Cøsmos Network: Proposal#23 passed, A statement from the ICF on recent events, Tendermint 2020 Roadmap, Binance.US to launch staking rewards for ATOM, Virgo joins INATBA, Band Protocol launches a new mainnet built with the Cosmos SDK
Biweekly update 28th January — 11th February
Welcome, Astronauts, to the Cøsmos biweekly! It’s time to check out the ecosystem events, progress of existing projects and community conversations!
Last week, proposal #23 by Gavin Birch of Figment Networks for the first spend from the community pool passed and Figment is now committed to these deliverables. Read the details on the progress of the Cosmos Governance Working Group and first month updates below.
The Tendermint Core team was sharing a roadmap for 2020. What follows is a list of objectives for the year, organized around four high-level goals. Check out the blog post which describes how they plan to tackle pieces of each of these goals concurrently in our report. Yesterday, Gaia v2.0.6 released with Cosmos SDK new version v0.37.7 which includes some minor event fixes. If you are building a dedicated network beyond Ethereum but still want to utilize the EVM, an easy way to do so is to use the Cosmos SDK and the Ethermint Module built by ChainSafe. Join their workshop tomorrow at Ethereum Denver to learn how.
On February 3rd, 2020 statements were made on Twitter about Jae Kwon in his role as CEO of All In Bits (dba Tendermint Inc). According to the latest post from the Interchain Foundation, “while it is widely recognized that Jae is a brilliant technical product visionary who co-founded the Cosmos project with Ethan Buchman in 2016, assertions were made that Jae has become an obstacle and distraction to the Cosmos engineering effort at All in Bits. Jae and Ethan currently serve as President and Vice-President of the Interchain Foundation, respectively… The Cosmos Network belongs to everyone now; it is not owned, controlled, or operated by any single party. The Interchain Foundation will continue to support this decentralized and resilient community according to its mandate”. Read the full statement and an update from Jae in our report.
Cosmos ecosystem is moving. Since the beginning of the February a lot has happened! Virgo, joined the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA). Akash Network has been hinting at a lot of upcoming beta testing for feedback for their supermini. Testnet is coming. Read the the paper the team published last week, in which they presented an evolution of the Network token economics. Check out Althea Development Update #81 covering phone client Beta 0 and the many fixes of router Beta 11. Althea routers have arrived on site for their new network in Ghana. Moreover, Deborah Simpier is Althea’s new CEO! BitSong launched their testnet at the end of January. They have an explorer so you can check out for stats. At the end of the month, e-Money launched their final testnet. They’ve got validators, a DEX, and a currency-backed fee system. The project will be conducting the token presale one month from now. Check out Forbole’s weekly update about Coronavirus, Cosmos, Mooncake. They are also welcoming new team members and hiring software engineers. Hashgard hasn’t updated social or submitted any GitHub repos these weeks. IOV has rolled out a really excellent UX for their starname service. IRISnet always has a ton going on: Irishub-sdk-js frame and several modules development are completed; Irishub Service invocation will be refactored; Rainbow 2.9.1 is under design, development, and test. Recently IRISnet community volunteers have written two reports, developed staking rewards calculator, made three Rainbow wallet tutorials. Terra validators Kytzu and Syncnode has launched a new iOS wallet for Terra, Cosmos, Kava, Iris and more. Kava testnet launched successfully on February 6th. Russian AMA is coming later today. Don’t miss it! CoinPM interview with Brian Kerr, Co-Founder and CEO of Kava is now live! Tune in to find out more about their mainnet and CDP module, why they chose to build their platform on Cosmos and more! Read why LikeCoin moved from Ethereum to Cosmos SDK in their latest blog post. And don’t forget to check out their weekly progress update. Basechain now has more than 425M+ LOOM tokens staked and more than 70,913+ wallets in use! Additionally, in January of this year, Binance added LOOM to their staking program “with stakes as long as 1 year… suggesting long-term belief and support of the project.” Stake your LOOM and enjoy compound rewards! Cosmos India successfully completed its first ever meetup held in Bangalore. Commercio Network took part in FeeOnlySummit. CosmWasm by Ethan Frey, new js-CLI demo video is now out. Cyber created a folder for its community to take part in the governance of Cosmos. Regen Network has big plans for their 2020 Testnet Roadmap. They will be running three successive incentivized testnets. In the latest episode of Planetary Regeneration Podcast, Gregory Landua interviewed John Henry Clippinger, co-founder of the Token Commons and Swytch.io, member of the MIT Media Lab, and author of several wonderful books. Sentinel’s new, user-friendly website is now live at sentinel.co. Learn about Coordinated Key-signing, the THORChain team’s efforts to realise a highly-reliable protocol, in their Weekly Dev Update. Yesterday, for the first time ever the amount of stakers on RuneVault has exceeded 900! The amount of stakers is currently at 902 stakers, with a total of 113,6 million RUNE being staked. Moreover, Asgard Wallet was published internally, pending feedback, it will be live for public soon. Agoric Validator Guide is out. Chai sits at 1,18 million active accounts today. Coinone, one of the largest exchanges in Korea has launched a validator on the Terra network. Governance proposal to temporarily freeze Terra’s on-chain tx fees for 12 weeks until the chain has had sufficient time to gather economic data has passed with more than 99% of the vote. Band Protocol, an oracle solution, launcheв a new mainnet built with the Cosmos SDK. FOAM developed a Haskell implementation of the ABCI server and SDK. Good news is, the community continues to grow, mature and expand driven by the collaborative efforts of its contributors. Aurel, CEO of Dokia Capital, puts up 10K DAI bounty for creating a MVP Zcash Foundation Zone on Cosmos. And more to follow!
