Cøsmos Network: Prop 25 seeks community approval for CosmWasm to be integrated into the Cosmos Hub, The Zcash Foundation plans to bring its privacy features to the Cosmos ecosystem, GoZ phase 1b begins today, “Code with us” 1st workshop took place, Ecosystem updates

Published in

Paradigm

19 min readMay 18, 2020

Biweekly update 5th May — 18th May

Welcome, Astronauts, to the May edition of Cøsmos biweekly! There was a ton of big stuff over the past two weeks for you!
Good news is, the next phase of Game of Zones is restarting today, on May 18th after the bug fix is merged into the software. You can join the related channel on the Cosmos Discord server to chat with other people willing to help you get used to IBC and prepared for GoZ.
Moreover, the team launched “Code with us,” a live, interactive workshop program designed to educate and provide real-time practice to developers in the community. 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! Check out the video from the first workshop “Scavenger Hunt Tutorial” held by Billy Rennekamp in our report.
Cosmos governance is on its 25th proposal that seeks community approval for CosmWasm to be integrated into the Cosmos Hub. If passed, it will enable faster feature integration for the Cosmos Hub post-IBC launch and will introduce a constrained form of smart contracting on the Cosmos Hub. Read the full proposal below.
As for the social side, the Cosmos team was hosting an hour to hour and a half long video conference event at Consensus:Distributed this year in its “Foundations” segment on May 12th, the second day of the online conference. The new Interchain.FM episode with Justin Kilpatrick and Jehan Tremback of Althea is now out as the Citizen Cosmos podcast episode with Sunny Aggarwal. Read also ’37 Questions for Cosmos’ Sunny Aggarwal on Coindesk. Such an interesting reading!
A lot has happened in Cosmos ecosystem since the Cøsmos biweekly last issue! Retrospective from the Regen Network incentivized testnet running CosmWasm was published. IRISnet team is actively involving in the GoZ. Kava improves governance enabling faster response to volatile markets. Terra relays more news on CHAI with a W Concept and 10x10 payment integration: with the latest integrations, CHAI users now have access to 14.2 billion dollars worth of merchandise volume across 19 major merchants. BAND was listed on the largest Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX. Althea Network is growing fast. From the launch of The Akashian Challenge testnet to their Supermini campaign, it’s been an unstoppable month for Akash. Idena partners with Gitcoin and RadicalxChange for its first hackathon. SENT introduced Velocity, one of the first white-labelled dVPN applications on the network that was built by a community member. This application features a customized UI and is running on the public Sentinel node list. Cyber Congress Game of Links is taking shape. ChainSafe announced that it’s launching ChainBridge, which will function as one of the several 2-way peg zones between not only Cosmos and Ethereum but for many other related blockchains. And much more!

Development

Github metrics:

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.

Cosmos Governance

Proposal: integration of CosmWasm with Cosmos hub by adding support for smart contracts:

Cosmos governance is on its 25th proposal — and a rather significant one, at that. Prop 25 seeks community approval for CosmWasm to be integrated into the Cosmos Hub. If passed, it will enable faster feature integration for the Cosmos Hub post-IBC launch and will introduce a constrained form of smart contracting on the Cosmos Hub. Voter turnout is so far at 32% with a 99% Yes vote (source).

Awareness and social encounters

37 Questions for Cosmos’ Sunny Aggarwal on Coindesk.

Citizen Cosmos podcast, episode 4: Sunny Aggarwal, Tendermint & Sikka:

Cosmos Network at Consensus: Distributed

This year, the team was hosting an hour to hour and a half long video conference event at Consensus:Distributed this year in its “Foundations” segment on May 12th, the second day of the online conference.

