Cøsmos Network: Stargate upgrade on July 27th, ICF announces latest round of grantees, The newly formed Tendermint Inc Board of Directors appoints Peng Zhong as CEO, IRISnet to support BSN and work on the integration of Chainlink via IRITA, Community events, Citizen Cosmos podcast new episodes

Published in

Paradigm

19 min readJun 30, 2020

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 25, 16th June — 30th June

Welcome, Cosmonauts, to our regular report on Cøsmos ecosystem! The past two weeks have brought a number of significant news which are the main focus of the current report.
Firstly, the Cosmos team introduced Stargate, the largest Cosmos upgrade yet! Stargate will enable higher transaction throughput, cross-chain transactions, accelerate UI development, and so much more.
Secondly, the Interchain Foundation (ICF) announced that six leading blockchain architects — Althea, ChainSafe, Confio, Lunie, Iqlusion and Regen Network — are joining the growing ranks of organizations taking leadership roles in the Cosmos ecosystem to advance the development of “The Internet of Blockchains”.
Moreover, Tendermint Inc’s announced Peng Zhong as its new CEO and the formation of a new BOD. The next release of Tendermint will introduce a new implementation of the Tendermint light client. In newly three-part article, Anton Kaliaev walks you through what the light client is, how it works and why they need it. Furthermore, there are the changes in Tendermint 0.34; upcoming release of Tendermint Core 0.34, the version required for the Stargate Upgrade, replaces an in-house serialization library with Protocol Buffers. Read the details on what you need to know and do in order to get ready in Tendermint official blog.
Also, Cosmos Unchained: Cosmos vs Ethereum 2.0 live meetup took place. In this live meetup Chjango Unchained, Sunny Aggarwal, and Danny Ryan discussed the differences between Cosmos and Ethereum 2.0. Check out the recording in our report! Last week, the Layer1 team sat down with Zaki Manian and Dean Tribble, to discuss Interoperability and why it matters, how Cosmos is leading the charge, building out Agoric, and why iterations on DeFi are dangerous but positive for crypto. Cosmos AMA with Sunny Aggarwal and AMA #2 with Atomic Wallet took place. Episode 9 of Citizen Cosmos podcast with Ethan Buchman is now out.
As you know, Cosmos launched the ‘Code with Us’ — a live, interactive workshop program designed to educate and provide real-time practice to developers. The program aims to provide everyone with access to the information and resources needed to use the Cosmos stack. If you are looking for a quick and fun introduction to Cosmos’ tech, this is the perfect way to get started! If you missed the Code with Us session with Alessio Treglia and Jonathan Gimeno on debugging Cosmos SDK apps, watch the replay below to get a general overview on debuggers and how to configure them to work with Go data types.
Cosmos ecosystem moves fast! China’s recently launched national Blockchain Services Network (BSN) is bringing Chainlink oracle functionality to its network. As part of this integration, Chainlink, IRITA, and SNZ Pool are contributing to the fundamental development and growth of BSN. And Chainlink will be integrated into BSN via IRITA’s interchain service hub. A step-by-step guide on how to use Ledger Nano with Terra Station was published. Phase 2 of The Akashian Challenge began yesterday. Regen Network’s ‘Planetary Regeneration Podcast’ new episodes are now out. The Persistence One team published the last article in their GoZ Updates series covering the highlights from the competition and shedding some light on future of IBC protocol. BandChain Phase 0 Mainnet has been live for about three weeks with about 50 active nodes bonding over 80+ million BAND — over 80% of the supply staked! Furthermore, BandChain v1.0.3-alpha released with many changes to make it closer to becoming a release candidate for BandChain Phase 1. The test~Auction for the test network GOL token, which gives token holders the access to the ETH donated to euler~Foundation during the auction, the community powered DeVC of the Cyber network is over and governance of the fund may start now. The Sentinel iOS application has been submitted for review. Community members will soon be able to test the application on Test Flight prior to the public release. THORChain’s latest testnet is available for public testing. And much more!
That’s a wrap! Paradigm will come back in July with more exciting Cosmos updates. Stay tuned!

