with Zaki Manian

Published in

Paradigm

18 min readOct 7, 2020

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 32, 23rd September — 7th October

Welcome, all Space Cowboys and Astronaut Girls, to our October biweekly update! In this recap, we cover recent Cosmos Network tech developments, milestones, events, and more.
Are you Stargate ready? If you are a validator, explorer, wallet or exchange come to test your Stargate integration! According to Zaki Manian the upgrade is near at hand!
Good news is, Ethermint v0.2.0 has been released. This release introduces the atto Photon, the token used on Ethermint’s EVM module. The Tendermint team announced the release of Starport v0.11, a game-changing update that will make it easier than ever for you to build a blockchain app. With this release, they’re providing an online dev environment that has Starport pre-installed, letting you start writing business logic immediately. v0.11 is a massive update, and other highlights include experimental Stargate support, comprehensive documentation with the Starport Handbook, a refreshed UI scaffold that includes full wallet functionality, full CRUD support for Starport generated types, and a Raspberry Pi image that lets you quickly set up validators. Moreover, ‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Calls took place.
In order to bolster public goods development in the Cosmos Network, Tendermint is delegating~19M Atoms to 70 Cosmos Hub validators based on the scope and cadence of their Cosmos contributions. Also, in an effort to carry out core R&D of the Tendermint tech stack and in line with its vision for greater transparency, Tendermint is sharing the administration of its GitHub with Interchain GmbH & Informal Systems Inc.
These weeks, Jonathan Gimeno blogged on Rosetta API, an open-source specification and set of tools developed by Coinbase, makes integration with blockchains simpler, faster, and more reliable by establishing a standard API for integrating blockchain applications. Shaun Conway (ixo), Erik Voorhees (Shapeshift), and Chjango Unchained (Cosmos) discussed decentralized exchanges and centralized exchanges on September 23th during ‘Cosmos Unchained: DEXs vs CEXs’ event. David Kavazi, Co-Founder and CSO of Paradigm, caught up with Zaki Manian to discuss the past, present, and future of Cosmos Network. Tune it on!
Furthermore, HackAtom V is coming. It begins on Friday October 16th. HackAtom India deadline has been extended to October 11th, 2020. It is in full swing. 1,000+ talented devs from across India have joined forces to kick-start the Indian Cosmos ecosystem whilst competing for $10,000 in prizes. More time to build the Cosmos!
As for the ecosystem updates, over two weeks, there was a lot of truly huge news for you! The Terra’s Columbus-4 mainnet update has been successfully released. All new features, including both protocol and application structural changes, are intended to improve developer’s ergonomics and application development in general. The Oasis Mainnet Beta is now live: the network kicked off in <1 min with over 70 validators and is running great. The SENT incentivized Cosmos based testnet is live with 50 validators participating in the competition. On Friday, September 25th, the Akash team launched Akash DeCloud. Tuesday September 29th was an important day in the history of IOV because for the first time its token was listed and has met its market. The recording of the development standup call for the Peggy project, the Cosmos — Ethereum bridge, lead by the Althea Peggy dev team is now out as well as Peggy Dev Update #2. Kadena has announced its new multi-protocol DEX named Kadenaswap.Bianjie was awarded BSN “Gold Certified Partner”by China Mobile Jiangxi Branch. Bluzelle will help to support data for Stafi’s staking contract, such as pledge, redemption, transaction, as well as mapping information between rTokens & Staked tokens. Moreover, Frontier announced a partnership with Bluzelle to introduce Native BLZ Staking on Frontier Mobile interface.Persistence raises $3.7M from industry heavyweights to bridge traditional finance and DeFi via NFTs. Band Protocol ‘September 2020 Community Update’ is here. Cyber releases a new bounty program. Desmos Network has been busy upgrading. Bytom’s Mainchain and Sidechain (Vapor) were all added into Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. And much more!
That’s all for today! Stay in the loop!

Development

Github metrics:

3 Reasons Why you Want to Test Cosmos Stargate Today

by Zaki Manian

Cosmos Stargate aims to deliver the promise of interchain communication among hundreds of independent blockchains. Imagine a blockchain that is able to create and exchange assets among many other blockchains in the Universe. In order to participate in that new economy, infrastructure providers in the Cosmos ecosystem including wallets and exchanges will need to achieve readiness at testnet and before mainnet. In this article, Zaki outlines three critical reasons why Cosmos infrastructure players need to test the latest version of Stargate Testnet.

