Cøsmos Network: Stargate-3 is live, HackAtom V is coming, Tendermint partners with B-Harvest to build the AMM DEX Liquidity Module, Kava Labs introduced Harvest, Oracle chosen as TikTok’s secure cloud provider, Akash mainnet this Friday, and more!

Published in

Paradigm

17 min readSep 23, 2020

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 31, 9th September — 23rd September

Greetings to all Space Cowboys and Astronaut Girls! The past two weeks have brought a number of significant news which are the main focus of the current report.
Firstly, Zaki Manian announced the release of the latest version of the Stargate testnet! Now you can test: IBC support, relayer, legacy amino support for block explorers, exchanges, wallets, and more.
Applications are now open for HackAtom V, the most exciting event of this fall! The team has $50k in ATOMs to give away! They want to see creativity and innovation when expanding the Cosmos Universe. Don’t miss your chance to participate! Check out rules & guidelines below.
Good news is, Tendermint partners with BHarvest, a Cosmos validator and research powerhouse, to bring a Liquidity Module into CosmosSDK to provide the tools that can allow SDK chains to deploy AMM-style DEXs. Join the Tendermint team on Thursday to weigh in on the future of the Cosmos Hub.
An executive summary by Chjango Unchained (Tendermint) was published detailing how the team intends to spend their 10% of IRIS tokens over time to pursue a full-on Iris Network ecosystem development campaign. See who’s on the list of validators they’re planning to delegate IRIS to below. Forby, a thought piece by Brent Xu on distribution curves, a new cryptoeconomic primitive designed to modify behavior in bonding curves, appeared. It explores equilibriums and design. Things get interesting when factoring in staking.
As for the ecosystem updates, over two weeks, there was a lot of truly huge news for you! Persistence One, together with Cosmosis, was hosting HackAtom Week.
Oracle Corporation announced that it was chosen to become TikTok’s secure cloud technology provider. This week, on Friday, September 25th, the Akash team will launch Akash DeCloud: mainnet, and progress their vision for The Unstoppable Cloud, a permissionless, sovereign, and open cloud where builders of the Internet have greater freedom and sovereignty. IRISnet Co-Founder Harriet shared her viewpoints on BSN Open Permissioned Blockchain Project. Moreover, Bianjie established a strategic partnership with Zhongcheng Blockchain Research Institute. Kava Labs introduced Harvest — its cross-chain money market. Kava Proposal #16 is now in the voting period. If passed Harvest will be included in Kava-4 “Gateway” network upgrade. The IOV team announced that their project is now called Starname. Bluzelle expands its reach by entering the Polkadot ecosystem. In the latest post in Terra’s blog, the team goes over the new Contracts section in Terra Station, where users can upload, query, and interact with smart contracts. Band Protocol’s testnet upgrade from Wenchang to GuanYu was a success: over 36+ validators participated and will continue to test the network before the public Mainnet launch of GuanYu. Althea announced a partnership with Iqlusion and several Cosmos projects to form a new collaboration focused on the development of bridges, tools, and infrastructure for blockchain projects. Agoric released Agoric Alpha, their smart contract platform. Developers can create and operate sophisticated dApps and DeFi markets. Oasis mainnet is fast approaching. This week, the team shared the Oasis Genesis File, and provide a roadmap for mainnet release. The new Turing-3 SENT Cosmos-based testnet launched on the 21st of September. Cyber’s takeoff round is still going with a little over 25 days left to the end. The second edition of the Interchain Foundation’s biweekly update. And more!
And last but not least, ‘Cosmos Unchained’ is closing out its season finale with a bang! Join Shaun Conway (ixo), Erik Voorhees (Shapeshift), and Chjango Unchained (Cosmos) who to discuss decentralized exchanges and centralized exchanges later today on ‘Cosmos Unchained: DEXs vs CEXs’ virtual event!
That’s all for today! See you next month with more exciting Cosmos news!

Development

Github metrics:

Cosmos Stargate Upgrade Overview

Stargate is the largest Cosmos upgrade yet. Stargate enables higher transaction throughput, cross-chain transactions, accelerate UI development, and so much more.

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

STARGATE-3 IS LIVE:

CosmWasm:

Replay of the #15 Community call:

CosmWasm Governance Voting Event:

Thursday Sep 24th. Simulating UniFi DAO UP-101 funding case using CosmWasm (CW1-Subkeys).