In last week’s episode, the Zero Knowledge podcast hosts catch up with Christopher Goes, IBC Lead at Tendermint. They learn a bit more about the Cosmos Network ecosystem and his work on IBC. Video from online Trust-Less 2020 Conference featuring Sunny Aggarwal, researcher at Tendermint and founder of Sikka, is now out. For last week’s episode of Chorus One podcast the team had Gavin Birch on to discuss the Cosmos Governance Working Group proposal. They talk about his experience with Cosmos governance, goals of the working group, as well as deliverables of the proposal itself. They also catch up Christopher Goes from Tendermint to chat about zkps in the context of interoperability.
These weeks, The Proof of Stake Alliance (POSA) was formed to promote the greater education of Proof of Stake technology through collaboration and dialogue among stakeholders. Coinbase Custody joins Cosmos validator active set and POS Alliance along Interchain, Kava and others. Binance adds Cosmos perpetual contracts with up to 50x leverage. According to the most recent announcement, Binance.US users would now be receiving staking rewards for ATOM starting next month. Cosmos staking now live for institutional investors on Anchorage.
That’s a wrap! See you in two weeks with more exciting Cosmos updates!
“Using the Cosmos Stack, you could enable governance in terms of putting issues such as the issuance and scarcity of assets into the hands of your community… Participating and being part of such governance is a very potent form of engagement. I haven’t seen too many products doing it.”
Zaki Manian, Tendermint Labs
Development
Github metrics:
Cosmos Governance Working Group: Month 1 Update
by members of the Cosmos community
Quick takes
- Prop23 passed, and Figment is now committed to these deliverables (which are additional to our prior involvement)
- Prop23 has provided us with some voting data to learn from
- Lowering the voting barriers: subkeys + wallet/exchange voting functionality
- GWG Month 1 community call (20 people) and the GWG charter
- Participation in the Cosmos GWG exceeds Month 1 targets
- The Cosmos ‘Parameter Change Wiki’ has been initiated
- The Cosmos ‘Community Spend Best Practices’ doc has been initiated
- Community discussions happening
Gaia v2.0.6 release
Cosmos SDK version bumped to v0.37.7 which includes some minor event fixes.
CosmWasm for multi-chain smart contracts
Get started now writing smart contracts in RUST and easily add CosmWasm smart contracting support on a Cosmos chain, without adjusting existing logic. CosmWasm is under active development and will benefit from updates like the Cosmos SDK and IBC. Check out the introductory blog post and join the Telegram group. If you want to go more in-depth, watch the tutorial videos:
CosmWasm: editing Smart Contracts: Part one | Part two
CosmWasm by Ethan Frey, new js-CLI demo
Awareness and social encounters
Zkps & interoperability: IBC context with Chris Goes
In last week’s episode, the Zero Knowledge hosts catch up with Christopher Goes, IBC Lead at Tendermint. They learn a bit more about the Cosmos Network ecosystem and his work on IBC. They then focus in on how he is thinking about zero knowledge proofs in the context of IBC like-interoperability constructions. They explore some of the ways in which zkps could be incorporated into different schemes for interoperability — including bridging, lightclient constructions, validity proofs and more.
The following episodes on Cosmos:
Democratizing Staking So That Anyone (Not Just Institutions) Can Participate | Trust-Less 2020
With Konstantin Richter (CEO of BlockDaemon), Sunny Aggarwal (Researcher at Tendermint, Founder of Sikka), and Chris Remus (Founder of Chainflow)
Sustainability of the Cosmos Network: A Statement from the Interchain Foundation:
On February 3rd, 2020 statements were made on Twitter about Jae Kwon in his role as CEO of All In Bits (dba Tendermint Inc).