Development

Github metrics:

Cosmos Stargate Upgrade Overview

Join the Cosmos Stargate announcements channel!

If you’re running a block explorer, wallet, exchange, validator, or any other service (eg. custody provider) that depends upon the Cosmos Hub or Cosmos ecosystem, you’ll want to pay attention, because this upgrade will involve substantial changes.

Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)- cross-chain transactions
Protobuf Migration — blockchain performance & dev acceleration
State Sync — minutes to sync new nodes
Full-Featured Light Clients
Chain Upgrade Module — upgrade automation

Next Steps

Block explorers, wallets, exchanges, the team is asking you to schedule time in August for integration testing against the Stargate network.

Validators, they are hoping that nearly all validators in the Cosmos Hub will participate in the Stargate testnet as a simulated upgrade. The team is anticipating the first testnet to be July 27.

Join the Stargate testnet to get used to this process. The Stargate team intends to run testnets and upgrades (using the Cosmos Hub genesis file) to broaden the pool of experience.

IBC Ecosystem Presentation: IBC 1.0 Status Update

The core IBC working group was giving monthly updates, Q&As, demos and presentation on IBC related topics.

The IBC demo is up-and-running with real light clients, real proofs, end-to-end handshakes and working token transfers.

Check out the code and try it out yourself here.

Awareness and social encounters

Episode 9 of Citizen Cosmos podcast with Ethan Buchman is here! The podcast that uncovers the masterminds of the Cosmos ecosystem. They talk about DeFi, differences between finance and money, biological systems, hummus and the scam train single of course!

Check out also Episode 10 with Gregory Landua, chief regeneration officer at Regen Network.

Inter-Blockchain Communication, Cosmos Network, Agoric, Why We Build Blockchains, DeFi Thoughts on Layer1. The team sits down with Zaki Manian and Dean Tribble, to discuss Interoperability and why it matters, how Cosmos is leading the charge, building out Agoric, and why iterations on DeFi are dangerous but positive for crypto:

These weeks events:

June 16 · Cosmos Unchained: Cosmos vs Ethereum 2.0. In this live meetup join Chjango Unchained, Sunny Aggarwal, and Danny Ryan to discuss the differences between Cosmos and Ethereum 2.0.

June 18 · Cosmos AMA #2 with Atomic Wallet:

June 29 · Online event: Custom tokens with CosmWasm

June 30 · Cosmos AMA with Sunny Aggarwal:

Code With Us

Live online workshops by Cosmos

The team is launching “Code with us,” a live, interactive workshop program designed to educate and provide real-time practice to developers in the community. The Cosmos ‘Code with Us’ program brings workshops from the home offices to yours. There couldn’t be a better time to invest in online learning, especially with so many people working from home.

This program aims to provide everyone with access to the information and resources they need to become familiar with the Cosmos stack. These seminars are small workshops led by expert mentors from Tendermint Inc, Interchain GmbH, Agoric, Band Protocol and others that will use their expertise to guide the community of developers from deploying a simple “Hello World” blockchain, to getting familiar with the Cosmos SDK architecture, running an IBC relayer, and much more.

Participants have the opportunity to access hands-on live lessons to code together in real-time with some of the community’s most respected contributors. Most of the workshops are structured in two-hour sessions with associated online materials or tutorials, and will take place roughly every two weeks. If you are looking for a quick and fun introduction to Cosmos’ tech, this is the perfect way to get started. To get started, make sure you sign up for “Code with Us” workshops.

The team has put together a list of future workshops designed to educate, guide and inspire the next generation of innovators. Bear in mind that this list is subject to change as more community members express their enthusiasm to participate in the program.

New to Cosmos? No worries! Come and join the workshops and pick up a new skill in just 2 hours! With so many interesting themes to choose from, you can pick your favorites and you’re all set to begin your journey into the vast universe of the Cosmos ecosystem

Sign up for the “Code with Us” workshop program. The team will send you a link to add the calendar, email reminders of the upcoming workshops and a list of documentation for each session.