CosmWasm Beginner Class Workshop#2 State Modeling & Buckets: Orkun Külçe will show you state modeling & use buckets to manage data in CosmWasm on Sep 29th 12pm CET

Tendermint

An AMM DEX for the Cosmos Hub: B-Harvest partners with Tendermint to build a Liquidity SDK Module

Tendermint announced a partnership with B-Harvest, one of the oldest Cosmos contributors in the ecosystem towards building this AMM DEX Liquidity Module. The Liquidity Module is designed around extensive research into existing AMM implementations on Ethereum while optimizing on certain economic incentive systems unique to Cosmos.

“This effort by B-Harvest and Tendermint (AiB) to bring an automated market maker to the Cosmos Hub ensures that the Cosmos Hub will be well positioned to jumpstart DeFi applications in the post Stargate world. The effort fulfills one of the dependencies identified in the ATOM2021 memo.” says Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion and CEO of PeggyJV.

How Tendermint Intends to Spend its IRIS Token Treasury

Executive Summary of the IRISnet Ecosystem Development Plan by Chjango Unchained.

Join the team on Thursday to weigh in on the future of the Cosmos Hub

Meeting #2: Sept 25, 7PM UTC
Topic: Interchain Staking (model is a WIP)

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 Governance

Proposal 29

Genesis fund recovery proposal on behalf of fundraiser participants unable to access their ATOMs

Awareness and social encounters

Distribution Curves — A thought piece on Cryptoeconomics and DeFi

On the topic of DeFi in Cosmos: A thought piece by Brent Xu on distribution curves, a new cryptoeconomic primitive designed to modify behavior in bonding curves. It explores equilibriums & design. Things get interesting when factoring in staking.

Code with us

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.

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.

Upcoming events:

HackAtom

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

Schedule:

Registration opens: Wednesday Sept 2nd, 8am PDT
HackAtom Begins: Friday Oct 16 @ 12p PDT
Submissions Due: Friday Oct 30th @ 12pm PDT
Voting for Community Choice Award: Nov 2nd — Nov 6th 12pm PDT
Winners Announced: Monday Nov 9th 12pm PDT

Rules & Guidelines

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

Submission Guidelines

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

View full rules

Prizes:

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

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

Written Guides:

Apply at five.hackatom.org

Join HackAtom V Discord

HackAtom India: Build the Cosmos

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

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

Schedule

HackAtom India began: 4th September 2020
Deadline for Submission: 4th October, 2020
HackAtom India Ends: 4th October, 2020

Judges

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

Prizes

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

Workshops took place:

Building Multi-chain Smart-contracts using Cosmwasm: Ethan Frey
Starport: The fastest way to launch a Cosmos blockchain: Denis Fadeev
Powering DeFi using Cosmos SDK: Deepanshu Tripathi
Learn how to set up an Ethermint development environment and use Ethereum tooling on Ethermint: Elizabeth Binks

September 23rd: Cosmos Unchained: DEXs vs CEXs: Join Shaun Conway (ixo), Erik Voorhees (Shapeshift), and Chjango Unchained (Cosmos) to discuss decentralized exchanges and centralized exchanges on Sept 23, 3p PDT.

Finance

Cosmos validators

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Roadmap

Cosmos Roadmap:

93% complete

IBC v1.0.0 issues left to be implemented.

Status updates:

Interchain Foundation

ICF Update — Sept 22nd:

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

If you missed the last update, check it out at ICF Update — Sept 7.

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

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

Oracle:

Oracle chosen as TikTok’s secure cloud provider: Oracle Corporation announced that it was chosen to become TikTok’s secure cloud technology provider. This technical decision by TikTok was heavily influenced by Zoom’s recent success in moving a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.

In a statement to reporters on Monday, Oracle announced that its new TikTok venture will be entirely divested from ByteDance, a significant break from previous reports of the agreed deal between the two companies.

“Upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global,” the company said in a statement to reporters.

The statement differs significantly from earlier reports, which showed Oracle and Walmart taking only a 20 percent stake in the new venture and ByteDance maintaining control of the other 80 percent. ByteDance has not publicly relinquished its claim to the company, and Oracle did not respond to a request for clarification.

IRIS Network:

IRISnet Co-Founder Harriet shares her viewpoints on BSN Open Permissioned Blockchain Project: Key Viewpoints from Harriet: The BSN Open Permissioned Blockchain (BSN O. P. B. ) initiative works in building a framework designed to help public blockchains to meet the compliance requirements, which can successfully promote the blockchain technology adoption in the real economy. Differently from what many people think, the BSN O. P. B. won’t adversely affect the decentralization of the public blockchains, it will instead lead to an exponential increase in the applicable use-cases and and accelerate the technological advancements as well as blockchain value realization.

