Astronauts, welcome to our newsletter about the Cøsmos ecosystem. A lot has happened since the last issue! Ethermint, the POS implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine built on top of Tendermint Core, has now a tutorial for deployment. Get started now with a tutorial built by ChainSafe.
As for social encounters, the team attended San Francisco Blockchain Week. Jae Kwon, CEO and co-founder of Cosmos/Tendermint, gave a manifesto talk about Virgo, which is an open association of individuals and organizations working together to create better open tools for human coordination. Sunny Aggarwal, Research Scientist at Cosmos/Tendermint, gave at talk about Moneyness at CESC during SF Blockchain Week. Chjango Unchained, Cosmos/Tendermint Director of Community, discussed Supernova and its impact on the Cosmos ecosystem, and Brent Xu, Director of Special Projects, discussed the Evolution of Money in the Crypto Ecosystem at the Macro.wtf event during SF Blockchain Week. On November 1st — 3rd, 2019 SF Blockchain Week’s DeFi Hackathon took place. It was a three-day event that leverages open source software and decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent solutions without intermediaries. Check out the information about teams and winners in our report below. And join the Telegram AMA about the upcoming Game of Zones featuring Zaki Manian of Tendermint and Dean Tribble from Agoric.
These weeks, the Interchain Foundation presented details about the funded projects building virtual machines on top of Tendermint, either as modules for the Cosmos-SDK and/or via run-times in other languages.
The Cosmos ecosystem continues to flourish! The Kava Mainnet is live. Akash, the world’s first super cloud for serverless computing, empowering the architects and builders of the internet with greater access, freedom, and efficiency, is now a part of Cøsmos. IBC demo by IRIS Network is out as IRIS rainbow new release 2.6. Now you can transfer IRIS between IRIShub and BinanceDEX. Althea and MakerDAO partnered for Abuja Network powered by Dai. New telegram bot tool from BitSong released. A new version of the SDK/Gaia has been released for cosmoshub-2 mainnet. This release includes a version bump for Tendermint that addresses a security vulnerability. It is recommended that operators update their nodes! Version 2.0.3 will be used for the next Cosmos hub upgrade scheduled for December. The new episode of ‘Hashing It Out’ podcast featured Jay and Ken from Cypher Core. In the last episode of ‘Chorus One podcast’ Felix was joined by Mirko Schmiedl, Founder of StakingRewards.com, a website focused on displaying various metrics about staking tokens. They dive into what kind of data users of Staking Rewards can currently see, what this data is useful for, as well as what Mirko imagines the site to cover in the future. Regen Network Development update was published, including CosmWasm, the mainnet launch, and other developments. And worth to mention, these weeks, ATOM was listed on Exodus Desktop and Mobile and Binance America.
Development
Github metrics:
Development Updates
Information is taken from Cosmos Hub & Spoke Newsletter — Month of October by All in Bits (Tendermint Inc)
Cosmos SDK: Check out the new Cosmos SDK two week sprint project board plus other updates that include:
- Adding unique digital assets to your Cosmos applications (like Pokemon cards) can be tested out by users via the recently merged NFT module. Check the complete blog post here.
- The new “Hellochain” tutorial is quick and simple way to start building on the Cosmos SDK.
- IBC integration and implementation underway. Check out the milestone for progress and issues.
- State accessors ADR and implementation. This improves developer UX with regards to reading and writing to module state and will be integral for IBC functionality.
- Keyring support has been introduced to the SDK that will replace the less secure DB-based keystore. Users will be provided with a command to migrate their keys.
- Implementation of transaction decoding CLI command and REST endpoint.
- Genesis accounts have now been modularized. Applications no longer have to rely on a static type.
Tendermint team announces a Fast Finality Decentralized open-source exchange DEMO built on the Cosmos SDK. Try it on.
