Cøsmos Network: IBC is here, Proposals 31 & 32 have passed, Interchain Conversation II was a blast, HackAtom V winners spotlights, The Secret Ethereum Bridge is live on mainnet, Oracle recognized in Gartner report, Oasis Labs and The BMW Group join forces, Terra introduces BuzLink, Kadena partners with Celo, and more!

Published in

Paradigm

14 min readDec 16, 2020

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 37, 2nd December — 16th December

Hello Space Cowboys and Astronaut Girls! The past two weeks have brought a number of essential news for you!
After extensive work, the release candidate for the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC), the mechanism for interoperability between heterogeneous chains, which forms the connective substrate for the Cosmos Network, is here! As the internal code audit conducted jointly by Interchain GmBH and Informal Systems has been finalized, IBC is now ready-to-go for the upcoming ecosystem-wide Cosmos Stargate upgrade!
What’s more, Proposal 31 ‘ Governance Split Votes’ and Proposal 32 ‘Funding for Development of Governance Split Votes’ have successfully passed.
Interchain Conversation II took place on December 12th-13th with over 1500 participants, 53 speakers and 47 sessions diving into Cosmos current development and what lies ahead! Find the links to recordings below.
As you know, HackAtom V, Cosmos first exclusively virtual hackathon event of its kind, was a major success and had a large range of project submissions, and five winning categories. These weeks, the team published a blog post, in which they showcase the top winners of each category, describe each project, and highlight the projects’ next steps.
On top of that, ChainSafe released v0.4.0 of Ethermint which includes: pending state queries, invariant checks for account balance and nonce, customizable EIP support, and various bug fixes from the public testnet.
As for the Cosmos ecosystem updates: The eighth edition of the Interchain Foundation’s biweekly update is here. The Secret Ethereum Bridge is now live on mainnet, bringing programmable privacy to ETH and ERC-20s. In addition, up to 2 million SCRT are expected to be available to support bridge mining and the launch of Secret DeFi / Secret AMM over the coming weeks. Oracle named a leader in 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems and placed furthest in vision. Bluzelle launches the second iteration of its Swarm of Duty testnet. The Oasis team announced that they’ve launched an early-stage project with BMW Group to build the next generation of data privacy technology in the automotive industry. Powered by smart contracts on Columbus-4 mainnet on Terra, BuzLink is a new blockchain viral marketing tool to scale social referrals. HBTC Chain & Ti-Labs established a strategic partnership to jointly facilitate the Cosmos ecosystem. IOV launched a new trading platform for the Starname IOV token: Uniswap. Kava is Listing on the Solstice The third Persistence StakeDrop campaign on Terra (LUNA) will be launched on December 19th. Mirror Protocol integrates Band Protocol oracles. Band Protocol becomes first blockchain project to join OpenAPI initiative alongside IBM, Ebay. The Peggy module was upgraded to Stargate. The Agoric testnet is now on Stargate-rc4 with faster block production times. Bytom Foundation has completed the Seventh coin burn in 2020. The results of Cyber’s take-off round are here. Kadena partners with Celo. The partnership will allow Celo’s cUSD stablecoin and Kadena’s KDA token to interoperate across both networks via a trustless bridge relay. Sentinel Exidio and Mysterium Network have come together to launch the dVPN alliance, and they invite other networking security focused projects to join the initiative. And much more!
Cosmonauts, who wants some ATOMS? ATOMS as prize money offered by the Tendermint for the first 50 Cosmonauts that help in getting cosmos on StackExchange. Follow the step-by-step tutorial below and don’t forget to claim your prize!
That’s all for today! See you on the other side of IBC!

Development

Github metrics:

Announcing the IBC 1.0 implementation release candidate:

Since the last IBC update earlier this year, the IBC team at Interchain GmbH has been hard at work finalising the 1.0 specification-compliant implementation in the Cosmos SDK. Working in close collaboration with their friends and colleagues at Informal Systems, Agoric, Akash, Iqlusion, Chorus One, Tendermint, and more, they’ve managed to squeeze in a few last-minute features, pinpoint and fix several bugs, add extensive unit tests, and document the codebase comprehensively. About a month ago, the team finished the 1.0 implementation milestone. Since then, they’ve been engaged in an intensive internal code audit conducted jointly with Informal Systems, and just a few days ago they finalised and merged the last of the audit fixes, meaning that IBC is now ready-to-go for the upcoming ecosystem-wide Stargate upgrade.