You want to verify whether Amino to Protobuf May Break Your Integrations

Amino is no longer the way to generate queries on Cosmos. Cosmos Stargate will now feature the new protobuf gRPC endpoints. Although current AMINO endpoints will still be supported for a limited time, this is the beginning of the end. To make sure that your team is not left behind, simply start pointing your Cosmos queries against. http://34.123.30.100:1317/ is available to test today. Also, it’s important to start the switch as new features such as Interchain Blockchain Protocol (IBC) queries are not supported in AMINO and are only available in gRPC.

You want to create Cosmos assets today

There’s no reason to wait until mainnet to start creating assets on the Cosmos. Stargate Testnet-3 brings digital asset creation on the Cosmos today. Digital assets are powering the current interest in memes and NFTs that are now making up the latest aspect of DeFi. Cosmos infrastructure players should test their ability to create digital assets on the Cosmos today as the new business opportunities will be explored by teams not willing to wait.

You want to signal your readiness to the Cosmos now.

Users are not waiting for their infrastructure providers to be ready to leverage Cosmos Stargate features. They will go to the providers that are already implementing new digital asset interactions. Cosmos Stargate Testnet-3 is your way to signal to your users and the greater Cosmos community that you are Stargate Ready. Go to https://airtable.com/shrEr1bQD6COG9WH0 and check off your company’s Stargate Testnet Readiness. If there are any features that proved troublesome, simply come into the #stargate channel on Discord.

Conclusion

Cosmos Stargate-3 Testnet is the upgrade readiness testnet for the Cosmos universe. The team is nearing feature freeze and final release candidates, but you want to start taking advantage of Cosmos Stargate today. Check out the testnet download instructions here https://github.com/cosmosdevs/stargate/blob/master/README.md and report your testnet readiness here: https://airtable.com/shrEr1bQD6COG9WH0. Let’s go!

Cosmos is committed to confirming that existing services have tested against stargate-3 before submitting a governance proposal for a final upgrade.

Rosetta API for Cosmos SDK

by Jonathan Gimeno

Rosetta API, an open-source specification and set of tools developed by Coinbase, makes integration with blockchains simpler, faster, and more reliable by establishing a standard API for integrating blockchain applications.

By using a common interface that standardizes the process of how a user interacts with a blockchain, both the work of exchanges to integrate with new blockchains and also of the developers to build cross-blockchain applications such as block explorers, wallets and dApps is considerably reduced.

With IBC about to be enabled following the imminent Stargate upgrade and a vision of interconnectable blockchains on the horizon, Tendermint Engineering has been working on an initial implementation of Rosetta API for Cosmos SDK to enable applications to make blockchain data available through endpoints compliant with the standard proposed by Coinbase.

CosmWasm:

Replay of the #16 Community call:

Engineering newsletter is out:

Tendermint

Ethermint v0.2.0 has been released

Starport v0.11 has landed with an online dev environment, Stargate support, and more

The team announced the release of Starport v0.11. This is a game-changing update that will make it easier than ever for you to build a blockchain app. With this release, they’re providing an online dev environment that has Starport pre-installed, letting you start writing business logic immediately.

v0.11 is a massive update, and other highlights include experimental Stargate support, comprehensive documentation with the Starport Handbook, a refreshed UI scaffold that includes full wallet functionality, full CRUD support for Starport generated types, and a Raspberry Pi image that lets you quickly set up validators.

Have questions or want to share some feedback? Find the team in the #Starport discord channel.

‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Call #3

The latest community call. Topic: Secondary Token of the Cosmos Hub

‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Call #2. Topic: Interchain Staking.
‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Call #1. Topic: Replicated Security.

Tendermint re-delegated ~19M ATOMs to new Cosmos Hub Validators

Tendermint delegates ~19 million Atoms to validators, based on their contributions to the Cosmos network.

This is a follow-up blog post to April’s announcement that Tendermint is unbonding all of its ATOMs.

To recap, Tendermint had made plans to unbond the majority of the ATOMs held in its treasury and re-delegate to Cosmos validators who have been active contributors to the Cosmos Network.

In 2017, the Interchain Foundation had launched a public fundraiser, raising upwards of $16M in BTC and ETH valued in USD. As part of the fundraiser agreement, Tendermint received 10% of the ATOMs launched at genesis for building the initial infrastructure of the Cosmos Network and for delivering on the feature set outlined in the Cosmos whitepaper.

Over 3 years later, those ATOMs sitting in Tendermint’s treasury are being put to work. They were largely illiquid because almost all of the ATOMs were bonded. In total, as of Oct 2020, Tendermint has roughly 22M ATOMs in its treasury, 85% of which are earmarked for redelegation to the following list of Cosmos validators.