Bianjie Establishes a Strategic Partnership with Zhongcheng Blockchain Research Institute: To join efforts and carry out together R&D oriented to important sectors as CBDC, STO, Big Data, and Industry Blockchain Applications.

Regen Network:

Cosmos Community SDK Development Call 9/9:

Starname — IOV Name Service:

You can call us Starname: The IOV team announced that their project is now called Starname
IOV Token will be listed on Bilaxy on September 29th, 2020
Listing, the prelude of a token
Call to action for IOV Token holders who have missed the deadline to migrate their tokens
What do Polkadot, IOV, Kusama, Solana and Elastos have in common?

Bluzelle:

Bluzelle expands its reach by entering the Polkadot ecosystem:

Desmos Network:

Kava:

Kava Labs introduced Harvest — its cross-chain money market

Harvest enables users to earn more with their digital assets. They will be able to lend, borrow, and earn with assets like BTC, XRP, BNB, BUSD, KAVA. There will be a governance token HARD. 40% of the token supply will be used to incentivize users. 20% for KAVA stakers. 5% out of 200M HARD to be sold during IEO.

Harvest is the first of what will be many applications that utilize the Kava blockchain’s security, price feed module, and cross-chain functionality to provide open and decentralized financial services to the world.

Kava — The Next Chapter: This article will finally unveil the true vision for the Kava platform and share what it means for KAVA holders and our community in the months to come.

Terra:

Announcing TerraUSD (UST) — the Interchain Stablecoin
Terra Smart Contract Kickstart
Hex Trust partners with Terra to provide custody and staking services, enabling the integration of the Terra blockchain and staking services for the Luna token, within Hex Trust’s fully licenced custody platform, Hex Safe.
Introducing Nicolas Andreoulis — Core Researcher

Persistence One:

Persistence One, together with Cosmosis was hosting HackAtom Week.

The first webinar in the HackAtom Week was facilitated by Ethan Fray from CosmWasm.
They had Denis Fadeev, Director at Tendermint, to talk about Starport.
They was hosting Elizabeth Binks from ChainSafeth who took a hands-on session for Ethermint
Persistence CTO, Deepanshu Tripathi was live on HackAtom Week to demonstrate how to build DeFi dapp using CosmosSDK and Persistence SDK.

Band Protocol:

Band Protocol’s testnet upgrade from Wenchang to GuanYu was a success! Over 36+ validators participated and will continue to test the network before the public Mainnet launch of GuanYu.

Here’s how validators can join Testnet #3: BandChain GuanYu Testnet #3: Successful Upgrade, How to Join as a Validator

Loom Network:

Althea Network:

Building Infrastructure Collaboratively: Althea announced a partnership with Iqlusion and several Cosmos projects to form a new collaboration focused on the development of bridges, tools, and infrastructure for blockchain projects.

Contributing to Althea Peggy.

Agoric:

Agoric released Agoric Alpha, their smart contract platform. Developers can create and operate sophisticated dApps and DeFi markets.

Oasis Labs:

Oasis mainnet is fast approaching. This week the team shared the Oasis Genesis File, and provide a roadmap for mainnet release. Read about it here.

e-Money:

Cyber:

The Keplr extension for Cosmos-SDK chains by chainapsis supports Cyber. You can send & receive EUL and manage your staking provider with the extension

Over 650, 000 Cyberlinks from various resources like Wikipedia, Arxiv.org, etc have been submitted to the Cyber blockchain via IPFS by its users with Game of Links almost reaching 10% goal
Cybers takeoff round is still going: https://cyber.page/gol/takeoff with a little over 25 days left to the end.

Citizen Cosmos news:

New website launched
Blog launched
Plenty of new episodes, including Billy Rennekamp, Tendermint vs ICF and Tor Bair, privacy and secrets. Listen here
If anyone wishes to support the work of Citizen Cosmos, they are welcome to check out their Gitcoin grant page

Idena Network:

Kadena:

LikeCoin:

Sentinel:

The new Turing-3 SENT Cosmos-based testnet launched on the 21st of September.

THORChain:

BEPSwap Pool Ownership Issue and Fix
Weekly Dev Update #60: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 08–14 Sep 2020; Chaosnet Update, V13 client, Explorer Updates.
Weekly Dev Update #59: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 01–07 Sep 2020; Chaosnet Security Update.

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.

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