Tendermint Core: An important update: Tendermint validators and service providers on Tendermint-powered networks to prepare to update their software to the latest, most secure version as quickly as possible as this update becomes available (Patch release October 2nd). Recent development updates to Tendermint Core also include:
- The IAVL Spec — join the discussion and help improve the design of the IAVL tree. If you have ideas, open an issue.
- Check out the newly recorded Tendermint Developer Session discussing IAVL for more details on the topic.
- If you have recommendations on improvements for the Tendermint protocol, we recommend submitting an RFC, you can find out more here.
Inter-blockchain Communication: IBC will serve as an open standard for interchain communication. For a list of IBC implementations, IBC-supporting blockchains, and special IBC bridges, see here. The main updates include:
- Newly updated IBC 1.0.0-rc4.
- IBC Gaia integration is in progress.
- The team is working on the 2chainz (2chainz = the ability to send a message between 2 chains) tutorial right now so that users can try out IBC for themselves.
- Resolving this issue will enable testnets and in turn a concrete timeline for Game of Zones.
CosmWasm: CosmWasm will bring the WebAssembly (Wasm) virtual machine (VM) to the Cosmos SDK. WebAssembly potentially enables software written in arbitrary languages to run safely and fast on arbitrary hardware. Wasm is like an intermediary language between the developers programming language of choice and the user’s hardware, therefore allowing developers to use any programming language in addition to the initial GOlang limitation.
We are beginning development work on WebAssembly integration with the Cosmos-SDK (CosmWasm). The main updates include:
- An initial proposal provides an outline of how the wasmer engine/Cosmos-SDK integration connects to the rest of the SDK framework and all modules building upon it.
- Library for building Cosmos-compatible wasm smart contracts.
- CosmWasm Cosmos-SDK issues.
- Follow the CosmWasm discussion on Telegram.
Ethereum-Cosmos SDK Bridge Project: Bidirectional Ethereum-Cosmos bridge (codenamed “Peggy”) is the starting point for cross chain value transfers from the Ethereum blockchain to Cosmos-SDK based blockchains. For a simple overview of the project the blog post, The Technicals of Interoperability: An Introduction to Ethereum Peg Zone, is a great place to start.
Development is beginning on the project’s second milestone (four milestones in total). The main updates include:
- An single-validator automated testnet environment to support agile development and to allow curious Cosmos-SDK users to try it out.
- Enable sending Cosmos tokens (ATOM or IBC-standard tokens) to the Ethereum blockchain via CLI.
Ethermint: Ethermint is designed to be a Proof of Stake implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine built on top of Tendermint Core. For more details on the product, check out our blog post “A Beginner’s Guide to Ethermint.”
Ethermint is currently under active development by ChainSafe, an Interchain Foundation grant recipient. The main upcoming development include:
- Completion of RPC API endpoints to be Web3 compatible.
- Implementation of queries through the EVM module to interact with Ethereum state.
- Inclusion of state updates at the start and end of blocks to capture and replicate Ethereum state transition more accurately.
- Storing transaction receipts and implement filters to give adequate information for dapp developers.
- Repo can be found here.
Ethermint is live!
Tutorial for starter deployment on Ethermint is up! Get started now with a tutorial from ChainSafe
Chainsafe ETH2.0 Light Client
In this talk Marko Baricevic, Product Manager for Tendermint, speaks to Greg & Cayman from Chainsafe on ETH2.0 Light Clients.
Awareness and social encounters
October 28th — 31st: SF Blockchain Week, Marriot Marquis in San Francisco, CA:
Virgo Manifesto Talk — CESC 2019
In this talk Jae Kwon, CEO & co-founder of Cosmos/Tendermint, gives a manifesto talk about Virgo, which is an open association of individuals and organizations working together to create better open tools for human coordination.
Sunny Aggarwal — Moneyness
In this talk Sunny Aggarwal, Research Scientist at Cosmos/Tendermint, gives at talk about Moneyness at CESC during SF Blockchain Week.
