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Cøsmos Network: HackAtom V is in full swing, ‘Big Bang’ Stargate testnet announced, Stargate Bug Bounty Program released, Tendermint Fellowships introduced, Interchain.fm new episodes, IRISnet’s Bifrost Phase-1 launches, KyberSwap integrates Band Protocol, Akash to integrate Chainlink, BitSong testnet-4 is live, and more!

Paradigm
Paradigm
Published in
19 min readOct 20, 2020

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 33, 7th October -20th October

Greetings all Space Cowboys and Astronaut Girls! Another two weeks are in the books so it’s time for our biweekly summary of all things from the Cosmos ecosystem!
First and foremost, Stargate-3a has updated to Stargate-4 and is ready for relayer testing on top of amino REST endpoints and gRPC. The biggest event from these weeks was the announcement of ‘Big Bang’ Stargate testnet. The goal of it is to create a multichain test environment that tests, simulates, and benchmarks the post-Stargate Cosmos. As every stack of software required for Stargate upgrade has matured, the software used and procedures handled in Big Bang will mimic the real world. The Big Bang testnet will be broken down into three stages, each having emphasis on different aspects of new features introduced by Stargate, and will be operated by Regen Network, Vitwit, and Tendermint.
The successful release of the Cosmos Stargate software upgrade is a testament to a hard-won victory over this challenge. More than seven teams contributed to ship the Cosmos Stargate release including the Cosmos SDK team, the IBC and Tendermint Core teams at Interchain GmbH, Tendermint Inc Team, the Relayer team, the Informal Systems team, as well as Iqlusion. These weeks, they shared with the community the experience on this journey of what they did, what they learned and what is next as they launch the final version of the Cosmos Stargate. Moreover, with the Stargate testnet release candidate ready to be launched, Cosmos announced the Stargate Bug Bounty Program to help identify critical bugs in the software release. Read more about it and how you can get involved below.
What’s more, HackAtom V is in full swing! It is the time to join! Find the links to workshops’ recordings in our report.
The Tendermint Inc. introduced Tendermint Fellowships. Tendermint Fellows is the means to identify raw talent that is as-yet undiscovered to then provide the early stage financial backing for converting that raw energy into the next killer decentralized application to burst into the cryptocurrency market. Furthermore, ‘Tendermint Core Dev Sessions’ and ‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Calls took place.
Two new live recording sessions of Interchain.fm podcast appeared: with Tarun Chitra, Founder of Gauntlet Network, and with RAC, a Grammy award winning recording artist. Tune it on!
As for the ecosystem updates, over two weeks, there was a lot of truly huge news for you! CosmosTV, a 24x7 broadcast, for the Cosmos community launched. Bifrost, IRISnet’s DeFi and Interchain Testnet has launched Phase-1 with incentivized tasks. BitSong testnet-4 is live. Category 1 and 2 of Sentinel’s incentivized Cosmos/Tendermint based testnet has now ended and Category 3 has been extended. Band Protocol has successfully upgraded BandChain from Wenchang to GuanYu, completing Phase 1 which supports the permissionless creation of customizable data oracle scripts that can query public and permissionless data sources leveraging a decentralized network of 67+ validator nodes. Also, KyberSwap integrates Band Protocol. Terra partners with Velo Labs to build out a next-generation payment system. Akash Network to integrate Chainlink oracles to power pricing data. Persistence announced StakeDrop: 1M XPRT tokens will be distributed. The Kava 4 Gateway launch was successful. This upgrade expands support for collateral assets to BTC, XRP, BUSD, and others. Also, Harvest, the world’s first cross-chain money market application on Kava is now live. Cyber’s prop 13 has been accepted. This means that the bounty pool, for the current campaign, is increased by 500 and the rewards by 30. e-Money appoint Morten Møller Holst as COO. Chain of Secrets just launched the Secret API for Secret Network as part of the developer community on-boarding efforts. Agoric’s weekly updates are here. Check out Althea’s recent blog post explaining the differences between bridges and payment channels. And much more!
That’s all for today! See you next month with more exciting Cosmos news!

Development

Github metrics:

Announcing the ‘Big Bang’ Stargate Testnet

by Josh Lee

Stargate, or Cosmos-SDK v0.40, introduces some of the most groundbreaking features the Cosmos ecosystem has seen so far. This massive task was taken on by 7 different entities around the globe with a common passion for the Internet of Blockchains. After months of collaboration, the release candidate for Stargate has finally been released.

However, releasing software is just half of the equation. The other half is testing it. With so many new features like state sync, cosmovisor, protobuf, IBC, and many more–it is crucial that these features are tested in the hands of those who will use it the most.

This is where you can help.

Why Big Bang?