Code With Us — How to Debug an SDK Application:

IBC and Game of Zones

Game Of Zones competition has come to an end:

Finance

Fungible Staking Derivatives Design Walkthrough with Sunny Aggarwal:

Cosmos validators

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Cosmos was added to LedgerLive:

Roadmap

Cosmos Hub Roadmap:

Governance Milestones

The following milestones will require voting by on-chain governance.

Proposal: Atom Transfers

2019–04–10 An upgrade proposal may be created on the Cosmos Hub to allow ATOM to be transferred to other Cosmos addresses. Read more »

Proposal Passed: Atom Transfers

2019–04–17 Success! The proposal to allow ATOM to be transferred to other Cosmos addresses passes.

Proposal: IBC future TBD

An upgrade proposal may be created on the Cosmos Hub to add support for IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol. IBC will allow other Cosmos SDK-based blockchains to connect to the Hub. Read more »

Proposal Passed: IBC future TBD

Success! The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol is now supported by the Cosmos Hub. The IBC standard will allow blockchains that support it to connect.

Community Governance future TBD

At this point, the critical features of the Cosmos Hub has been activated by the community of Atom holders. Further governance of the network and upgrades to the software or blockchain state are left to the community. Read more »

IBC Implementation

Due by July 27, 2020 78% complete

IBC v1.0.0 issues left to be implemented.

Tendermint

The newly formed Tendermint Inc Board of Directors appoints Peng Zhong as CEO

New Board & CEO

The company’s newly aligned mission comes after the distribution of leadership, which includes the creation of a five-person Board of Directors and the appointment of the new CEO, Peng Zhong. Currently, three positions for the planned five-person board have been confirmed. Candidacy for the fourth and fifth board seats is undergoing active consideration. Tendermint Inc’s newly formed Board of Directors includes Heng (Harriet) Cao, CEO of Bianjie and Co-Founder of IRISnet, Jae Kwon, Founder of Tendermint Inc, Co-Founder of Cosmos, and President of the Interchain Foundation (ICF), and Peng Zhong, CEO and President of Tendermint Inc.

Tendermint Inc’s Board of Directors and CEO have an aligned objective to structure and execute a viable long-term vision and strategy for the organization. The CEO’s role is responsible for the development and execution of the company’s vision and is held accountable by the board and Tendermint Inc’s shareholders. The CEO reports directly to the Board of Directors about the company’s progress and any significant organizational changes. Tendermint Inc’s Board of Directors is actively responsible for financial resource allocation, budgeting, and executive compensation in addition to advising the CEO.

Company Mission

The company’s high-level mission is and will remain about building more utility, usability, and ultimately value into the Cosmos Network. In the short term, Tendermint Inc is actively supporting the greater decentralization of the Cosmos Network with initiatives such as:

Re-delegating Tendermint Inc’s ATOMs to Cosmos validators who have demonstrated a pedigree of significant contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Renewing service contracts with the Interchain Foundation to support the Cosmos mission towards a decentralized token economy built for a global network of developers.
Ongoing coordination with the Interchain Foundation to create a coherent software delivery lifecycle through improved governance by actively distributing the maintainership of the Cosmos code repositories.

Long-Term Strategy

As Tendermint Inc enters a new phase, their long-term strategy and roadmap to support the growth of the Cosmos ecosystem will focus primarily on:

Enhancing the Cosmos developer experience through better tooling, tutorials, and onboarding.
Hosting community events, educational resources, and programs to support Cosmos development.
Lowering the barrier to entry for Cosmos technology adoption by new developers.
Developing innovative, easy-to-use, and community-centric Web 3.0 products and applications to improve people’s everyday lives.

As the Tendermint Inc team continues to build and execute on these initiatives, they’ll keep the community informed on updates like:

New Tendermint Inc board members.
Board meeting summaries on a quarterly basis.
Announcements on Tendermint Inc’s long-term strategy, company, product roadmaps, and development updates.

