Cøsmos Network: Stargate proposal is live, Tendermint Core security update, ‘Cosmos Unchained: Ethereum Peggy Showdown’, Liquid Staking Deep Dive debate, Terra introduces Anchor, and more!
Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 26, 30th June — 14th July
Cosmonauts, it’s time to Paradigm’s regular report on Cøsmos ecosystem! The beginning of July has brought a number of significant news which are the main focus of the current report.
On June 28th, 2020, the Tendermint team identified a pair of bugs that, when exploited, could be used to halt networks running Tendermint Core. On July 2nd, 2020, Tendermint Core version 0.33.6 was released with patches for these vulnerabilities. Impacts from these vulnerabilities were initially reported by Neeraj Murarka from Bluzelle. The Bluzelle team’s ongoing reports were instrumental in identifying and fixing these issues. The triage, remediation and communication processes were a collaborative effort by employees of All In Bits GmbH, Informal Systems Inc., and Interchain GmbH. Read the full vulnerability coordination retrospective for details of the risk and impact on the Cosmos forum. Furthermore, new releases for Tendermint Core 0.33.6 and Cosmos SDK 0.38.5 are now out.
As you know, the Cosmos team introduced Stargate, the largest Cosmos upgrade yet! Stargate will enable higher transaction throughput, cross-chain transactions, accelerate UI development, and so much more. Currently, Taariq Lewis and Zaki Manian are looking for feedback on the first of two Cosmos governance proposals for the Stargate upgrade. The Governance Proposal #27 is now in the voting period.
What are the different mechanisms that IBC, Peggy and Chainbridge implement for cross-chain interoperability? Find this and more in the replay of the latest Cosmos Unchained meetup. And if you miss the Liquid Staking Deep Dive debate about on-chain staked assets, check the video below. A must-see!
As for the Cosmos ecosystem projects’ updates, there was a ton of big stuff over the past two weeks for you! The Terra team introduced Anchor, a savings protocol on the Terra blockchain. Anchor offers a principal-protected stablecoin savings product that accepts Terra deposits and pays a stable interest rate. Moreover, Terran Hunger Games announced. Kava software version 0.9.1 has been released. Please follow the guide and update your nodes as soon as possible. The Band Protocol team recently released BandChain v1.0.4 with many changes for the BandChain Phase 1’s upcoming testnet. They also kickstarted the technical series exploring the architecture of the Band Protocol decentralized oracle network. The Loom team published their roadmap for 2020–2021. Desmos Network’s Morpheus-7001, the new testnet, was launched. Episode 25 of the ‘Planetary Regeneration Podcast’ is now available. Akash held an AMA Livestream event on July 10th. The team also introduced new team members. The new SENT Android dVPN application makes tremendous strides towards improved user experience and aligns with one of Sentinel’s core focus to decrease user learning curve. The IRIS Network team published the results of the third implementation of the Community-centric Delegation Campaign and the Second One-year Token Burn Plan. THORNode Documentation has been prepared. And much more!
See you in at the end of the month with more exciting Cosmos updates! Have a great week!
Development
Github metrics:
Cosmos Stargate Upgrade Overview
Introducing Stargate, the largest Cosmos upgrade yet. Stargate will enable 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
Next Steps
Block explorers, wallets, exchanges, the team is asking you to schedule time in August for integration testing against the Stargate network.
Validators, they are hoping that nearly all validators in the Cosmos Hub will participate in the Stargate testnet as a simulated upgrade. The team is anticipating the first testnet to be July 27.
Join the Stargate testnet to get used to this process. The Stargate team intends to run testnets and upgrades (using the Cosmos Hub genesis file) to broaden the pool of experience.
Cosmos Governance
Stargate proposal is live!
Awareness and social encounters
Hashing It Out #87-Informal Systems Ethan Buchman:
Liquid Staking Deep Dive debate:
Moderator: Billy Rennekamp, Interchain Foundation & Cosmos
Roundtable : Tarun Chitra, Gauntlet Network, Barney Mannerings, Vega Protocol, Sunny Aggarwal, Tendermint Inc & Cosmos, Brian Crain, Chorus One and Cosmos, Sam Hart, Interchain GmbH and Cosmos and our virtual audience.
This event was spurred by the work of the Liquid Staking Group, “Bridging Proof-of-Stake and Decentralized Finance” https://blog.chorus.one/liquid-stakin... and Tarun Chitra, “Why Stake when you can Borrow?” https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11156
The topics and discuss opinions with regards to:
- Staking is Defi
- Security tradeoffs
- Additional Utility
- Avoiding Centralized Staking
June 30 · Cosmos AMA with Sunny Aggarwal:
July 9 · Cosmos Unchained: Ethereum Peggy Showdown: In this live meetup Chjango Unchained (Cosmos), Greg Markou (ChainBridge), Justin Kilpatrick (Peggy), and Christopher Goes (IBC) discussed the design differences between IBC, Peggy, and ChainBridge and how each project approaches the problem of interoperating with the Ethereum mainchain.