While it is widely recognized that Jae is a brilliant technical product visionary who co-founded the Cosmos project with Ethan Buchman in 2016, assertions were made that Jae has become an obstacle and distraction to the Cosmos engineering effort at All in Bits. Jae and Ethan currently serve as President and Vice-President of the Interchain Foundation, respectively.
All in Bits (“AIB”) has been contracted by the Interchain Foundation (“ICF”) since 2017 to build the software necessary to launch the Cosmos Network. All In Bits was crucial in bringing both the software and the Cosmos community to life, and the launch of the network would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the team members at AIB.
Since the network launch in March 2019, the Cosmos community has continued to grow, mature, and expand. We’ve seen entities like Agoric, Regen and others become core contributors to the Cosmos engineering effort, while Figment, Chorus One and others have taken on leadership roles in governance and community coordination. We applaud these efforts and continue to be amazed at the incredible commitment and talent of the Cosmos community. For many of the core engineers at AIB, Cosmos is a mission more than a place to work. Their passion for the project and its values has allowed them to push forward with development despite uncertainty about AIB’s governance. Their dedication and resilience is inspiring.
The number one priority of the Interchain Foundation is to ensure the long term stability, security, and growth of the Cosmos Network, which includes the stability and security of Cosmos’ most valuable assets: its contributors. The ICF is committed to ensuring all major Cosmos contributors at AIB have a supportive place to continue their work, to grow, take risks, experiment, falter, and ultimately succeed.
Operations at the ICF will not be impacted by these recent events. Multiple people are involved in decision making and financial management at the ICF. Effective controls are in place so that no individual can act unilaterally. The ICF will continue to operate its funding program, manage its treasury, and conduct business as usual. The funding program has deployed funds to over 50 projects and is continuing to see high impact results. We expect the program to continue its operations for years to come, and we are planning some improvements to incorporate more community involvement in funding decisions. We also have some exciting developments with respect to a significant expansion of the Cosmos R&D effort, to be announced soon.
The Cosmos Network belongs to everyone now; it is not owned, controlled, or operated by any single party. The Interchain Foundation will continue to support this decentralized and resilient community according to its mandate. We are committed to the sustainability of the Cosmos ecosystem and are excited by the leadership roles so many community members have taken on, as well as the outstanding R&D efforts we’ve seen to date.
We are monitoring the situation with AIB closely, and will provide updates on any changes or actions as things progress, though we expect this to be a short term distraction from the very bright future ahead for Cosmos in 2020.
An update from Jae Kwon:
Is Jae “stepping down from Cosmos”?
No, that’s FUD, and probably intentional misrepresentation, or perhaps a mistake in translation.
Jae & CEO role of Tendermint Inc.
The goal is to eliminate the role of the CEO for Tendermint Inc, so it isn’t correct to say that Jae is “stepping down”. Rather, the role is being eliminated to decentralize Tendermint Inc. and implement checks and balances from within.
Tendermint Inc. organizational structure today comprises a sole decision factor, which is Jae Kwon, in his role of company’s CEO. Jae and company has decided that moving forward the company will adopt a more decentralized corporate “Process” that is being developed along with the Virgo project.
Jae will continue to serve as a member of the ICF foundation council.
Virgo &/vs Cosmos
They are complementary. Virgo uses the Cosmos stack, and will bring more users to Cosmos.
Cosmos’s mission is to create decentralized technology to power the new token economy. Virgo’s mission is to decentralize our financial, social, and org-tech systems from open software to open hardware. Cosmos fulfills a significant portion of Virgo’s mission, and Virgo in turn can help Cosmos stay true to its mission to provide the world with the best viable alternative open financial infrastructure, while bringing new users to the Cosmos ecosystem. Virgo is part of an experimental project bootstrapped by the ICF, headed by Jae Kwon, and executed with the support of AIB.
Upcoming events:
February 12th, 2020: EthDenver
Ethereum is moving towards a sharded Blockchain architecture, which is a bit like a Local Area Network (LAN) of Blockchains. Everyone loves a good LAN party but sometimes you need to access remote systems. In terms of traditional computers this activity manifests as “The Internet” which utilizes TCP/IP as a communication protocol between remote machines. On a network of Blockchains you need IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) which manifeste as “The Interchain”. IBC enables a massive variety of networks to co-exist, each with their own features and purpose, communicating with a trustless protocol. Ethereum is obviously a massive part of this Interchain and aspects of its architecture will show up in many different places in many different ways.
One of the ways Ethereum will show up across the Interchain is with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This is a time tested secure execution environment with properties that make it ideal for smart contracts. If you are building a network outside of Ethereum and you want to utilize the EVM, one easy way to do so is to use the Cosmos SDK and the included Ethermint Module being developed by ChainSafe. Aragon has recently decided to run their own network that utilizes this architecture in order to make protocol level decisions for their users. This enables them to modify gas costs, increase throughput and design their own token economics from the ground up.
