Accelerating the Internet of Blockchains: Tendermint in 2020
Our mission at Tendermint is to invest in engineering, improve developer experience, and grow the value of the ecosystem. With a newly appointed CEO, what do the next six to twelve months for Tendermint look like? Is Virgo still a thing? How does Starport fit in? In this article, I’ll give clarity on what we’ve been working on recently. I’ll also share our long-term priorities and strategy to accelerate the path to the Internet of Blockchains.
The end of the Virgo experiment
We are winding down the Virgo project. The Virgo website and other channels will continue to exist, but we are no longer dedicating resources to maintain this presence. We have considered which parts of Virgo have compelling narratives, and we have rolled these projects into our Cosmos-focused teams. This pivot has worked well — we’ve freed up resources and set ourselves up to focus on a singular mission: the Cosmos Network.
A renewed focus on Cosmos
Tendermint is a ~10% stakeholder of the Cosmos Hub. As such, we have skin in the game to ensure the continued growth through the utility of the ATOM. In the short term, we’ll be re-delegating ATOM to a more diverse set of Hub validators who actively contribute to building public goods for Cosmos, in the spirit of #TheAtomicSpreadOut. In the long term, we will be leveraging ATOM to accelerate the process of growing into the interconnected network of blockchains that everyone in the community is excitedly awaiting.
The Interchain Foundation granted us funding earlier this year, not just for Cosmos ecosystem development, but also for two projects called Dither and Cosmos Cash. One of our priorities for the remainder of this year is to deliver on these projects.
We’re rethinking what is possible for Dither. Our current plan is to develop an open-source chat module for the Cosmos SDK that comes with a full-fledged web UI. Think Discord/Slack but designed with first-class cryptocurrency support, built on top of the Cosmos SDK.
Cosmos Cash is an R&D project that will enable institutions to issue fiat currency (EUR, CHF, etc) as IBC tokens. The primary goal of this project is to connect fiat issuance directly to a zone in the Cosmos Network. We’ll have more news on Cosmos Cash and Dither as we delve further into development.
Investing in engineering
Earlier this year, due to internal disagreements, many core Cosmos protocol engineers left to form Interchain GmbH, a new engineering-focused team funded by the ICF. We’re in the process of rebuilding our engineering strength to continue to focus on protocol development, to improve the application developer experience, as well as provide more onramps to the ATOM. Our current engineers are assisting with the Stargate & IBC upgrade for the Cosmos Hub, maintaining a stable release of the Cosmos SDK, integrating the Rosetta API with the Cosmos SDK, as well as leading R&D on a Shared Security module.
Increasing Cosmos Hub utility
One of the most common questions in the Cosmos ecosystem is regarding how the ATOM will accrue value. ATOM holders have invested a lot of resources into making the Cosmos Hub the most secure proof-of-stake settlement layer in existence. With IBC 1.0 coming soon, how can the Hub leverage this protocol to share its security with other blockchains? There are several teams in the Cosmos ecosystem working on separate, additive approaches to increasing ATOM value.
Liquid staking, alternatively, issuing derivatives of staked tokens, is one approach. Earning rent by securing pegged assets is another approach. Shared security, also known as cross-chain validation, is a third approach. One particularly interesting community idea is adding an automated market maker (a la Uniswap) DEX directly onto the Hub. We look forward to seeing which of these approaches the ATOM holder community will vote to support.
We at Tendermint are researching how to introduce decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols into proof-of-stake blockchains in ways that don’t conflict with the staking incentive. We believe the ATOM is the best mechanism in Cosmos to offer premium shared security for future chains. We are actively pursuing R&D on cross-chain validation and we’ll have more to report on this in the near future.
Starport is the solution to SDK usability
While attempting to use the Cosmos SDK ourselves to build a production application, we identified several usability issues for first-time app developers. We decided to solve these problems for future developers through intelligent automation and code scaffolding. Over the past couple of months, our Developer Experience team has been building Starport, a friendly interface to the Cosmos SDK. Even though Starport is in early alpha, it’s already capable of helping developers build blockchains in minutes instead of hours. Even more, Starport generates a full web app for every chain, allowing developers to focus on writing business logic.
We just announced Starport publicly last week, and we’re thrilled at the positive reception that we’ve gotten so far. There are fewer than a thousand Cosmos developers today, but more than 24,000,000 developers worldwide. We believe Starport lowers the barrier to entry to blockchain development and will enable mainstream developers to start solving business problems with IBC and the Cosmos SDK. We have paradigm-altering features in the Starport pipeline that will make Cosmos app development even more accessible and productive — stay tuned for announcements.
Starport Cloud is the solution to validator onboarding
Over the years, we’ve experienced how much global coordination is required to launch a blockchain with a decentralized validator set. We hope to use our learnings to make this experience easier and more streamlined for future teams who want to start blockchains with a globally distributed validator set. We’re experimenting with novel UX solutions to vastly simplify decentralized network initialization, visualize and debug network state, as well as solve peer discoverability.
Starport Cloud, which we will fully reveal later in Q3, will be an integrated chain validation and app hosting platform that will make it much easier for developers to deploy and test their blockchain applications. We hope to support developers from early MVP, decentralized launches, incentivized testnets, and all the way to mainnet. We are looking to start discussions with validation providers who are interested in being a part of the Starport Cloud initiative — we plan on simplifying the exchange of validation services for mainnet tokens.
Contributor Microgrants are the solution to community funding
While Cosmos technical development has been adequately funded, we believe that the community growth of the Cosmos Network could use additional support. We have been identifying small teams building public goods that directly benefit Cosmos Hub through the Cosmos Community Contributor Microgrants. Read about Q1 recipients here:
We have an upcoming list of Q2 microgrant recipients so stay tuned for news on that. We plan on leveraging ATOM and our Ecosystem Development team’s shared experience to invest in and partner with Cosmos contributors who have emerged as some of the most capable teams in the ecosystem doing cutting edge R&D.
We’re also looking to work with Hub stakeholders to make the community pool more useful, empowering ATOM holders, validators, and the greater crypto community to participate meaningfully in the growing Cosmos token economy.
Thanks for being a part of the community
Our mission is to invest in protocol engineering efforts, improve the Cosmos developer experience, and work with the community on the future of ATOM and the Cosmos Hub. We’ve been leveraging our team’s strengths and hiring over the last couple of months to tackle critical Cosmos adoption problems. Our team is brilliant, highly focused on delivering, and there are many more updates I’d love to share. But I’ll save those for a future post. As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @zcpeng.
If you want to work with us to build Cosmos and make blockchain development as approachable as possible — we are hiring!
Thanks to Chjango Unchained and Jin Kwon for reviewing and suggesting edits for clarity.