Read more>>>

Sharing the Tendermint Github Organization

In an effort to carry out core R&D of the Tendermint tech stack and in line with its vision for greater transparency, Tendermint is sharing the administration of http://github.com/tendermint with Interchain GmbH & Informal Systems Inc.

Tendermint 2020 Roadmap

The Tendermint Core team has decided to share their goals and roadmap for 2020. What follows is a list of their objectives for the year, organized around four high-level goals, which are themselves ordered by approximate priority. However, the team plans to tackle pieces of each of these goals concurrently.

This list is ambitious: It is possible, even likely, that there’s more outlined here than they can achieve in a year. If you are interested in helping the team reach these goals, they’ll be opening up a few new positions soon.

Goal 1: Increase the number of people who can make substantive contributions to Tendermint Core

Goal 2: Ship features and fixes which help Tendermint Core retain its market-leading position

Goal 3: Improve the developer- and user-experience for projects that use Tendermint Core

Goal 4: Expand and curate the number of technologies that can be integrated with Tendermint Core

If you have questions, ideas, or would like to contribute, please open an issue or join Tendermint developer forum.

Awareness and social encounters

Cosmos Unchained: DEXs vs CEXs

Shaun Conway (ixo), Erik Voorhees (Shapeshift), and Chjango Unchained (Cosmos) discussed decentralized exchanges and centralized exchanges on Sept 23.

Interview with Zaki Manian — Head of the Development at Cosmos Network

Last week, David Kavazi — Co-Founder and CSO of Paradigm, caught up with Zaki Manian — Head of the Development at Cosmos Network, former Director at Tendermint, Co-Founder of the Iqlusion and CEO of PeggyJV.

In this episode, they discussed:

Zaki’s background. When did he first hear about crypto and how he became part of Cosmos Network.
Past, present, and future of Cosmos Network, what kind of problems the team is trying to solve, and why it is important.
Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and the importance of the long-anticipated Stargate upgrade.
Zaki’s favourite projects from the Cosmos ecosystem.
All things DeFi, and how is DeFi on Cosmos manifesting with IBC and beyond.
Cosmos against ETH 2.0, Polkadot, Near, Elrond. The differences in approaches to scalability, security and interoperability.
The problem of ‘Top Validator Oligopolies’.
And more!

HackAtom

Cosmos HackAtom V has landed and the team has $50k in ATOMs to giveaway! They want to see creativity and innovation when expanding the Cosmos Universe.

Schedule:

HackAtom Begins: Friday Oct 16 @ 12p PDT
Submissions Due: Friday Oct 30th @ 12pm PDT
Voting for Community Choice Award: Nov 2nd — Nov 6th 12pm PDT
Winners Announced: Monday Nov 9th 12pm PDT

Rules & Guidelines

There are no limits on team size.
Look to the participants section in DevPost to find teammates and introduce yourself
No outside work or work that was started prior to the official start date of the hackathon is allowed. Cannot use work from someone outside of your team who is also competing. Judging is based only on the work done during the duration of the hackathon. Using work that was done before the hackathon is grounds for disqualification.
It is encouraged to use pre-existing open source tools and libraries.
Asking for guidance or advice from someone not on your team is encouraged.

Submission Guidelines

All projects must be submitted at hackatomv.devpost.com by Friday Oct 30th @ 12:00 pm PT.
Can submit work in multiple prize categories. Be sure to submit to every prize category your team wants to compete in.
All submissions must be completed during the duration of the hackathon. Teams can form ideas before the hackathon, but the code, hacks, and prototypes must be built during the hackathon.
A presentation file must be included with your submission. The goal is to explain your project to the judges. A pdf, google slide, youtube video, or other medium will be accepted and judged.

View full rules

Prizes:

$50K USD valued in ATOMs. The spot price of ATOM will be taken on the last day of the hackathon, on Oct 30th, where the day’s ‘High’ value will be used.

There will be three (or more) winners in each category except for the Community Choice Award, where there will only be one winner (the team that gets the most votes).

Apply at five.hackatom.org

Join HackAtom V Discord

HackAtom India: Build the Cosmos

Cosmos Network Partners with Persistence One to launch ‘HackAtom India: Build the Cosmos’, the first virtual Cosmos Hackathon to give developers in India a chance to begin their journeys into the Cosmos ecosystem.

HackAtom India calls for developers in India to build DeFi projects, interoperable applications, and Developer tools using Cosmos’ technology stack and modules such as Ethermint, CosmWasm, IBC protocol and many more.