If you are interested in learning about building application-specific and interconnected Blockchains before EthDenver, join the workshop on Wednesday, February 12th during BUIDL Week. This session will be a hands on instructional course that uses the Cosmos SDK to build an NFT Blockchain. The team will also go over the process of deploying your own EVM Blockchain that you can interact with via Metamask and utilizing all your favorite Ethereum developer tools. The workshop will be taught by Billy Rennekamp, founder of Clovers Network and developer relations engineer at Tendermint, Inc.
Connect with Cosmos on the forum to learn more!
Finance
The Interchain Foundation (ICF) raised $17 million in April 2017 to shepherd the development of the Cosmos network.
“To date, we still have over 1,400 BTC, over 50,000 ETH and just over 20 million ATOMs in the treasury,” ICF director Arianne Flemming says.
At today’s prices, that’s worth over $104 million. And that’s even after the nonprofit deployed $25 million in capital to fund over 50 projects.
Cosmos validators
Information from Mintscan.io:
Cosmos Markets
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Information from Coinlib.io:
These weeks, The Proof of Stake Alliance (POSA) was formed to promote the greater education of Proof of Stake technology through collaboration and dialogue among stakeholders. Coinbase Custody joins Cosmos validator active set and POS Alliance along Interchain, Kava and others.
Binance adds Cosmos perpetual contracts with up to 50x Leverage.
Binance.US continues to add to the Arsenal as it introduces Staking Rewards for ATOM. According to the most recent announcement, Binance.US users would now be receiving staking rewards for COSMOS (ATOM) starting next month.
Figment is building an open system for staking rewards reporting that will generate income reports for every account on Cosmos Hub 1, 2, & 3. End of Q1 2020:
[GWG] Should a validator’s vote count if removed from the active set?: Should votes count on validators outside of active validator set? Discussions ongoing by Gavin Birch.
Anchorage is the First Institutional Custodian to Support Cosmos ATOM. Custody and trading now live, staking coming soon.
ATOM listed on Go CryptoMarket.
ATOM at Swapzoneio soon!
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
The team would like to speed up Tendermint’s development process, and as part of that, they’d like to increase the number of people who can meaningfully contribute to Tendermint Core. This is a two-fold process: First, they plan to increase the number of potential contributors; and second, they need to make it as easy as possible for these engineers to contribute by lowering the “cost of entry” to the project.
Tendermint Core is an ambitious codebase. It can be a challenging one as well, combining a novel security model with aggressive requirements around throughput and performance. Additionally, Tendermint Core has accumulated some technical debt as it nears its sixth (!) birthday.
Increase the number of contributors
This is largely a hiring problem. The team had two new engineers join the team in January, and they’ll continue to hire throughout the year.
Lower the “cost of entry” to the project
In order to make Tendermint Core as friendly as possible, the team plans to refactor and simplify a number of components. They also intend to produce on-boarding documentation which will help new hires and community contributors understand the architecture and design of Tendermint Core more quickly.
The candidates for refactoring will all first need to be assessed: Does this component meet the needs from a testability perspective? From a performance perspective? From a legibility and maintainability perspective? If the answer to any of these questions is no, what would a better design look like?
Once a candidate component has been fully assessed — a process that may take a few weeks of developer time — the spec and implementation work can be more precisely mapped out. Until then, the implementation plans themselves are TODOs.
The following components are candidates for refactoring:
- Consensus Reactor
- P2P Module
- RPC Module
- Evidence Module
For details on the phases of these refactors, along with their current status, please see tracking issue tendermint/4630.
In addition to increasing the clarity and legibility of these modules and reactors, these refactors should increase their testability and modularity. One proposal is to ensure that all reactors adhere to a well-defined, per-reactor interface, in order to increase modularity and allow users to use their own implementations.
Goal 2: Ship features and fixes which help Tendermint Core retain its market-leading position
Tendermint has been a pioneer in the BFT consensus space. However, in the face of increasing competition, the team needs to prioritize the features and fixes which will help them maintain their market-leading position, and which will enable the Cosmos Network to fulfill its full vision:
These features, fixes and improvements include:
- Light Client (necessary for IBC)
- Fork Accountability Fixes
- State Sync (synchronizing application state without replaying every transaction)
- Evidence Handling (implicating “lunatic validators”)
- “Pipelining” the Tendermint Algorithm
- Adding DeliverBlock to ABCI
Goal 3: Improve the developer- and user-experience for projects that use Tendermint Core
Tendermint has a healthy number of users, including validators and in-house “users” working on Cosmos. The team is lucky to have their feedback, and they are prioritizing a handful of features which will improve their user experience.