Supernova
In this video Chjango Unchained, Director of Community at Cosmos/Tendermint, discusses Supernova and its impact on the Cosmos ecosystem.
Evolution of Money in the Crypto Ecosystem — Brent Xu
In this talk Brent Xu, Director of Special Projects at Cosmos/Tendermint, discusses the Evolution of Money in the Crypto Ecosystem at the Macro.wtf event during SF Blockchain Week.
November 1st — 3rd: SF Blockchain Week’s DeFi Hackathon, Terra Gallery in San Francisco, CA:
The Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) Hackathon event was a three-day event that leverages open source software and decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent solutions without intermediaries.
Twitter thread with the teams:
Winners:
November 5th: Game of Zones AMA, AMA in Telegram:
Hosted by Staking Hub, join this Telegram AMA about the upcoming Game of Zones. Featuring Zaki Manian of Tendermint and Dean Tribble from Agoric.
Upcoming events:
Other:
Aragon Chain AMA with Aragon One, Chainsafe, and Cosmos (AGP-106):
In this video Chjango Unchained, Director of Community at Cosmos/Tendermint, has an AMA with the Aragon One and Chainsafe team. They discussed AGP-106, which is Aragon One’s community proposal to build Aragon Chain built on Ethermint and the Cosmos SDK. More on that below.
Finance
Cosmos Markets:
Information is taken from Coinmarketcap.com.
Information from Coinlib.io:
ATOM listed on Exodus Desktop and Mobile.
Binance America listed ATOM on 31st October:
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 »
Ecosystem
Virtual Machines Take Off in the Cosmos
in Interchain Foundation blog
The Cosmos Ecosystem is a complex adaptive system grounded in the joint philosophy of sovereignty and choice: where any group may build, deploy, and operate, using their preferred languages and tools, a fault-tolerant co-ordination service — “blockchain”, if you will — that can rendezvous with other blockchains.
This philosophy manifests in Cosmos software in the form of the ABCI and IBC protocols, that respectively enable blockchain applications to be built in any programming language, and to securely communicate with one another.
To date, the focus of ABCI development has been in Golang, namely, via the Cosmos-SDK, which is used for Gaia (aka the Cosmos Hub) and is emerging as a leading framework for blockchain application development. As the Cosmos-SDK has matured, attention is turning towards integrating various virtual machines as Cosmos-SDK modules, enabling Cosmos-SDK applications to update their logic at run-time through some of the leading blockchain virtual machines and runtime environments. Smart contracts and their underlying virtual machines are taking off in Cosmos.
In addition to Golang, there has also been significant development in Javascript, namely the LotionJS framework, which is being integrated with Agoric’s work on securing Javascript, and is being used to build Bitcoin pegs. There is also a preliminary ABCI framework in python, and community supported ABCI servers in languages like Rust, Erlang, Java, and Haskell.
To facilitate adaptation and emergence in the Cosmos ecosystem, the team must continue to expand and increase support for a diverse set of languages and development environments.
Hence the Request for Proposals for development teams to build ABCI frameworks in other languages, and to integrate them with existing state machines and with IBC.
To this end, the Interchain Foundation is excited about funding a number of projects building virtual machines on top of Tendermint, either as modules for the Cosmos-SDK and/or via run-times in other languages:
More information about each project:
- Ethermint: The ICF funded ChainSafe to build Ethermint. Ethermint is the high speed implementation of Ethereum built on top of Tendermint. Go Ethereum can be slow and doesn’t offer transaction finality due to Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work security model. Ethermint will give the same ability to deploy smart contracts at a much faster speed. ChainSafe is implementing the EVM as a Cosmos-SDK module, allowing the Ethermint EVM to interact with other Cosmos-SDK modules. Prominent Ethereum applications, including Aragon, are contemplating adopting Ethermint for their own uses.