Schedule:

HackAtom India began: 4th September 2020
Deadline has been extended to October 11th, 2020.

Judges:

Billy Rennekamp — Grants manager, Interchain Foundation
Sahith Narahari — Software Engineer, Tendermint
Deepanshu Tripathi — CTO, Persistence One
Josh Lee — Developer Relations, Tendermint

Prizes:

Winners of HackAtom India will be rewarded from a pool of $10k USD in six different categories.

Finance

Cosmos validators

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Roadmap

Cosmos Roadmap:

97% complete

Milestones:

View on GitHub →

Status updates:

Interchain Foundation

ICF Update — Oct 6th

The third edition of the Interchain Foundation’s biweekly update! They are using this space to highlight some of the more exciting activities that took place at the Interchain Foundation over the last two weeks. This includes some check-in meetings that occurred with various funding recipients as well as general meetings and goings-on that members of the Interchain ecosystem might find interesting and informative. If any of the updates are especially relevant to what you are working on feel free to drop them a line at hello@interchain.io.

Featured in this edition:

• Akashnet

• Ape Unit

• Chainapsis

• IXO

• ChainSafe

• Relevant

• Nomic

• Bez

• Persistence One

If you missed previuos updates, check it out at ICF Update — Sept 7, ICF Update — Sept 22.

ICF Spotlight: Agoric

Composable Smart Contracts on IBC

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) collaborates with Agoric to build and support the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. Agoric brings composable, reusable, safe, smart contracts with a new security model to blockchain networks. Composable decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts will be reliable, more affordable to execute, and accessible — written in JavaScript.

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

On Friday, September 25th, the Akash team launched Akash DeCloud: Mainnet, and progress their vision for The Unstoppable Cloud, a permissionless, sovereign, and open cloud where builders of the Internet have greater freedom and sovereignty

Oracle:

IRIS Network:

Rainbow Validator (Aug.)| IRISnet Validator Rewards Program: ATEAM & Coinstaking & Kytzu
Bianjie was awarded BSN “Gold Certified Partner”by China Mobile Jiangxi Branch: Co-Founder Harriet Cao shared a keynote speech in the conference

Regen Network:

Cosmos + Regen Network = Synergy
Cosmos Community SDK Development Call 9/30:

Starname — IOV Name Service:

The Starname and the IOV token. Tuesday September 29th was an important day in the history of IOV because for the first time its token was listed and has met its market.

Bluzelle:

Bluzelle Empowers Stafi to Unlock Liquidity of Staked Assets: Being able to bridge off-chain and on-chain data with its decentralized database and oracles, Bluzelle will help to support data for Stafi’s staking contract, such as pledge, redemption, transaction, as well as mapping information between rTokens & Staked tokens.
Frontier announced a partnership with Bluzelle to introduce Native BLZ Staking on Frontier Mobile interface.

Foam:

Desmos Network:

Desmos October Upgrade: Desmos Network has been busy upgrading.
Desmos September upgrade postmortem: Learn what happened during the Desmos September upgrade, how it made its chain currently unusable and how the team plans to fix this.

Kava:

Terra:

The Terra’s Columbus-4 mainnet update has been successfully released. All new features, including both protocol and application structural changes, are intended to improve developer’s ergonomics and application development in general.

September 2020 Community Update: Stay in the know on Terra governance, partnerships, smart contracts, and upcoming events with its latest blog post.
Liquid Staking: A Discussion of its Risks and Benefits

Terra Campaign — CoinMarketCap:

Cosmos Network - Internet of Blockchains

The interoperable, scalable blockchain network. Built for developers.

cosmos.network

Persistence One:

Persistence Raises $3.7M from Industry Heavyweights to Bridge Traditional Finance and DeFi via NFTs
Tendermint to Delegate 595,000 ATOMs to Persistence’s AUDIT.one Validator to Strengthen the Cosmos Ecosystem
Cosmos Network Partners with Persistence One to launch ‘HackAtom India: Build the Cosmos’, the first virtual Cosmos Hackathon to give developers in India a chance to begin their journeys into the Cosmos ecosystem.

-HackAtom India began: 4th September 2020

-Deadline for Submission: 11th October, 2020

VIT Hack 2020:

Band Protocol:

Bytom:

Bytom’s Mainchain (Bytom blockchain) and Sidechain (Vapor) all added into Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

Bytom Foundation has completed the Five coin burn in 2020:

Althea Network:

Althea Peggy Standup #3: The recording of the development standup call for the Peggy project, the Cosmos — Ethereum bridge, lead by the Althea Peggy dev team.