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.
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.
Cosmos Code With Us — Setting Up a Cosmos Validator: Marko Baricevic explains what a Cosmos validator is, what a Cosmos validator does, and walks through the step-by-step process of running a Comos validator on this edition of Cosmos Code with Us.
Cosmos Code with Us: Developing on Ethermint July 21st · 1pm PDT / 4pm EDT / 10pm CEST · Online. Sign up for the workshop →
Digital Scarcity and Gaming with Go — Billy Rennekamp @ Berlin Golang Meetup:
Finance
Cosmos validators
Information from Mintscan.io:
Cosmos Markets
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
Roadmap
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 July 27, 2020 80% complete
IBC v1.0.0 issues left to be implemented.
Tendermint
On June 28, 2020, the Tendermint team identified a pair of bugs that, when exploited, could be used to halt networks running Tendermint Core. Find all details here:
Tendermint Dev Session: Debugging the Consensus Reactor: In this Tendermint Dev Session, Ethan Buchman describes the way he debugged a pair of issues in the Tendermint consensus reactor, including issue #4926. Other call participants: Tess Rinearson, Anton Kaliaev, Sean Braithwaite, Erik Grinaker, Callum Waters, Marko Baricevic
Tendermint Dev Session: 0.34 Protocol Changes and Supporting IBC Upgrade: In this Tendermint Dev Session, we discuss the possibility of including the hash of events in the blockchain, and the requirements that IBC upgrade paths will introduce to Tendermint Core. Participants: Marko Baricevic, Aleksandr Bezobchuk, Sean Braithwaite, Ethan Buchman, Christopher Goes, Erik Grinaker, Anton Kaliaev, Zaki Manian, Tess Rinearson, Callum Waters
Tendermint 2020 Roadmap:
The Tendermint Core team has decided to share its 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.
Ethermint is being actively developed:
Ecosystem updates
Akash Network:
The team launches The Akashian Challenge Phase 2 Week 2. 600,000 AKT rewards and special prizes at stake.
They held an AMA Livestream event on July 10th:
The team also introduced new team members:
-Cheng Wang (CFO). An adept entrepreneur with finance chops from legendary firms Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, he leverages his experience in treasury management and growth planning to help us materialize the future of cloud.
-Michael Gushansky, their first Marketing and Community Manager.
A Primer on the First Decentralized Cloud Marketplace
Akash Network Launches Chinese Community!
Oracle:
IRIS Network:
Bianjie AI Joins the Blockchain-based Service Network Development Association (BSNDA): The Blockchain-based Service Network Development Association (BSNDA) is a collaborative group formed by organizations that forward the growth of Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN). Dedicated to technical research and development, industry standard establishment, and product innovation, the association consists of the Cloud Services Committee, the Developers Committee, the Finance Committee, the Media Committee, the Industrial Capital Committee, and currently comprises 25 member organizations.
The results of the third implementation are as follow:
- IRIS Foundation made a distribution to delegators with an amount equal to their delegation rewards in June, distributed 985,243.7368 IRIS in total.
- According to the situation of community delegation, IRIS Foundation carried out a special burning of 8.92 million IRIS tokens undelegated by Eco-Development Fund on June 15, 2020.
- According to the Token Burn Plan, IRIS Foundation burned delegation rewards of Eco-Development Fund on June 30, totally 2,665,458 IRIS.
- The application form for validators rewards continues to be available. Welcome to jointly promote the sustainable development of the IRISnet ecosystem.
IRISnet Bi-weekly Report (2020.06.15~06.28）
- BSN Integrates Chainlink Oracles, Bringing Real-World Data Into Its IRITA Powered Network
- The winners of GoZ were officially announced and IRISnet won 2 awards
- Core dev team of IRITA, Bianjie, won the 3rd place in 2020 Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai) Blockchain Application Innovation Competition
- IRISnet is invited to attend Hangzhou International Blockchain Week 2020
- Harriet Cao (Founder of IRISnet) was appointed as a member of the newly formed Tendermint Inc Board of Directors
- Community member Daniela Pavin summarizes IRISnet weekly update「 This week in irisnetwork」on Twitter
Regen Network:
Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 19: Tom Newmark.
IOV:
The IOV Community Call #2;
Bluzelle:
Bluzelle testnet competition uncovers major Tendermint bug:
Desmos Network:
Morpheus-7001, the new testnet, was launched!
Registration for Desmos Round-0 will be opened from 14th to 27th July. The above Pre-Registration is replaced by this new form. Please kindly submit your revised indicative interest after reading the updated info:
Kava:
Update: USDX Minting Rewards for BNB — Proposal Did Not Pass, New Vote Issued.