These features include:
- Amino/proto3 Compatibility
- Mempool Improvements
- Tendermint “Modes”
Goal 4: Expand and curate the number of technologies that can be integrated with Tendermint Core
Finally, the team would like to thoughtfully expand and curate the number of technologies — largely regarding cryptography and databases — which can be integrated with Tendermint Core. This will broaden the potential use cases and user base for Tendermint Core. However, it will also increase the maintenance burden, so they should be thoughtful about which technologies they incorporate. The team may also want to audit their integrations and deprecate anything that is unused (or insufficiently used).
Candidates for inclusion include expanding cryptography choices:
- Abstract the choice of hash function used in consensus, so that users/operators can choose their own function (faster light clients are possible with BLAKE or algebraic hash functions)
- Introduce signature aggregation for block/vote signing (perhaps BLS)
- Allow people to use their own curves (i.e., expand beyond ed25519)
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 »
Ecosystem
Akash Network:
Akash has been hinting at a lot of upcoming beta testing for feedback for their supermini. Testnet is coming.
An Evolution of Akash Network Token Economics: Last fall, the team released their Akash Network Token Economic Model, a system that leverages Akash Token (AKT), a native currency, to solve for volatility while ensuring economic security of our public blockchain. In the paper, they presented various strategies to mitigate inherent adoption challenges that face an early market economy — lack of sufficient demand from the tenants (consumers of computing), which in turn hurts demand because of lack of supply. Read more>>>
Closer to the Future of the Cloud in 2020.
Althea:
Althea reconfigured their client to also act as a phone client. If you’re going to have distributed localized ISPs, phone is kind of an essential service, especially in more remote areas. They also updated their routers to handle the updated multicollateral DAI stablecoin.
Check out Althea Development Update #81: Phone client Beta 0 and the many fixes of router Beta 11.
Also, Deborah Simpier is Althea’s new CEO!
Althea routers have arrived on site for their new network in Ghana. Althea is now live in T’adi, Ghana.
Moreover, Althea Network new network in Denver Colorado!
BitSong:
BitSong launched their testnet at the end of January. They have an explorer you can check out for stats.
e-Money:
At the end of the month, e-Money launched their 5th (and final) testnet. They’ve got validators, a DEX, and a currency-backed fee system.
Heads up e-Money will be conducting their Token Presale one month from now. They will shortly be sending out an email containing information about the sale. To stay in the loop, please sign up for updates at https://e-money.com/presale.html!
Forbole:
Weekly Update: Coronavirus, Cosmos, Mooncake.
Forbole hiring software engineers.
Hashgard:
The project hasn’t updated social or submitted any GitHub repos these weeks.
IOV:
IOV has rolled out a really excellent UX for their starname service.
IRISnet:
IRISnet Biweekly Report(2020.1.27–2.9):
- Irishub-sdk-js frame and several modules development are completed;
- Irishub Service invocation will be refactored;
- Rainbow 2.9.1 is under design, development, and test;
- IRISnet issued statements for Cosmos ;
- Lantern Festival Hongbao (red packet) Activity is held;
- Thanks to community volunteers and validators. Recently they have written 2 reports, developed 1 staking rewards calculator, made 3 Rainbow wallet tutorials and released 1 iOS wallet supporting IRISnet mainnet & testnet.
Irishub Software:
- Irishub-sdk-js frame building is completed;
- Key Management, Bank, Staking, Gov, Slashing, Tx modules development is completed；
- Service invocation will be refactored:
— Protobuf will be replaced with JSON Schamel;
— Multiple service requests will be supported.
Rainbow Wallet:
- Rainbow 2.9.1 is under design, development, and test:
— Known problems will be fixed;
— The red packet function will be improved and the user journey will be adjusted.
IRISnet Issued Statements for Cosmos:
As Cosmos/Tendermint’s strategic partner of operation and technology development in China, IRISnet issued a statement on Twitter around the recent disputes in Cosmos:
IRISnet founder Harriet also issued the following statement：
Lantern Festival Hongbao Activity:
Lantern Festival is a traditional Chinese festival that celebrates family reunions. Traditionally, folks guess lantern riddles on that day. In the Chineses community, IRISnet has brought you interesting lantern riddle guessing activities, and you can get a Hongbao reward for each right answer. In addition, IRISnet also sends Hongbao to overseas community members through Twitter and Telegram.
iOS Wallet Supporting IRISnet Mainnet & Testnet by SyncNode & Kytzu:
IRISnet validator SyncNode & Kytzu Released the iOS Wallet Supporting IRISnet mainnet & testnet. The wallet name is SyncNode. Besides IRISnet, it also supports Cosmos, KAVA, Terra mainnets, and many more testnets.