The goal of Big Bang is to create a multichain test environment that tests, simulates, and benchmarks the post-Stargate Cosmos. As every stack of software required for Stargate upgrade has matured, the software used and procedures handled in Big Bang will mimic the real world. The teams aim to provide a vibrant testing ground for validators, developers, ecosystem projects, and others a useful experience and a final chance to be Stargate ready.

As the development of Stargate was decentralized across different entities, it felt apt that the testnet would be run by multiple entities. Big Bang will be operated by Regen Network, Vitwit, and Tendermint. And yes, they welcome contributions!

The State of the Stargate Testnets

  1. Stargate-x

Status: Live

The stargate-x organized and operated by Iqlusion focuses on Gaia / Cosmos Hub, specifically for integration testing on legacy amino for service providers such as wallets, explorers, and exchanges. Because of the nature of integration testing, the stargate-x testnet aims to provide a persistent, non-adversarial environment that replicates post-upgrade Cosmos Hub.

2. Cosmoshub-test-stargate

Status: Coming Soon

The cosmoshub-test-stargate testnet’s sole purpose is to prepare a smooth upgrade of cosmoshub-3 to cosmoshub-4. As Stargate introduces new command lines, REST architecture, and many more breaking changes–it is crucial that validators have familiarity with the upgrade process.

If you’re a cosmoshub-3 validator, it is strongly recommended that you participate in cosmoshub-test-stargate. There is a big chance that a validator without the cosmoshub-test-stargate experience will not be ready for the governance vote to upgrade.

3. Bigbang-x

Status: Gentx for Phase 1 (bigbang-1)

The primary target audience for Big Bang is projects planning an upgrade to Stargate and test the capabilities of IBC-enabled Cosmos.

Furthermore, different than the two testnets that primarily focus on testing the Cosmos Hub, the bigbang-x testnets will prioritize testing features, security, and performance with an emphasis on the amazing capabilities unlocked by the protobuf encoding refactor. In Phase 3, the team invites the community developers to take part by building new zones that leverage the power of app chains and composability provided by IBC.

A three-phase community-led testnet

The Big Bang testnet will be broken down into three stages, each having emphasis on different aspects of new features introduced by Stargate.

Phase 1. Schedule: 16-Oct-2020 1500UTC to 30-Oct-2020 1500UTC

The goal for Phase 1 of Big Bang is to bootstrap. A Cosmos-SDK v0.39 zone will be launched with the purpose of testing x/upgrade module and cosmovisor introduced in Stargate, which allows an automated upgrade of a Cosmos-SDK zone.

This phase targets validators who aim to familiarize themselves with the automated software upgrade process. Check here for more details on Phase 1.

Key timelines

  • GenTx submission: 16-Oct-2020 1500UTC to 19-Oct-2020 1500UTC
  • Genesis file release: 19-Oct-2020 1600UTC
  • Network genesis time: 20-Oct-2020 1600UTC
  • Software upgrade proposal (v0.39.1 to v0.40.0) — 26-Oct-2020 1500UTC
  • Voting Period — 48 hours (26–28rd-Oct-2020 1500UTC)

Phase 2. Schedule: 30-Oct-2020 1500UTC to 16-Nov-2020 1500UTC

Phase 2 of Big Bang will revolve around feature and performance testing. The aim is to identify potential bugs and security vulnerabilities that may exist in the software and to objectively measure the performance of the software through a series of test scripts.

Different from thestargate-3/4 testnet, which the goal is to ensure a smooth upgrade path for Cosmos Hub service providers, Big Bang will focus more on the wider Cosmos ecosystem and its projects. A light IBC testing between Big Bang, Agoric, Stargate-4, and Ethermint will take place.

Specific activities and timelines will be announced through the cosmos/testnets GitHub repository.

Phase 3. Schedule: 16-Nov-2020 1500UTC to 11-Dec-2020 1500UTC

For Big Bang Phase 3, the teams want to introduce a multi-token incentivized Stargate testnet. This testnet phase will involve multiple zones from the ecosystem such as Cosmos Hub, Regen Network, Akash, and Chainapsis who plan on operating Stargate testnet zones of the application-specific blockchains throughout.

They envision Phase 3 to be a community-funded Game of Zones like incentivized testnet where Cosmos developers, validators, and service providers can showcase the full potential of the post-Stargate Cosmos.

More details on the incentivization and how you can participate will be shared via the cosmos/testnets repository. If your project would like to participate in Big Bang phase 3 by running a zone or provide token incentivization for participants, please leave an issue on the GitHub repository.

Cosmos Stargate Release Bug Bounty Program

by Zaki Manian

The Cosmos Stargate testnet release candidate is ready to launch. The various Cosmos teams responsible for delivering this new software are excited to enlist the help of the community to identify critical bugs that may have made it past engineering and integration testing so far. The teams depend on the community to assist them with testing so that they can increase confidence in the software release. Thus, for Stargate we will launch a special bug bounty program that will last from today through December 31, 2020. Rewards for this program will be temporarily increased from rewards in prior programs to encourage the community to actively support bug discovery.

