A Light-Year in the Cosmos: Tendermint 2020
It’s been a tumultuous year for all of us due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I am incredibly proud of what Tendermint has accomplished for the Cosmos community despite these hardships. In this post, I’ll be going over our highlights for 2020 and also give a preview of what’s coming up next.
At Tendermint, we’ve faced some additional internal difficulties that resulted in the great re-org of Cosmos engineering in early 2020. We spent the earlier part of the year rebuilding our teams and forging stronger ecosystem relationships. But the vast majority of this year has been spent developing and bringing awareness of the stellar tools that accelerate us to the Internet of Blockchains.
Highlights of 2020
Engineering
A trusted, rock-solid foundation is crucial to the economic growth of Cosmos. Led by Alessio Treglia, our Engineering team has been focused on improving the Cosmos SDK, the foundation for all of our products. Specifically, we’ve focused on improving the client app developer experience, code test coverage, and quality assurance metrics of the SDK. We’ve also broke ground on the Cosmos Cash research project.
We’re putting app developers first by creating and maintaining v0.39 Launchpad, an extended support version of the Cosmos SDK. Launchpad is a stable platform for app developers to build on top of while the core developers iron out final issues around the v0.40 Stargate release of the SDK and IBC 1.0. To assist with transitioning chains to Launchpad, we’ve opened up maintenance PRs against various chain repositories. These include Commerc.io, Band Protocol, Terra, Bluzelle, Ethermint, Akash, and Starname.
We are contributing three significant features for the upcoming Stargate release of the Cosmos SDK: cosmovisor, a more secure keyring implementation, and Rosetta API support. We’ve joined the ADR committee and taken part in critical architectural decisions on the shape of the Cosmos SDK’s future releases.
We’ve also started working on the Cosmos Cash protocol research project this year. Cosmos Cash is a protocol for institutions to issue real fiat tokens on a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain. We’ve completed the first two deliverables for Cosmos Cash: a proof-of-concept and a feasibility study. To learn more, read Alessio’s announcement.
Developer Experience
Led by Denis Fadeev, the Developer Experience is a team established in the summer of 2020 to improve the experience of building blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Starport CLI, which launched in August, is the easiest way to build a blockchain, full stop.
Starport CLI features include boilerplate scaffolding, module scaffolding, a single command for building, initializing, running a blockchain node with auto-reload, types within modules, and chain customization through a simple config file. It also includes a frontend scaffold for signing in, sending tokens, creating new transactions, and a friendly welcome screen to guide new developers. Starport has received incredibly positive feedback from the community, both from experienced blockchain developers and those only getting started.
Since August, we’ve recorded over 120k user interactions with Starport. Usage during our hackathons has peaked at over 6k events and 150 simultaneous users per day. According to Starport’s GitHub Insights, it receives around 7k git clones and 13k views every month. Starport v0.13, with full support for Stargate, has just launched this week. Check it out!
Brand & Design
Led by Nass Donald, our design team is one of the most promising in crypto. Designed and launched this year, the HackAtom V website and the Stargate website have been significant visual design and communication successes. I’m incredibly proud of our design team for the amount of effort they put into every project. The work they have done for Cosmos has been earning accolades from Twitter:
Have to say I think @cosmos might have the best branding and design in crypto? Consistent across all their channels and products
Wong Joon Ian @joonian
Man,@cosmos branding is so good. Just look at this website. Amazing job to whoever designed it. #Cosmos $ATOM
brianli.com @bwhli
The team provided design and front-end development support to a wide array of projects throughout the year, including Starport DevTools and component library; documentation and tutorials websites; online events, workshops, conferences, and hackathons; visual marketing materials for blogs and social media channels; email communications; a few brand design initiatives; and some exciting community-building programs.
With iterative improvements to the existing Cosmos website, we’ve seen a steady growth of traffic and engagement throughout the year. Meanwhile, the team has been hard at work behind the scenes in 2020, building an entirely new website and a comprehensive directory of ecosystem projects. You can read about it in the “upcoming releases for 2021” section.
Marketing & Community
With Chjango and Adriana Mihai’s tireless efforts, the community for Cosmos this year has expanded significantly. We published 320 @cosmos tweets to over 10M impressions, increasing our followers from ~30k to 46k. The Cosmos mailing list has grown from 13k to 18k contacts. We’ve also been at the forefront of ecosystem communications, broadcasting major Cosmos events and developments like Game of Zones, Stargate, Ethermint, Cosmos Jobs, Cosmos SDK, Tendermint Core, IBC, Peggy, CosmWasm, and more.
2020 was a year that saw the rapid growth of virtual events. Our team launched Code with Us this year, a series of live-streamed workshops designed to teach Cosmos concepts to developers. We produced 14 workshops for ~300 live participants — these videos have also received over 7k views on YouTube. Other virtual events we ran this year include Cosmos Unchained and Future of the Cosmos Hub. For this year’s end, we hosted Interchain Conversations II in partnership with Dystopia Labs. This highly successful conference had 52 speakers, 46 talks, and 1.6k registrants.