Staking Tutorial of Rainbow by IRISnet Volunteer Jack & Validator Everstake:
IRISnet Volunteer Jack & Validator Everstake made the Rainbow staking tutorial separately. IRISnet volunteer Jack has made a staking tutorial video of the Rainbow Wallet both in Chinese version and English version. And Everstake has written an article to walk you through all steps required to stake IRIS via Rainbow.
Kava:
Beware — Crypto is in Public Stock Markets.
Kava Labs CEO Brian Kerr brings DeFi to Davos 2020. With Shaka Rasheed, General Manager — Capital Markets, Microsoft, led large financial services to the cloud. Oversees blockchain as well.
LikeCoin:
From Ethereum to Cosmos SDK. Why LikeCoin moved to Cosmos? Here is why.
LikeCoin Weekly Progress Update 2020.02.03.
Loom Network:
Basechain now has more than 425M+ LOOM tokens staked and more than 70,913+ wallets in use!
Stake your LOOM and enjoy compound rewards: https://wallet.loomx.io
In January of this year, Binance added LOOM to their staking program “with stakes as long as 1 year… suggesting long-term belief and support of the project.” Check out this January 2020 Markets Overview from Binance Research.
Regen Network:
Book Review: “The Carbon Farming Solution”. The definitive text on regenerative agriculture, by Eric Toensmeier.
Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 2: John Henry Clippinger: This blog is a transcription of the second episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
Sentinel:
Sentinel’s new, user-friendly website is now live at sentinel.co. 2020 marks the beginning of the transition of Sentinel’s service offerings into the mainstream. Clear and straightforward brand identity.
Terra:
January 2020 Community Update:
1. Chai
- Chai sits at 1.18 million active accounts today, and Terra passed the 1M mark on Jan 14th.
- Dapp.com has recently started to track CHAI in its catalog, and it is already one of the top dApps in its radar.
- Dapp.com has also tapped Terra as one of the “9 blockchains we will pay the most attention to in 2020”:
- The team launched the fist offline payments integration with CU on Jan 2nd, and this has lead to a stepwise increase in brand recognition and awareness. CU is the most ubiquitous convenience store in Korea with more than 14,000 stores nationwide, and they’ve put up CHAI related posters on every store. Korean consumers are literally exposed to CHAI on every street corner.
2. Infrastructure
- Coinone, one of the largest exchanges in Korea has launched a validator on the Terra network (one node) and opened staking services with 24 hour withdrawals directly from the exchange. Onenode already has 3 million LUNA staked, and the number is increasing rapidly.
- Terra validators Kytzu and Syncnode has launched a new iOS wallet for Terra, Cosmos, Kava, Iris and more.
- TerraSDR (SDT) and Luna have been integrated with Moonpay.io. It is now possible to buy both assets using credit / debit cards from third party wallets and at buy.moonpay.io.
- B-Harvest, one of Terra’s genesis validators has launched a 0-commission validator, and has since then amassed voting power of almost 30 million LUNA. This is significant because it is the first instance of a community-grown validator without a sizable stake acquired in the pre-sale to break into the top-3 rank. Getting more decentralized every day!
- Stakingrewards.com integrated LUNA staking information.
- DelphiDigital published a research report on “elastic supply” stable coins, comparing Ampleforth, Terra and Celo.
3. Others
- Do Kwon spoke with Brian Crain from Chorus One about Terra’s recent 1M user milestone, and what their plans are to get to the next 10 million.
- Governance proposal 4, a proposal to temporarily freeze Terra’s on-chain tx fees for 12 weeks until the chain has had sufficient time to gather economic data has passed with more than 99% of the vote. Details are here:
THORChain:
Weekly Dev Update #29: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 03–10 Feb 2020. The team is deep in real-world testing and optimisations. There are some issues with reliability so the team has taken the initiative to re-think how some parts of the protocol can be simplified. Work from this will add to the timeline but it is a necessary part of the process to achieve a safe launch.
Weekly Dev Update #28: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 28 Jan–03 Feb 2020.
For the first time ever the amount of stakers on RuneVault has exceeded 900 yesterday! The amount of stakers is currently at 902 stakers, with a total of 113,572,645 RUNE being staked.
Other projects:
January 2020 Update: Announcing an early Alpha Release of Band Protocol 2.0: Band Protocol, an oracle solution, launches a new mainnet built with the Cosmos SDK.
- The team will be rolling out a new Mainnet for Band Protocol 2.0 on D3N, an independent Cosmos-based blockchain for data requests and payments.
- New oracle design allows for more flexible data queries from public and permissioned APIs, supports various payment methods, and facilitates personal information sharing between users and off-chain services without compromising on security.
- It will support a new staking model and reward mechanism.
- The team is releasing the implementation of D3N in 4 phases for the full oracle design. Check out the living doc for Band Protocol 2.0 spec for more info.