The Cosmos portion of the conference had a (tentative) agenda broken down below over a 1–1.5 hour long period:

Wachsman Fireside Chat with Ethan Buchman:

Cross Chain Hackathon with Cosmos, Agoric, and Band Protocol

📅 Dates: 20 April — 11 May

Cross-Chain Hackathon Office Hours: Marko (Interchain GmbH), Dean (Agoric), and Swit (Band) helped answer questions for participants during the Cross-Chain Hackathon office hours from Gitcoin. (date recorded — 5/8/20)

IBC and Game of Zones

Technical Game of Zones Update from Interchain GmbH:

There are several goals of Game of Zones: to educate the public about IBC; to stress test the system in an adversarial and competitive setting; and to shine a light on any potential vulnerabilities in the IBC protocol and implementation. Earlier, participants in Game of Zones successfully helped us identify a problem. It wasn’t exactly a bug in IBC, but it was a problem nonetheless.

The team will share more on that in a moment, but first, some context:

Last Monday, the Iqlusion team, which sometimes also goes by “Cosmos Devs,” posted an update to the Game of Zones challenge. In short, the timeline has been adjusted to accommodate the aforementioned problem, which popped up at the end of Phase 1. (For more details on Game of Zones logistics, please see Iqlusion’s post.)

Now, they are following up on that issue on behalf of the Interchain GmbH team, which includes the core development team for IBC. They’ll share a deeper analysis of the bug and root cause, as well as the cross-entity next steps that they’ll be taking together, to ensure a smooth conclusion to Game of Zones, and, more importantly, a robust Cosmos Network.

Competition Timeline

Phase 1b will begin Monday, May 18th at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Thursday, May 21st at 6:59am UTC.
Phase 2 will begin Monday, May 25th at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Friday, May 29th at 6:59am UTC.
Phase 3 will begin on Monday, June 1st at 7:00am UTC, and will end on Friday, June 5th at 6:59am UTC.

Game of Zones — Phase 1 Recap Livestream: Zaki Manian and Jack Zampolin give a recap of Game of Zones, Phase 1a.

You can also join the related channel on the Cosmos Discord server to chat with other people willing to help you get used to IBC and prepared for GoZ.

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.

What they expect participants to get out of this program:

Get your hands dirty with Cosmos tech, and have fun while coding
Master the basics of programming your own blockchain application and get answers to your questions in real-time
Understand the common, high-level concepts of Cosmos SDK technology
Develop basic skills in the Go programming language

Requirements:

Participants of this course need to have basic programming skills as this is a course aimed at developers
To complete the interactive challenges of the course, you’ll need a desktop or laptop computer with an internet connection
Before the course, you’ll need to install Go onto your computer. You can download it here
Please make sure to have google calendar so that you can log in and confirm your participation for the workshop
The workshops will be held in English and will be based on the existing @cosmos resources and documentation.

The first workshop in this program was “Scavenger Hunt Tutorial” held by Billy Rennekamp on 11th May.

Code with us — Scavenger Hunt Tutorial with Billy Rennekamp: Learn how to build a working game with its own internal economy using the Cosmos-SDK, a Golang framework for making application-specific blockchains. The workshop will use the ‘scavenger hunt’ tutorial led and designed by Billy Rennekamp.

Future workshops will be announced two weeks in advance and they will onboard future participants through the same registration process to make sure your virtual seat is covered.

Finance

Cosmos validators

POS Bakers has made the Google sheet public if you’d like to take a deeper look at the data.

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

European exchange Kaiserex listed COSMOS, 13 trading pairs with ATOM available.

Roadmap

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.

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 June 01, 2020 77% complete

IBC v1.0.0 issues left to be implemented.

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

The Unstoppable Update: May 2020.

Oracle:

Dawn Protocol:

IRIS Network:

The First implementation of the Community-centric Delegation Campaign & the Second One-year Token Burn Plan!

IRISnet on Consensus Distributed: Make blockchain technology work for real-world business requirements.

IRISnet Biweekly Report(2020.4.20~5.3):

IRISnet team is actively involving in the GoZ: released two versions of GoZ Network State Visualizer; is going to share a new version of Rainbow wallet for GoZ to help ordinary users to experience interchain token transfer
IRISnet and Chainlink partnership announcement & AMA
Coindesk, BSN, CEO of Red Date Technology Yifan He mentioned a partnership between BSN and Cosmos based on IRITA, an enterprise-focused solution branching off of the Shanghai-based IRISnet project
COIRFAN is going to release the mobile setting of its web page. Thanks to Cypher Core and Paradigm for the report which mentioned IRISnet
IRISnet co-founder Harriet Cao is going to give a class with business leaders to share the application scenarios of industrial blockchain

Regen Network:

Postmortem of CosmWASM Kontraŭa testnet: 24th April 2020 marked the end of Regen network’s 2nd incentivized testnet slated for Q1 of 2020.

Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 12: Joe Brewer

Sitting with the Trouble: “Planet of the Humans” demands we ask big questions, not parrot little answers.

Kava Improves Governance Enabling Faster Response to Volatile Markets:

Introducing Kava Committees:

A new type of governance mechanism has been created for the Cosmos-SDK called “committees’’. Much like in traditional governance organizations, committees consist of several appointed parties and are delegated certain decision making privileges. This is done either because a certain decision making speed or expertise out of the normal is required.

On KAVA, committees are formed in a normal governance vote that specifies certain Kava addresses as appointed committee members, the parameters they can influence as a committee, and within what range they can modify the parameters. Committees can be formed and delegated rights to decide any of the parameters that Kava’s governance controls such as debt-to-collateral ratios, interest rates, savings rates, debt issuance limits, etc.

Announcing the Kava Stability Committee:

As the first committee, Kava will create a Kava Stability Committee that will be responsible for maintaining key CDP parameters responsible for ensuring USDX’s stability. The full list of parameters the committee is responsible for overseeing can be found here.

Initially, the committee will be formed consisting of 5 leading organizations within Kava’s ecosystem, but this can be altered over time as seen fit by the greater Kava holder base.

Kava Stability Committee Selection Criteria:

3 criteria were used in selecting the nominees for the committee.

1) Has a large holding of $KAVA aligning interest towards long-term growth and success.

2) Understanding of Kava’s architecture, financial markets, and incentives.

3) History of engagement & responsiveness. They have displayed consistent engagement throughout Kava’s history on a technical and ecosystem level.

Announcing The Kava CryptoPayDay.

BNB Holders Can Now Mint USDX With Frontier Wallet: Step-by-step tutorial on how to mint USDX on your iOS or Android device.

Terra:

W Concept & 10x10 in new CHAI payment integration.

Althea Blockchain Update:

In 2019, we successfully completed the testing of our custom transaction library and Althea testnets 1–4.
In late 2019, we began work on the design and evaluation of the “Peggy” ethereum-to-cosmos bridge.
In early 2020, we arrived at an improved Peggy design that meets all of our needs. However that is when COVID-19 hit.
Since COVID-19, the demand for new Althea networks has greatly increased. All our efforts have been directed there, causing some delays in our blockchain development.
We have recently started strategic development of Peggy and reached out to Cosmos stakeholders and the Interchain foundation to support a more general purpose bridge that would benefit everyone. We welcome feedback on our proposal.

Althea Network is growing fast!

Agoric:

Oasis Labs:

e-Money:

Recently, mainnet has launched. The first block was produced at March 25th, 2020 at 12:00 UTC with more than 30 validators joining in the first few hours. All of the 40 validators slots are now occupied.

What’s next?

More web- and mobile wallet integrations in addition to Lunie, SyncNode Wallet and e-Money explorer.
IBC integration with the Cosmos Hub and participation in Game of Zones.
Seamless bank and credit card integration through the website.

Longer term:

Support for on-chain trading algorithms on DEX using WebAssembly (CosmWasm). This includes automated market makers similar to UniSwap or custom strategies.
Offer connectors to the DEX in software packages for automated trading, such as HummingBot.
Integrations and partnerships in the retail payments space.
Support for additional currencies, such as GBP, JPY and USD.

Cyber_Congress:

Game of Links is taking shape!
The game is part of the distribution games planned in Cyber Congress whitepaper. In this document, the team describes the purpose, the rules and the tools that are required to participate in the Game. The game started with euler-5, which is the technical name of their incentivized testnet that is required for the launch of the cyber network. The Game of Links is going to be held as part of the euler testnets. The game is organized by cyber~Congress. The main goal of the participants is to win as many tokens as possible, from cyber~Congress.