This year also saw the planning and launch of three successful hackathons. The Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon, which we hosted in partnership with Agoric and Band Protocol, had around 300 registrants and $15k in awards. The Cosmos India HackAtom, which we hosted in collaboration with Cosmos India and Persistence One, had 1.2k registrants, over 200 workshop attendees, and $10k in awards. We also delivered HackAtom V, the most valuable Cosmos hackathon of the year, to over 320 registrants and $50k in awards.
Finally, as a way to support the growth of the Cosmos ecosystem, we have launched these initiatives this year:
Operations
In Talent & HR, we’ve instituted a transparent and equitable compensation philosophy where we target the 60% percentile of San Francisco market salaries for all roles, irrespective of location in the world. We’ve also hired 17 people this year, primarily in engineering and technical roles, which has doubled our company’s size. If you’re interested in building the new decentralized token economy, we are hiring worldwide!
In Operations, earlier this year, we formalized and onboarded a new five-member Board of Directors to improve accountability and decentralize the governance of Tendermint Inc.
In Corporate Development, we’ve set up processes and templates for investment opportunities and recently signed an investment deal that we should disclose soon. In 2021, we want to support more developers building great projects in the Cosmos ecosystem, and we’re working on publicizing our inbounds for strategic investments.
Upcoming releases for 2021
We have several great projects coming up for Cosmos in 2021, and here is a high-level overview of what we’re aiming to deliver. We will provide more detailed information and previews of the DEX, Starport 1.0, and Cosmos Website 2.0 early next year.
Stargate
Our biggest goal for 2021 is to work with the core development community to bring Stargate onto the Cosmos Hub. This upgrade will also enable the interblockchain communication protocol, allowing you to send tokens to and from the Cosmos Hub. Stargate is a massive project that involves more than just the SDK. The API has many breaking changes, and we’re assisting app developers, wallet developers to help migrate their front ends to work flawlessly with Stargate.
Liquidity Module
We are collaborating with the talented B-Harvest team to develop and build decentralized exchange (DEX) for Cosmos-based blockchains. Work has started on the Liquidity Module in Q4 of 2020, and B-Harvest has already finished Milestone 1. While Engineering manages this product, Design will be coming in to design and develop a well-thought-out web UI for this DEX. We hope to present a prototype of this DEX to the Cosmos community by the end of Q1.
Starport 1.0
Starport has quickly become the best starting point for any developer who wants to get into the Cosmos ecosystem. While we have made it very easy to build a new Cosmos chain through scaffolding and hot reloads, creating a chain is still only the first step to a production mainnet. Starport’s vision is a vertically integrated tool that supports app developers from their first Hello World-style blockchain to a production mainnet.
To get us there, we’ve worked on proofs-of-concept for two other components of Starport: Cloud and Network. Starport Cloud is validation-as-a-service for app developers and people who want managed validators. As for Starport Cloud, we hope to have out as an alpha in Q1. We’re also building Starport Network, a marketplace for app developers, chain coordinators, and validators to negotiate token distribution and schedule chain launches. Starport Network is a blockchain, and we hope to have a testnet by Q2.
Cosmos Website 2.0
We were hoping to get the revamped Cosmos website out to everyone this year, but work has taken a little longer than expected amidst lots of activity in the ecosystem. In Q1 2021, you should see the launch of the brand new Cosmos website. Our company has been working hard on both content and design to make sure it reflects the best of Cosmos and is understandable and usable to newcomers. We’re also kicking off a standalone IBC website, with the goal to court other blockchain frameworks to adopt IBC. Later in the year, we also plan to build a standalone website for Cosmos Hub, providing an entry point for newcomers to learn about the ATOM token and staking.
The path to a multi-chain future
I’ve never been more bullish on Cosmos. The ecosystem is stronger than ever, and our tools solve scalability problems in cryptocurrency. Tendermint will do everything we can to bring a multitude of sovereign blockchains to market. In fact, I believe there is a viable future for a million interoperable blockchains. If you’re interested in learning more, I gave a presentation a week ago with that exact title — A Million Blockchains — at Interchain Conversations II.
I want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who has been working so hard to make Cosmos successful this year. I am proud of our growing community, and I appreciate how we’re able to collaborate so well to build out this robust open-source ecosystem. Special thanks to the Interchain Foundation, which has been tirelessly supporting the majority of ecosystem development efforts. Happy holidays everyone! Enjoy the time off, and I look forward to building something great with you in 2021.
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Thanks to Adriana Mihai, Alessio Treglia, Denis Fadeev, Nass Donald, Chris Abejon, Natalia Puntel, and Brent Xu for coming up with the content for this blog post. Thank you to everyone at Tendermint for making this possible.