- CosmWasm: The ICF funded Confio to continue the project that was started at the Cosmos Hackatom in Berlin in June 2019 of developing an implementation of a WASM smart contract engine for the Cosmos-SDK. Confio is working with Hackatom team members from Regen Network, TruStory, and Althea on completing this implementation. This project will bring a WASM virtual machine into the Cosmos-SDK, allowing decentralized applications to be built on top of an existing blockchain as a set of WASM smart contracts.
- Cosmic Swingset: With support from the ICF, the Agoric team integrated their object-capabilities based Javascript run-time, Secure EcmaScript, into the Cosmos-SDK. This enables Cosmos-SDK applications to utilize smart contracts written in a more secure subset of Javascript, opening the ecosystem to the world’s most popular programming language without inheriting the typical mess of security issues that come along with it. The Agoric team are pioneers in object-capability based security, and bring decades of experience in designing such systems to the Cosmos. They have also been instrumental in the development of the IBC specification.
- Kadenamint: The ICF funded a joint project with the Kadena and FOAM teams to build out support for ABCI and IBC in Haskell. Haskell is an advanced functional language with strong guarantees and deep roots in mathematical and formal methods communities. Expanding the Cosmos ecosystem into Haskell will open new opportunities for building advanced state machine systems with strong correctness guarantees.
The FOAM team is focusing on hs-abci, a production ready ABCI server and a minimal Cosmos-SDK in Haskell, including a BaseApp library and a Basecoin app roughly compatible with those of the Cosmos-SDK.
The Kadena team is focusing on “Kadenamint” — integrating their Pact runtime into the FOAM-built SDK. Pact is an advanced smart contract language and runtime developed by Kadena in Haskell. It is Turing incomplete, open source, and human readable. Kadenamint will support contract upgrades and formal verification, while integrating with relational database systems. Furthermore, this lays the groundwork for smart contract integration with the upcoming IBC protocol. - Movemint: The ICF funded OpenLibra to integrate the Move virtual machine on top of the Tendermint ABCI and prepare it for future IBC integration. Move is the VM being designed for the notorious Libra project, but it inherits much of it’s type system and safety features from the beloved Rust language.
Of course, there is also the original gangster of putting virtual machines on Tendermint, since before the Cosmos white paper was even written: Burrow by Monax, an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine on Tendermint, which is now also part of the Hyperledger project.
The Interchain Foundation is looking forward to working with these projects, and many more, on the journey to developing sovereign and decentralized state machines and integrating them into the larger Cosmos ecosystem.
To learn more about their funding program, including a complete list of funded projects, see here.
The Interchain Foundation closes the Q3 grants application to process the projects currently in the pipeline:
These weeks updates:
The Kava Mainnet is live!
An Overview of Kava’s Token Design.
Akash Network joins the ecosystem:
The economics behind the Akash Network validator system:
IBC demo by IRIS Network is out. Give it a try!
IRISnet Core Dev Team Bianjie is Certified as China National High-Tech Enterprise: On September 30th, 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China released an announcement on the official website of the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission — the 4th list of National High-Tech Enterprises in 2019 Shanghai. Among the list, IRISnet core development team Bianjie is officially Certified as National High-Tech Enterprise.
How to Transfer IRIS to Binance DEX with Rainbow? Iris Network rainbow new release 2.6 is out. Now you can transfer IRIS between IRIShub & BinanceDEX.
IRISnet Biweekly Report(2019.10.21–11.3).
“How Much Do U Know of Blockchain?” — IRISnet at SMG Radioshow “Citizens & Society”.
IRISnet (IRIS) Airdrop on Binance DEX — Win 500,000 IRIS!
Althea and MakerDAO partner for Abuja Network powered by Dai.
Althea Development Update #77: Hiding in plain sight.
Althea October Community Call:
Cosmostation Mobile Wallet: Cosmostation wallet apps are non-custodial tendermint-based wallet that supports Cosmos Network. The team will add more tendermint-based blockchain projects in the coming updates, such as IRISnet, IOV, Kava.