The key idea behind the Game of Links is to establish a starting value of relevance for the knowledge graph. It is crucial for getting quality search results from the inception of the network. All the disciplines are an integral part of the preparation and testing of the network before the launch of the mainnet.

Start playing: https://cyber.page/gol

A vizualization of the links: https://cyber.page/graph

Commercio.network:

Commercio.network launched the MainNet for Monday, May 4th

Idena Network:

There is a new version of the Idena node available: 0.20.0

Idena partners with Gitcoin and RadicalxChange for its first hackathon.

Kadena:

Sentinel:

SENT introduces Velocity, one of the first white-labelled dVPN applications on the network that was built by a community member. This application features a customized UI and is running on the public Sentinel node list.

THORChain:

Weekly Dev Update #42: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 05–11 May 2020.

Update on Operational Reserve: THORChain’s treasury is sufficient and will be ending monthly OTC sales.

ChainSafe:

ChainSafe announced that it’s launching ChainBridge, which will function as one of the several 2-way peg zones between not only Cosmos and Ethereum but for many other related blockchains:

Chorus One:

Chorus One Receives Web3 Foundation Grant to Bridge Polkadot and Cosmos Ecosystems.

Forbole:

Cosmos India:

Built with the Cosmos SDK

Projects that are actively building on the Cosmos ecosystem

Akash Network — 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 — 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 world’s first Interledger solutions provider bringing blockchains, wallets, and exchanges the interoperability and liquidity of the Interledger. Announcement » Infrastructure

Lino Network — Lino is a decentralized autonomous content economy to determine its value and incentivize contributors in a more direct and effective manner. Announcement » Social

Loom — 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 — 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. They are building financial infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized applications. Announcement » Stablecoin Infrastructure

TruStory — 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

Two of the world’s biggest blockchains are converging

The Zcash Foundation is bringing its anonymous blockchain to the cross-chain Cosmos ecosystem. Soon you’ll be able to send Zcash from one to the other.

The Zcash Foundation plans to bring its privacy features to the Cosmos ecosystem.
The project will utilize “pegzones” to add an anonymity layer to cross-chain transactions.
This will allow shielding assets, transfers and staking across blockchains.
It will be possible to move Zcash from one blockchain to the other.

The Zcash Foundation, a nonprofit organization that develops the Zcash (ZEC) protocol and privacy-focused blockchain, has announced that its plans to bring privacy to the Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem, and create a greater connection between the two chains. This will allow Zcash to effectively be moved from one chain to the other.

The protocol is used for its so-called “pegzones” — that function as intermediaries between different blockchains. The Zcash Foundation plans to utilize this functionality, allowing Cosmos users to send and receive private and anonymous transactions.

“Zcash is unique among privacy solutions in that it has strong network effects: new users gain anonymity from all prior transactions of existing users, while in turn contributing to a greater anonymity set for the entire system,” stated the announcement on May 6, adding, “Our plan is to take advantage of these network effects by giving Cosmos users access to this anonymity set through an IBC-enabled pegzone.”

The project will be launched in two phases. In the first one, the pegzone will provide tokens backed by ZEC in an existing Zcash shielded pool — where coin information is kept private — the foundation noted.

“These tokens can be sent throughout the Cosmos ecosystem, allowing Cosmos users to trade and use ZEC,” the announcement said.

In the second phase, the Zcash Foundation plans to add a shielded pool to the pegzone itself, providing shielded staking (a way of generating new coins), shielded IBC assets and shielded transfers across blockchains. This will bring Zcash’s privacy features to the Cosmos ecosystem.

“This plan provides an increasingly useful privacy layer for the Cosmos ecosystem, while growing the anonymity set of Zcash. And our library-first design for Zebra will let us build the Zcash portions of the project using modular, reusable components,” the announcement concluded.

The project’s initial design document is already published in the “zcash-pegzone” repository on Github.

Cosmos is hiring! See the latest job openings here.