Submit bugs at the Hacker One program: https://hackerone.com/tendermint

Read more>>

How Seven Teams Collaborated To Deliver The Biggest Software Upgrade In The Cosmos Universe

by Zaki Manian

Complex software development coordinated by remote teams is a challenge to avoid the dreaded delays. In the crypto ecosystems, failures to ship can negatively impact community perception as well as token value. The successful release of the Cosmos Stargate software upgrade is a testament to a hard-won victory over this challenge. More than seven teams contributed to ship the Cosmos Stargate release. The team asked the leading teams involved to contribute their insights into their journey to ship the Cosmos Stargate release. These teams included the Cosmos SDK team, the IBC and Tendermint Core teams at Interchain GmbH, Tendermint Inc Team, the Relayer team, the Informal Systems team, as well as Iqlusion.

Read more to an in-depth case study of success in teamwork and coordination unique to the Cosmos community>>>

Tendermint

Tendermint Core Dev Sessions:

End-to-End Testing: In this Tendermint Core Dev Session, Erik Grinaker gives a walkthrough of the new end-to-end testing suite that he’s built for Tendermint Core.

Light Client Attacks: In this Tendermint Dev Session, the team discusses attacks on the light client and related evidence handling/accountability protocols. Led by Zarko Milosevic.

‘The Future of the Cosmos Hub’ Community Call #5:

The latest community call. Topic: Liquid Staking and Validator Shares

Introducing: Tendermint Fellowships

A new initiative for Cosmos hackathon winners

Tendermint Fellowships is a new program being launched by Tendermint Inc. Tendermint Fellows is the means to identify raw talent that is as-yet undiscovered to then provide the early stage financial backing for converting that raw energy into the next killer decentralized application to burst into the cryptocurrency market.

How it works

The discovery mechanism behind Tendermint Fellows relies heavily on hackathons. Whenever a Cosmos hackathon is launched, that’s when proceeding evaluations for potential Fellows will occur. At the close of every Cosmos hackathon, there is the potential for up to 2 Fellows to be discovered; though there is no hard cap as to how many Fellows could emerge. The outcome is completely based on merit of the existing talent pool that presents itself during each hackathon.

A Tendermint Fellowship is granted to the individual, rather than to the winning team, who showcases extraordinary leadership skills, communication skills, depth of technical skills, resourcefulness, and business acumen. By identifying the individual, the prestige of recognition is awarded to the person who unambiguously demonstrates the highest level of competency above their competition in their ability to take a project’s goals across the goalpost from start to finish.

The Fellow who decides to keep their team would then self-manage the resources granted to them by the Fellowship Program and distribute as-needed to keep the operations of the project going. If any one team has multiple individuals who qualify for a Fellowship, then those individuals will receive funding in addition to the first Fellow as well as become recognized as another Tendermint Fellow as part of the same class.

Read more>>>

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.

Meet the team:

Interchain.fm

Ep 7: Tarun Chitra, Staking Derivatives

Live recording session of Interchain.fm podcast with Tarun Chitra, Founder of Gauntlet Network, where we discuss staking derivatives on proof-of-stake networks

Ep. 8: RAC and the Rise of NFTs

Live recording session of Interchain.fm podcast with RAC, a Grammy award winning recording artist, where we discuss NFTs and blockchain scarcity

HackAtom

Schedule:

  • HackAtom Began: 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

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).

Workshops replays:

Join HackAtom V Discord

Other events:

October 15th: Code with Us: Proof of Authority SDK Module

Finance

Cosmos validators

Source

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Roadmap

Cosmos Roadmap:

98% complete

Milestones:

View on GitHub →

Status updates:

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

Oracle:

IRIS Network:

-Bifrost, IRISnet’s DeFi and Interchain Testnet has launched Phase-1 with incentivized tasks: Bifrost is the DeFi and Interchain Testnet that IRISnet launched to support the Cosmos Network’s interchain vision and bring IBC as well as DeFi features. Bifrost Phase-1 plans to mainly test the upgrade modules and new modules:

  • Testing Service function, including the service creation, binding, request, response, service fees withdrawal, etc.
  • Testing Oracle function, querying the response value of the running Oracle
  • Testing Record function, including creating and querying records
  • Testing NFT function, including issuing, minting, editing, transferring and burning NFT tokens
  • Testing Random function, requesting random numbers with or without Oracle
  • Incentivized tasks has been accordingly released based on the above modules. Rewards will be distributed in the form of NFT badges within the Bifrost testnet, and there will be three reward levels (Gold/Sliver/Bronze) according to the percentage of achievement of tasks. These NFT badges can be reflected in the upgraded IRIS Hub mainnet: developers can not only chose to hold these badges as icons of the honor, but can also transfer them to IRIS tokens.