Tendermint 0.34, Protocol Buffers, and You: The Tendermint Core team writes you a note explaining the upcoming serialization format change in Tendermint Core 0.34. This is a state-breaking change, and you’ll have to conduct a network upgrade if you want to use Tendermint Core 0.34 or later.

Everything you need to know about the Tendermint Light Client: The next release of Tendermint introduces a new implementation of the Tendermint light client, and in this three-part article, the team will tell you everything you need to know about it.

In Part 1, they’ll talk about what the light client is and why they need it. Part 2 will guide us through the core principles and algorithms used. In the final Part 3, the team will touch upon the Go implementation.

Tendermint 2020 Roadmap:

The Tendermint Core team has decided to share its 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.

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

Phase 2 of The Akashian Challenge began yesterday:

Akash Network Announces Integration Partnership with Lunie Wallet.

Oracle:

IRIS Network:

BSN Integrates Chainlink Oracles, Bringing Real-World Data Into Its IRITA Powered Network: China’s recently launched national Blockchain Services Network (BSN) is bringing Chainlink oracle functionality to its network. This key integration will enable governments and enterprises to incorporate validated real-world data into their BSN applications using Chainlink oracles via the IRITA interchain service hub. Professional Proof of Stake (PoS) operator SNZ Pool will run nodes to support the operation.

This integration of Chainlink provides BSN users additional security, reliability, and interconnectivity to help fuel even greater growth and adoption of blockchain applications in China and around the world.

As part of this integration, Chainlink, IRITA, and SNZ Pool are contributing to the fundamental development and growth of BSN. Chainlink will be integrated into BSN via IRITA’s interchain service hub. IRITA is a consortium blockchain product built using the Cosmos/IRIS SDK. The IRITA service hub will allow BSN blockchains to receive external off-chain data through Chainlink oracles. SNZ Pool, a professional node operator will provide node services to run the network. This multi-party collaboration will enable developers who build on BSN to access high-quality data through Chainlink which will make their applications more useful and connected with the real-world.

IRISnet Bi-weekly Report (2020.6.1~6.14):

IRISnet Dev Team won Most Innovative/Deceptive State Machine Award in Phase 3
IRIS Foundation secondly implemented the community-centric delegation campaign & the second one-year token burn plan
IRISnet and Kava Plan to Integrate to Enable Greater DeFi Services for Interchain Ecosystem
IRITA, the first enterprise consortium chain product in cosmos, is going to be used by BSN to support interchain interoperability
Community member Daniela Pavin interviewed IRISnet Dev regarding GoZ

Regen Network:

Mobilizing Community Co-Creation for Soil Health.

Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 17: Dr. Dorn Cox.

Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 16: Loren Cardeli.

IOV:

Bluzelle:

Desmos Network:

Registration for Desmos Round-0:

Kava:

Kava 3 Chain Advisory: There is a minor bug that affects changing the BEP3 asset supply, which means that the current value of 40000 BNB cannot be currently updated. No user funds are at risk due to this minor bug.

Mint USDX with your BNB using Cosmostation Wallet: A Step-by-step guide on how to mint USDX from your iOS or Android device.

Terra:

How to use Ledger Nano with Terra Station.

The role of transaction fees in network valuation and security.

Persistence One:

Persistence One published the last article in their GoZ Updates series covering the highlights from the competition and shedding some light on future of IBC protocol.

Also, in collaboration with Cosmos India, they hosted Terra and introduced the South Korean project to the Indian Blockchain Community. It is part of continual efforts of the Persistence One team to educate masses about Blockchain/Crypto:

Persistence CEO, Tushar Aggarwal, was invited as a speaker to the meetup hosted by Inblox Network and Matic Network. The meetup was focused on the Tokenisation of Real-world Assets. Persistence One has been working on tokenising the trade documents (Bill of Lading, Invoices etc) and new financial products (Solar credits, Social Impact Bonds etc).

Band Protocol:

BandChain Phase 0 Mainnet has been live for about three weeks with 46 active nodes bonding over 80+ million BAND — over 80% of the supply staked!