The proposed genesis file for kava-1 has been posted. Mainnet starts tomorrow 14:00 UTC.
BitSong Telegram Wallet (testnet): new telegram bot tool from BitSong.
Contest for Telegram Wallet (testnet) by BitSong. Prizes of 20.000 btsg. Test the BitSong Telegram Wallet, discover bugs, open issues, suggest new features.
Hashing It Out #65 — Cypher Core — Jay Jie and Ken Trueba: This episode features Jay and Ken from Cypher Core. Cypher Core offers a staking as a service platform for Proof of Stake protocols. Primarily focused on Cosmos network, they talk with them about their experience implementing their system, incentive models involved with staking services, and the overall Cosmos community.
Decentralization and Education Provision.
[Project Tracker] Cosmos #7 — October 2019 Updates in Cypher Core blog.
Chorus One podcast: 20 StakingRewards.com: Aggregating Data for Staking Assets with Mirko Schmiedl: This episode Felix is joined by Mirko Schmiedl, Founder of StakingRewards.com, a website focused on displaying various metrics about staking tokens. They dive into what kind of data users of Staking Rewards can currently see, what this data is useful for, as well as what Mirko imagines the site to cover in the future. Additionally, they talk about the state of Proof-of-Stake and different staking provider models, the research studies the Staking Rewards team has carried out, as well as the difference in interest around staking between the Western world and Asia.
New Gaia version 2.0.3 that will be used for the next Cosmos hub upgrade scheduled for December is out.
Forbole’s Monthly Update Oct 2019 — Commission raised.
Regen Network Dev Update #8: Community updates including CosmWasm, the mainnet launch & other developments
Agoric-documentation f/ building on Agoric’s Stack.
Sikka raises the com to 3% starting October 31st:
October 2019 Terra Community Update.
In numbers: Four Months of CHAI.
Agoric and Cosmos hash out an interoperable future for 2020 [INTERVIEW]: On Oct. 21, 2019, representatives from Agoric, Tendermint, FOAM, and oscoin gathered at Full Node in Berlin, Germany, to discuss the blockchain space’s current need for interoperability protocols.
Chain Reaction #1: Launching Inter-Blockchain Communication (Agoric and Cosmos) by Sahith Reddy Narahari. The transcript of the Chain Reaction interview about Inter-Blockchain Communication, transcribed by a community member.
CosmosVR: A spatial blockchain explorer by Cordula Hansen.
Built with the Cosmos SDK
Projects that are actively building on the Cosmos ecosystem
Akash is the world’s first super cloud for serverless computing, empowering the architects and builders of the internet with greater access, freedom, and efficiency. Announcement » Infrastructure
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 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 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 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 is the world’s first Interledger solutions provider bringing blockchains, wallets, and exchanges the interoperability and liquidity of the Interledger.Announcement » Infrastructure
Lino is a decentralized autonomous content economy to determine its value and incentivize contributors in a more direct and effective manner.Announcement » Social
Loom is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that includes a network of DPoS sidechains for highly-scalable games and user-facing DApps.Announcement » Games
Playlist is a project aimed at tokenizing the music industry with their PLAY Protocol. Social
Regen Network is a global community and platform focused on ecological monitoring and regeneration. Announcement » Agriculture
Sentinel Network is a network layer that enables a true p2p and decentralized Applications & Resources marketplace. Announcement » Infrastructure
A price-stable cryptocurrency designed for mass adoption. We are building financial infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized applications.Announcement » Stablecoin Infrastructure
TruStory is a building a social network for experts to identify what information is true and what isn’t in return for tokens. Announcement » Social
Check out the Full list of projects in Cosmos & Tendermint Ecosystem.
Partnerships and team members
Cosmos is hiring! See the latest job openings here.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Cosmos community continues to grow. There is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of Cosmos social media channels these weeks.
See also Cosmos forum and Matrix/Riot Chat.
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
There is a slight growth in Cosmos community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Cosmos Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