-IRISnet plans to integrate related services as a public chain service portal of BSN International: IRISnet will integrate related services as a public chain service portal of BSN International, providing a new low-threshold and convenient-access development environment for technology developers in the ecosystem.

-The Sixth Implementation of the Community-centric Delegation Campaign & the Second One-year Token Burn Plan:

The results of the sixth implementation are as follow:

  • IRIS Foundation made a distribution to delegators with an amount equal to their delegation rewards in September, distributed 600,469.1167 IRIS in total.
  • According to the Token Burn Plan, IRIS Foundation burned delegation rewards of Eco-Development Fund on September 30, totally 2,217,938 IRIS.
  • The foundation set up the “Rainbow Validator” award, which will continually receive application forms. Congratulations to Bi23 Labs for becoming the September Rainbow Validators.

-Bianjie & Wuhan RHDK Join Forces to Develop Blockchain Based Epidemic Early Warning System: Recently, Bianjie and Wuhan Run He De Kang (RHDK) formed a strategic partnership to jointly develop blockchain based Epidemic Early Warning Systems in fighting with Covid-19.

-IRISnet Monthly Update: 2020.09 — Community & Technical Recap.

Regen Network:

Cosmos SDK “Stargate” Release 0.40:

Starname — IOV Name Service:

Bluzelle:

Foam:

Desmos Network:

Kava:

Terra:

  • Houston (beta) — development framework & smart contract pipeline- designed to make life easier for Terra developers — launched:

Persistence:

Persistence announced StakeDrop: 1M $XPRT Tokens will be Distributed:

  • StakeDrop is a distribution mechanism which allows holders of PoS network tokens to acquire XPRT simply by staking on their favorite networks.
  • Networks included in the StakeDrop campaigns are: Cosmos Network, Terra, Kava Labs, IRISnet, Polkadot, Matic Network and Tezos.
  • 1% of the total XPRT token supply (1,000,000 XPRT) is allocated for StakeDrop rewards.
  • Reward amounts for specific participants depend on a variety of factors, including which network/s they are staking on, whether they are delegating to an AUDIT.one validator (higher rewards) or a different validator, and the length of their participation in each campaign.
  • The first StakeDrop campaign will be on Cosmos Network, beginning October 26th.

Band Protocol:

Loom Network:

Bytom:

Althea Network:

Althea Network is growing!

Agoric:

  • Agoric’s weekly updates:

Oasis Labs:

e-Money:

Cyber:

  • Cyber’s prop 13 has been accepted. This means that the bounty pool, for the current campaign, is increased by 500 and the rewards by 30 (this includes those who already completed the tasks)
  • Prop 14 proposes to allocate 15 GEUL from the comm pool for the already developed Cyber’s, open source, RSS parses that can parse RSS feeds and commit cyberlinks
  • An update on Cyber’s canary network, Euler. The network has been up since the last bug for a few days, but is still unstable. Theteam’s next step is to start bringing up the validators and twitch Tendermint params to find the most optimal params to suit the network current needs. As they’re doing this, it’s vital not to overload the network, hence, they kindly ask everyone to stop all crawlers and any other services that can submit many transactions simultaneously. If you wish to create cyberlinks, please stick to manual linking using Ledger and the CLI.

Citizen Cosmos news:

Idena Network:

Kadena:

BitSong:

BitSong testnet-4 is live:

LikeCoin:

Secret Network:

  • Secret Network Ecosystem Update: September 2020: In September, Secret’s big mainnet upgrade brought secret contracts to life. Here’s everything Secret from September, including the first exchange listing (Binance), new staking opportunities, and a roadmap for private and fair universal finance.
  • Secret Markets: Front Running Prevention for Automated Market Makers. Learn how constant function market makers powered by “secret contracts” on Secret Network can address privacy and usability challenges for decentralized exchanges like Uniswap
  • 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.

Sentinel:

Category 1 and 2 of Sentinel’s Incentivized Cosmos/Tendermint based Testnet has now ended and Category 3 has been extended. 50 validators participated in an eventful testnet which experienced attacks that ‘jailed’ a large % of participants.

THORChain:

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

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.

Medium

Twitter

Telegram

Reddit

Youtube

Cosmos forum

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

This is not financial advice.

Subscribe to detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm!

Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Telegram Chat. Reddit.

Main sources

Cosmos blog

Cosmos Twitter page

Cosmos subreddit

Cosmos Youtube channel

Tendermint media

Interchain Foundation media

Ecosystem projects’ social media

Today in Cosmos by Adriana | KalpaTech

🪐Crypto Twitter in general

Cosmos Network
Blockchain
Tendermint
Cryptocurrency

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Paradigm
Paradigm

Written by Paradigm

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