BandChain v1.0.3-alpha released with many changes to make it closer to becoming a release candidate for BandChain Phase 1:

BandChain: Community Validator Rollout #3.

BandChain: Community Validator Rollout #2.

BandChain: Community Validator Rollout #1.

BandChain Wenchang: Stage 2 Update.

Bytom:

CyberMiles:

Althea Network:

Althea Network is growing fast!

Agoric:

Oasis Labs:

Cyber:

Citizen Cosmos podcast:

-Episode 9 with Ethan Buchman, Cosmos co-founder: the now and then of Cosmos.

-Episode 10 with Gregory Landua, chief regeneration officer at Regen Network

The cyber network talks about the fact how an open semantics core can understand more languages than Google can, for example, the language of Enmoji (and build subjective relevance on top):

The test~Auction for the test network GOL token, which gives token holders the access to the ETH donated to euler~Foundation during the auction, the community powered DeVC of the Cyber network is over and governance of the fund may start now (GOL became transferable):

-The first case of the Cyber search engine integration into an IPFS browser. The Galacteek web3 browser can now deliver queries from the Cyber network!

Moreover, the amount of community maintained tools, profiles and threads in Cyber keeps growing.

Idena Network:

Kadena:

LikeCoin:

Sentinel:

The Sentinel iOS application has been submitted for review. Community members will soon be able to test the application on Test Flight prior to the public release.

THORChain:

Weekly Dev Update #48: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 16–22 June 2020; Internal Audit, Testnet 3.5, Unbond Memo, Bundled Witness Transactions.

THORChain release Testnet 3: THORChain’s latest testnet is available for public testing.

Weekly Dev Update #47: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 09–15 June 202.

Lunie:

Lunie announced Lunie Notifications which will enable users to access important information about staking, governance and network interests, all automatically curated from on-chain sources.

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.

Expansion of the Cosmos

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) announceD that six leading blockchain architects are joining the growing ranks of organizations taking leadership roles in the Cosmos ecosystem to advance the development of “The Internet of Blockchains”.

Amidst the current frailty and damaged nature of ICF economic system, its teams are aligned in their steadfast view of building the software needed to add a new financial paradigm and reconstruct a more resilient economy.

Currently, over $6B in digital assets have been secured on Cosmos blockchains, over 8500+ Github stars have been created on Cosmos and Tendermint projects, and there are over 100 projects in the Cosmos Tendermint ecosystem, including Binance Decentralized Exchange. Cosmos is the center of the staking industry with emerging innovations like staking derivatives and cross-chain collateralization.

These grants awarded by the ICF will fund leading blockchain architects to contribute to Cosmos core technology; Althea, ChainSafe, Confio, Lunie, Iqlusion and Regen Network. The funding will help these projects build the software, applications, and ideas to galvanize the success of Cosmos.

See more details on the projects and grants below:

Althea will receive funding from ICF to productionize Peggy, the software that enables Ethereum peg zones. The team will focus on building the Cosmos SDK application for moving assets on and off Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based Proof of Work chains. Peggy will enable an anti-fragile array of interchain routes with certain features and security assumptions being operated by various entities.
ChainSafe received funds to make Ethermint, the EVM module for the Cosmos SDK, production-ready and launch a persistent EVM Cosmos zone.
Confio received funding from ICF to support its work on the CosmWasm WebAssembly smart contract module for the Cosmos SDK. This will further support features such as a Javascript light client and a new Cosmos Javascript suite, CosmJS.
Lunie will continue the development of the flagship open-source wallet in the Cosmos ecosystem and to expand the platform to support more networks.
Iqlusion coordinated the successful Game of Zones series of adversarial IBC connected testnets, as well as developed the IBC Relayer Client.
Regen Network will lead upgrades to the Cosmos SDK in preparation for Stargate, as well as formation of a community stewardship plan for long-term SDK development.

This expansion will propel innovation and drive forward the further decentralization of the Cosmos ecosystem, with the aim of making our vision of the ‘Internet of Blockchains’ a reality.