- D3N is available for public inspection via their public Github repository.
- The alpha testnet supports data requests for public APIs and cross-chain compatibility with Ethereum network and EVM-compatible smart contract platforms. It is now available for developers to test and hack on.
All Eyes on India as Supreme Court Crypto Case Advances: Tushar Aggarwal, the CEO of Persistence.One and Co-founder of Cosmos India talks about the impact of the court case of RBI vs Crypto and that the interest on this is far beyond just in the crypto circles. Read all about it in this interview.
Cosmos India successfully completed its first ever meetup held in Bangalore, India on 2/2/2020:
Tushar Aggarwal, Co-founder of Cosmos India talking about the importance and relevance of ‘Interoperability’ and Cosmos at the Blockchained India meetup in Bangalore, India:
Cosmos India Meetup Series 2020 — The Bangalore Chapter: Cosmos India’s Meetup in Bangalore.
A new wallet launched in Cosmos Space. A new iOS that support most of the Tendermint based chains is published on the AppStore. The official wallet page is here: https://wallet.syncnode.ro/
Booyoun (CØSMOSTATION) presented CosmosJS — A JavasSript Open Source Library for Cosmos, IRISnet and Kava:
FOAM developed a Haskell implementation of the ABCI server and SDK.
Agoric Validator Guide is out.
Agoric Weekly Update:
Also, Agoric is hiring a Marketing Manager.
Fundamental questions on how governance works — does it result in changes, or just voting results? Topic opened by Neeraj Murarka, Bluzelle CTO/Co-founder.
[Validator] Nexus + Giveaways: An official introduction of the “nexus” validator with benefits.
Commercio Network took part in FeeOnlySummit.
Cyber created a folder for its community to take part in the governance of Cosmos.
CYBER: Ecosystem and Community Presentation: If you ever wondered about the community plans of cyber, what is cyber~Foundation, how to get funding from us if you are an open-source dev or how to talk to god. This is a must-see video:
Download now Mooncake by Desmos Network and the new 0.0.9 version and get ready for a new era of Decentralized Social Networks. Android available, iOS coming soon.
Why IBC is a big deal and why you should know about it: Andra Georgescu of Dokia Capital in her article simplifies the concept behind IBC, making it accessible to the community.
Kadena Introduces Chainweaver to the Cosmos Ecosystem: Kadena follows the release of Kadenamint with an interoperable digital wallet.
Chorus One:
Liquid Staking WG call 2 recording and notes are up:
- research report outline (5:00)
- Sunny’s Cosmos SDK multi-token Fungible Staking Derivatives (29:02)
30 Cosmos Governance Working Group with Figment’s Gavin Birch: In this episode Felix is joined by Gavin Birch, community analyst at Figment Networks, who has took it upon himself to improve the decentralized governance process of the Cosmos Hub. They start by going into Gavin’s background in the crypto space and how he joined the Figment team before exploring Gavin’s experience working on coordinating the upgrade to Cosmos Hub 3. Felix and Gavin explore the intricacies of blockchain governance and discuss controversies and learnings from this early experiment in decentralized funding.
31 Unslashed: Insuring Blockchain Risks with Marouane Hajji: Insurance is a part of the finance stack that has received less attention in the Defi space compared to other segments like lending and derivatives. In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Marouane Hajji, Co-Founder at Unslashed, to talk about blockchain risk, insurance, and the protocol that Unslashed is building. They start out exploring why blockchain risks can’t yet be insured using traditional insurance methods, as well as the go-to-market approach of Unslashed and their first product: a fully collateralized slashing insurance. They also discuss the interplay between staking derivatives and insurance and the interplay of the Melon Protocol and Unslashed to manage collateral for risk underwriters.
Meher Roy & Reisen — Co-Founders of Chorus One Ep #14 on No Sharding — The Solana Podcast.