This blog post enumerates the most significant protocol and implementation changes in the past few months, describes the expected two-phase Stargate IBC rollout, and lastly outlines how you can get involved.

Read more >>>

Coming next:

Finalization of the Cosmos Hub testnet
Cosmos Hub’s upgrade proposal and upgrade
Proposal to activate cross-chain transfers

Tendermint

ChainSafe released v0.4.0 of Ethermint with:

- Pending State queries

- Invariant checks for account balance and nonce

- Customizable EIP support

- Various bug fixes from the public testnet

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

Proposals 31 and 32 successfully passed:

Proposal 31 — Governance Split Votes

In the Cosmos Hub governance system, each address can only cast a vote for one option (Yes/No/Abstain/NoWithVeto) which uses their full voting power behind that choice.

This proposal proposes an upgrade to the Cosmos Hub governance module that would allow a staker to optionally split their votes into several voting options. For example, a single address could use 70% of its voting power to vote Yes and 30% of its voting power to vote No. Clients may opt into supporting this feature, as the existing UX of voting for a single option is preserved.

This is beneficial because oftentimes the entity owning that address might not be a single individual. For example, a company or organization that owns an address might have different stakeholders who want to vote differently, and so it makes sense to allow them to split their voting power.

Another example use case is exchanges and custodians. Many custodians and exchanges custody multiple customers’ ATOMs in the same address and use this address to stake on behalf of them. However, because of this, it makes it infeasible to do ‘passthrough voting’ and give their customers voting rights over their tokens, if different customers have different voting preferences. With this new proposal, custodians can use split votes to accurately reflect the preferences of their customers in on-chain governance.

Proposal 32 — Funding for ‘Development of Governance Split Votes’

Sikka is requesting 1776 ATOMs from the community pool to architect and implement the Governance Split Votes feature proposed in Cosmos Hub Proposal #31.

Awareness and social encounters

Interchain Conversation II

Annual Cosmos Interchain Conversations II summit (co-organized with Dystopia Labs), takook place on December 12th & 13th.

Check out the recordings via the link below:

HackAtom V Winners Spotlights

HackAtom V, Cosmos first exclusively virtual hackathon event of its kind, was a major success and had a large range of project submissions. Over 340 teams registered in the two week hackathon and entries included projects like Balancer-like pools, API Tools, games, supply management, and NFT Marketplaces. The team highlights some of the best entries.

HackAtom V had five winning categories. In this blog post, they showcase the top winners of each category, describe each project, and highlight the projects’ next steps. In total, the winners received close to $50,000 USD in prizes distributed by Interchain Foundation.

Code With Us

Code With Us Workshop — Saving Private Data: How to Build More Secure dApps with Secret Network

Beginning -18:00 — Introduction to Secret Network

19:00 –38:20 — Code deep-dive (basics)

38:30 –1:11:00 — Secret Voting contract development

1:11:00 — end — Front-end integration to the secret voting contract

Secret Network is the first blockchain with privacy-preserving smart contracts, powered by an encrypted flavor of CosmWasm.

Other

Interchain NFT + Metadata Working Group Call #6 2020.12.10

The state of Interchain NFTs + Metadata at the end of 2020

Interchain Foundation

ICF Update — Dec 15th

ChainSafe Conference Highlights;Cosmos Conversations Highlights; Trust Graphic Novel; Cosmos Quicksync from Chainlayer; Bianjie Agreement for Enterprise Compliant SDK; CosmosCash Research Paper; Althea Peggy Public Standup; WalletConnect Spec and Presentation; Map Of Zones Updates; Cosmos Rust Meeting; cdot and Substrate IBC; cdot and Substrate IBC; Gaia team lead Shahan Khatchadourian;

The eighth 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 previous updates, check it out at ICF Update — Dec 1st ICF Update — Nov 17th ICF Update — Nov 3rd ICF Update — Oct 20th ICF Update — Oct 6th, ICF Update — Sept 7, ICF Update — Sept 22.