Peggy Dev Update #2: End to end validator set updates + even more efficiency.
Althea Network is growing!

Agoric:

Agoric’s weekly update:

Oasis Labs:

The Oasis Mainnet Beta is now live! The network kicked off in <1 min with over 70 validators and is running great!

e-Money:

e-Money to Launch NGM Token During Rapid Growth of DeFi Market

Cyber:

Prop #11 to prolong the takeoff period until the 01/12/2020 is now live
Cyber releases a new bounty program. How you can participate:

Citizen Cosmos news:

Idena Network:

Kadena:

Kadena has announced its new multi-protocol DEX named Kadenaswap.

LikeCoin:

Secret Network:

SCRT 2020: The Secret Vision for Universal Finance: Learn about some of the critical applications being built on Secret Network — and how you can get involved.
Secret Network Gets a Secret API: Chain of Secrets just launched the Secret API for Secret Network as part of the developer community on-boarding efforts.
Secret Raffle: Enter to Win Secrets by Using Keplr Wallet: Want to have your own Secrets? Take just a few minutes to install the Keplr Wallet and you could win SCRT in a Secret Raffle.
Staking Secrets: A Living Guide to Staking and Delegating SCRT: Staking SCRT helps secure the network and lets you participate in community governance. With rewards currently above 30% annually, now is a great time to learn how to stake your secrets.

Sentinel:

The SENT incentivized Cosmos based testnet is live with 50 validators participating in the competition.

THORChain:

Weekly Dev Update #63: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 63, 29 Sep — 05 Oct; Multi-asgards, Liquidity Assets, Bitcoin implementation ongoing.
Monthly Treasury Report — September: The treasury comprises of $3.8m USD liquid and $12m in RUNE, with a 34 month Runway. Planned Obsolescence July 2022.
Weekly Dev Update #62: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 22–28 Sep 2020; Native RUNE, Native Gas, V15, Bitcoin testing
THORChain Community Products: Exploring community built products on THORChain
Norse Competition Winners: The winners were finally announced

Built with the Cosmos SDK

Projects that are actively building on the Cosmos ecosystem

Band Protocol — Band Protocol provides a secure and scalable decentralized oracle for Web 3. Announcement » Infrastructure

Binance Chain — Binance Chain is developed by Binance and its community as the basis for a decentralized exchange. Binance is considered the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. Announcement » DEX

e-Money — e-Money is the leading European provider of currency-backed stablecoins. The stablecoins are interest bearing and protected by an insolvency fund, which makes them unique in today’s market. Infrastructure Enterprise Stablecoin

IOV — IOV a universal protocol between blockchains and wallet users, is making it possible to send, receive and exchange any cryptocurrency from a single address of value. Wallet Name Service

IRISnet — IRISnet is designed to be the foundation for next generation distributed business applications. It is a BPoS blockchain, built with Cosmos-SDK, that enables cross-chain interoperability through a unified service model. Announcement » Enterprise

Kava — Kava is the first cross-blockchain DeFi platform that enables traders to leverage their assets and hedge using a multi-collateral CDP system and collateral-backed stablecoin (USDX). Announcement » Stablecoin Infrastructure

Persistence — Persistence is creating the most effective tools for enterprise blockchain solutions, built on Cosmos technology and powered by Tendermint. Announcement » Enterprise

Playlist — Playlist is a project aimed at tokenizing the music industry with their PLAY Protocol. Social

Regen Network — Regen Network is a global community and platform focused on ecological monitoring and regeneration. Announcement » Agriculture

Sentinel — Sentinel Network is a network layer that enables a true p2p and decentralized Applications & Resources marketplace. Announcement » Infrastructure

Terra — A price-stable cryptocurrency designed for mass adoption. We are building financial infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized applications. Announcement » Stablecoin Infrastructure

Check out the Full list of projects in Cosmos & Tendermint Ecosystem.

Partnerships and team members

Cosmos is hiring! See the latest job openings here.

MISC

According to Zaki, Stargate is near at hand:

Social media metrics

Social media activity:

Cosmos community continues to grow! There is a stable increase in the number of subscribers of Cosmos social media channels these weeks.

Join Cosmos official Discord channel here.

Check out Tendermint and Interchain Foundation Twitter pages.

There are also Community-managed Channels. These channels are managed entirely by members of the Cosmos community and do not represent official Cosmos or ICF announcements.

Cosmos Validator Working Group

Twitter Cosmos China

Twitter Cosmos Korea

Twitter Cosmos Japan

Cosmos India Telegram

Cosmos Singapore Telegram