Terra:
Introducing Anchor: The Terra team introduces Anchor, a savings protocol on the Terra blockchain. Anchor offers a principal-protected stablecoin savings product that accepts Terra deposits and pays a stable interest rate. To generate yield, Anchor lends out deposits to borrowers who put down liquid-staked PoS assets from major blockchains as collateral. Anchor’s yield is thus powered by block rewards of major Proof-of-Stake blockchains. Ultimately, the team envisions Anchor to become the gold standard for passive income on the blockchain.
In this post they cover the core concepts behind the Anchor protocol. For the full treatment read through the Anchor white paper.
Key features
The following are key features of the Anchor savings protocol:
- Principal protection: Anchor implements a liquidation protocol that liquidates borrower collateral whenever a loan is at risk, thus protecting the principal of depositors.
- Instant withdrawals: Terra deposits are instantly withdrawable — no lockup required.
- Stable interest rate: Anchor stabilizes the deposit interest rate by passing on a variable fraction of block rewards from collateral assets to the depositor.
Terran Hunger Games announced:
Terra’s CEO Do Kwon was speaking at Unitize2020.
Persistence One:
Band Protocol:
The Band Protocol team recently released BandChain v1.0.4 with many changes for the BandChain Phase 1’s upcoming testnet.
They also kickstarted the technical series exploring the architecture of the Band Protocol decentralized oracle network:
Understanding Band Oracle #1 — Oracle Scripts and Data Sources.
Loom Network:
Loom Network Roadmap 2020–2021: The Loom team published their roadmap for 2020–2021.
2020 Q3
The team aims to implement most of the core features of the next major version of the Loom protocol by the end of the year. To recap, this includes:
- Upgraded consensus engine.
- Upgraded EVM.
- A WASM runtime to support performant and upgradable smart contracts to replace native Go smart contracts.
- Transaction and storage fees.
- Per-user transaction throttling and quotas that can be specified on a per-contract basis to allow dapp developers to control costs.
2020 Q4
Once the core protocol features are in place they’ll build out the document management platform that will handle document authentication, document storage, document sharing, and time-bound documents.
2021 Q1
The Extdev testnet will be upgraded to the new version of the Loom protocol and they’ll begin testing with the enterprise clients. Once any major issues found during the testing phase have been fixed and Extdev is deemed to be stable we’ll contract a third-party to do an audit of the protocol.
After the audit is complete the new protocol will be deployed to Basechain, this will require a few hours of downtime to migrate state and upgrade all the nodes in the network.
2021 Q2
The new version of the Loom protocol will be open sourced, and the team will begin on-boarding new enterprise partners.
They’ll make further announcements as major development milestones are reached. So far Thailand seems to have weathered the pandemic better than most countries, hopefully that continues to be the case as more businesses re-open, so the can avoid any further delays. In the next few articles they’ll explore some of the new features of the Loom protocol in more detail, starting with the per-user transaction throttling and quotas dapp developers will use to control costs.
Bytom:
CyberMiles:
Althea Network:
Althea Community Update, Summer 2020.
Althea Network is growing fast!
Agoric:
e-Money:
Cyber:
Harriet Cao, IRIS Network & Hub: Episode 11 of Citizen Cosmos with is here. They discuss AI, how to decentralize Cosmos, regulation in China and decide who is cooler: Doctors VS Engineers. Tune it on!
Idena Network:
Kadena:
BitSong:
OKChain and BitSong come together for providing vibrant ecosystems to users.
LikeCoin:
Liquid Starts Support of LIKE token on LikeCoin chain:
Sentinel:
Download the new SENT Android dVPN application on the Google Play Store today! The new Android application makes tremendous strides towards an improved user experience and aligns with one of Sentinel’s core focus to decrease user learning curve.
THORChain:
THORChain publish TSS Whitepapers.
RUNE ARB BOT COMPETITION WINNERS: 15,000 RUNE awarded to community built Weekly Dev Update #50: THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 01–06 July 2020; Churning, Validator Onboarding, TSS bug-fixes, preparation for Testnet 4.
Lunie:
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
The Interchain Foundation (ICF)
Driving Decentralization in ICF Governance:
Interchain Foundation is always striving towards further decentralization in its governance. They announced the expansion of the Foundation Council with the appointment of luminary academic Dr. Fernando Pedone and Proof-of-Stake thought leader Brian Fabian Crain. Their advocacy and expertise will be invaluable to Interchain Foundation as the IFC continue its important work towards creating open-source, cryptographic, consensus-driven, economic networks.
Partnerships and team members
Cosmos is hiring! See the latest job openings here.
MISC
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Cosmos community continues to grow! There is a stable increase in the number of subscribers of Cosmos social media channels these weeks.
See also Cosmos forum.
Check out Interchain Foundation Twitter.
RIOT channels moved to Discord.
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
This is not financial advice.
Subscribe to detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm!
Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.
Main sources
Ecosystem projects’ social media
Today in Cosmos by Adriana | KalpaTech