Built with the Cosmos SDK
Projects that are actively building on the Cosmos ecosystem
Akash is the world’s first super cloud for serverless computing, empowering the architects and builders of the internet with greater access, freedom, and efficiency. Announcement » Infrastructure
Binance Chain is developed by Binance and its community as the basis for a decentralized exchange. Binance is considered the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. Announcement » DEX
e-Money is the leading European provider of currency-backed stablecoins. The stablecoins are interest bearing and protected by an insolvency fund, which makes them unique in today’s market. Infrastructure Enterprise Stablecoin
IOV a universal protocol between blockchains and wallet users, is making it possible to send, receive and exchange any cryptocurrency from a single address of value. Wallet Name Service
IRISnet is designed to be the foundation for next generation distributed business applications. It is a BPoS blockchain, built with Cosmos-SDK, that enables cross-chain interoperability through a unified service model. Announcement » Enterprise
Kava is the world’s first Interledger solutions provider bringing blockchains, wallets, and exchanges the interoperability and liquidity of the Interledger. Announcement » Infrastructure
Lino is a decentralized autonomous content economy to determine its value and incentivize contributors in a more direct and effective manner. Announcement » Social
Loom is a Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum that includes a network of DPoS sidechains for highly-scalable games and user-facing DApps. Announcement » Games
Playlist is a project aimed at tokenizing the music industry with their PLAY Protocol. Social
Regen Network is a global community and platform focused on ecological monitoring and regeneration. Announcement » Agriculture
Sentinel Network is a network layer that enables a true p2p and decentralized Applications & Resources marketplace. Announcement » Infrastructure
A price-stable cryptocurrency designed for mass adoption. They are building financial infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized applications. Announcement » Stablecoin Infrastructure
TruStory is a building a social network for experts to identify what information is true and what isn’t in return for tokens. Announcement » Social
Check out the Full list of projects in Cosmos & Tendermint Ecosystem.
Partnerships and team members
Tendermint Inc’s new open collaboration and org-tech initiative, Virgo, joins the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA):
The Virgo Manifesto, and subsequently, project Virgo, was revealed on November 2019 with the aim of advancing human coordination and passion for environmental protection and sustainable energy. Gathering and using information accurately to coordinate decision making is one of mankind’s greatest strengths. Today’s technology can enhance how people organize and coordinate , which requires meaningful, critical dialogue between technologists, regulators and citizens of the world.
However, technology alone will not solve the problem facing future generations. If the Virgo mission is to succeed, it needs to lead by example in coordinating and working together effectively. This was discussed at length during the blockchain interoperability roundtable at INATBA’s Global Blockchain Congress, Convergence 2019 in Malaga.
Tendermint’s Virgo initiative shares similar objectives to INATBA; namely the vision to help foster equitable digital coordination and governance. INATBA’s unique role in facilitating public-private engagement is essential to develop the industry, encourage the uptake of blockchain solutions and develop governance structures. These were the major drivers in Virgo’s decision to join INATBA, which provides Virgo with a voice in the European Union’s technology evaluations and regulatory efforts.
“INATBA is proud to welcome Virgo into our growing membership. They join an active and vibrant community, representing one of the widest ranging membership bases which is helping to shape the blockchain and DLT industry. We look forward to Virgo’s valued contributions to INATBA’s vibrant and expert working groups”
Said Marc Taverner, INATBA’s recently appointed Executive Director.
The European Blockchain Observatory and Forum was established by the European Commission in collaboration with the European Parliament to “connect European and global expertise”. The forum acts as a collaboration platform for ‘knowledge sharing, community engagement, project mapping and on use cases and the regulatory framework, production of thematic reports and delivery of training.’ Virgo contributors have joined many of these working groups to contribute to and learn from the different participants in focus groups on topics such as; identity, social impact, privacy and governance.
Virgo is an open and inclusive initiative that aims to remove complex technology and provide the public with freely available organizational tools that incentivize and reward change. If you are interested, visit theirr website and join the movement.
About INATBA
Public-private cooperation is essential to progress and ensure uptake. Officially launched on 3rd April 2019, the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) is a multi-stakeholder organization based in Brussels. It brings together suppliers and users of Distributed Ledger Technologies with representatives of governmental organizations and standard setting bodies from all over the world. They share the common vision of promoting transparent governance, interoperability, legal certainty and trust in services enabled by blockchain and DLT.
Cosmos is hiring! See the latest job openings here.
Rumors
Twitter:
Reddit discussions:
The voting period has concluded for Prop23, which has passed: Here are some voting stats for Prop23:
- 79.42% of all staked ATOMs voted
- 33 delegators represented 4.66% of the voting power
- 95 votes in total
Other:
“I was already a huge Cosmos fan, largely because of their thorough dev and launch process to mainnet…An open system like this with a few battle-scars feels more trustworthy to me than one which is apparently flawless.”
Cosmos ⚛January 2020 Network Analysis by Gavin Birch:
- New key metrics: economics; community pool; cartel watch stats
- Jan 29 Community Pool balance ~285k ATOM (~5k spent in January)
- Jan 20 inflation 7.12% and rewards rate ~9.43% (know the difference!)
- Jan 20 — Top 10 validators have lost a further 2% of voting power
Quick Takes
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Cosmos community continues to grow. There is a slight increase in the number of subscribers of Cosmos social media channels these weeks.
See also Cosmos forum and Matrix/Riot Chat.
Check out Interchain Foundation Twitter.
There are also Community-managed Channels. These channels are managed entirely by members of the Cosmos community and do not represent official Cosmos or ICF announcements.
Cosmos Validator Working Group
There is strong stable growth in the Cosmos community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Cosmos Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