Finance

Cosmos on StackExchange:

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Cosmos Roadmap:

98% complete

Milestones:

View on GitHub →

Status updates:

Ecosystem updates

Akash Network:

Oracle:

Oracle Cloud Manages COVID-19 Vaccination Program in the United States
San Francisco State University Moves Financial Planning to Oracle Cloud: San Francisco State University implements Oracle Cloud EPM to increase agility, improve insights and enhance business decision-making.
What’s another word for volunteering? How about: bescrappy: In this corporate citizenship blog series, Oracle asks nonprofit organizations to make up words that describe what Oracle Volunteers’ contributions mean to them.
Oracle Recognized in Recently Released Gartner Reports: Oracle named a Leader in 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems and placed furthest in vision.
Oracle Again Named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Point-of-Sale Applications Quick-Service/Fast Casual Restaurants Sector 2020–2021 Vendor Assessment: New innovations in POS platform and omnichannel roadmap are well positioned to help customers grow and navigate market challenges and opportunities.
Oracle Announces Fiscal 2021 Second Quarter Financial Results: Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) today announced fiscal 2021 Q2 results. Total quarterly revenues were up 2% year-over-year to $9.8 billion.
Oracle Fuels Contactless Dining Experiences for Outback Steakhouse Australia

IRIS Network:

Regen Network:

Starname:

Secret Network:

The Secret Ethereum Bridge is LIVE on Mainnet: Users can now get programmable privacy for their ETH and select ERC-20s. Plus: up to 2 million SCRT are expected to be available to support bridge mining and the launch of Secret DeFi.
More ERC-20 support on the Secret Ethereum Bridge: WBTC and USDT
ERC20 support on the Secret Ethereum Bridge: YFI and UNI, KNC and COMP, DAI and MKR
Since Dec 14th, holders can use the Secret Network Bridge to bring privacy to their LINK and AAVE and interact with Secret DeFi.

Bluzelle:

Swarm of Duty II — Scaling Storage Capacity: Bluzelle launches the second iteration of its Swarm of Duty testnet.
Swingby Partners with Bluzelle For Price Oracle Services on Skybridge

Kava:

Terra:

Introducing BuzLink: Scaling Social Referrals: Powered by smart contracts on Columbus-4 mainnet on Terra, BuzLink is a blockchain viral marketing tool to scale social referrals. Capitalizing on the lack of transparency and one-sided nature of existing referral programs, BuzLink takes social referrals to a new level by enabling all users who share a product link benefit when a user buys the product. Awards are distributed to each user in Terra stablecoin rewards according to their degree of relationship to the buyer. As value accrues for each user in the process, BuzLink creates an in-built system of transparency and trust by visualizing the flow of referrals each step of the way using blockchain technology’s immutable tracking capabilities.
November 2020 Community Update

Persistence:

Community Newsletter #2 — November 2020
Terra (LUNA) StakeDrop Begins December 19th: After the successful completion of our Cosmos and Kava StakeDrop campaigns, the third StakeDrop campaign on Terra (LUNA) will be launched on December 19th.

Band Protocol:

Bytom:

Althea Network:

The development of the Peggy Cosmos<->Ethereum bridge:

-The Peggy module was upgraded to Stargate

-New testnet is coming

Althea Network is growing!

Agoric:

The Agoric testnet is now on Stargate-rc4 with faster block production times. Try it out at: https://agoric.com/testnet
Meet the Coders Who Hacked The Orb: Agoric and Chainlink announce winners of the DeFi hackathon

Oasis:

Driving Innovation with Differential Privacy: The Oasis team announced that they’ve launched an early-stage project with BMW Group to build the next generation of data privacy technology in the automotive industry.

Cyber:

The results of Cyber’s take-off round are in.

Citizen Cosmos news:

Idena Network:

Idena Proof-of-person blockchain to eliminate risks of mining pools

Kadena:

Kadena Building DeFi Bridge to Celo and Joining Alliance for Prosperity, also Announcing Bounty Program for Kadenaswap DEX: The partnership will allow Celo’s cUSD stablecoin and Kadena’s KDA token to interoperate across both networks via a trustless bridge relay.

BitSong:

LikeCoin:

Sentinel:

Sentinel Exidio and Mysterium Network have come together to launch the dVPN alliance, and they invite other networking security focused projects to join the initiative.

THORChain:

KIRA Network:

Introducing Phase One of the KIRA Liquidity Reward Program

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.

MISC

Cosmos and Blockstack hackathons offer glimpse into DeFi’s future in Cointelegraph.

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