Builder Stories: Why Noble Chose the Cosmos SDK
Cosmos SDK Builder Stories highlights innovative projects that are building with the Cosmos SDK. In this first edition, learn about Noble and how the world’s leading for application-specific blockchains is helping them achieve their goals.
Noble, Abstracting Asset Issuance
Noble was built to bring native assets to the interchain and help solve liquidity fragmentation across the broader ecosystem, beginning with Circle’s popular stablecoin USDC. Focusing on security and ease of access, Noble facilitates ecosystem entry for asset issuers by abstracting the complexities away. CEO and Co-founder, Jelena Djuric, explains, “Historically, appchains have struggled to attract sufficient liquidity due to the constraints of monolithic architectures and custodial bridging. Noble is purpose-built to solve this by leveraging IBC to provide secure and seamless access to assets across the interchain.”
According to Jelena, many asset issuers have a tough time assessing the various tradeoffs between different chains. “Noble is that singular place for an issuer to come and gain access to this incredibly vibrant ecosystem of chains communicating over IBC.” The total IBC-connected economy is worth more than $112 billion, transacting over $1 billion volume in the last 30 days, making the interchain a compelling destination for any asset issuer.
Bringing USDC to the Interchain
Since bringing USDC to the interchain in September 2023, Noble-issued USDC has become the most widely adopted stablecoin in the interchain. Noble has already issued over $220 million of native USDC, representing the fastest-growing USDC issuance across the crypto industry, and reaching $1 billion of transaction volume throughout the interchain.
Noble is currently the eighth-largest issuer of native USDC, just above Optimism and under Polygon and NEAR. “Bringing in liquidity and new assets like USDC is a huge unlock, not only for Noble but the whole ecosystem, and the demand will continue to grow as more projects decide to build in the interchain,” Jelena enthuses.
From Stablecoins to Real-World Assets (RWAs)
Noble’s vision goes beyond stablecoin issuers to any asset issuer in the emerging real-world assets (RWAs) space, which is set to transform the future of traditional assets like real estate, commodities, and art. The year 2024 has seen a major surge in demand in the tokenized RWA sector, growing by more than 30% in the second quarter. According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group and ADDX, the tokenization of illiquid assets is expected to create a $16 trillion industry representing 10% of global GDP by 2030.
USDC was the first step in Noble’s journey. Noble is now looking to bring in more assets, everything from different types of fiat stablecoins to real-world assets, showcasing the capabilities of the interchain and the powerful Interchain Stack.
“This is the most exciting place to build. Everything from the customizability of the Cosmos SDK to the permissionless nature of IBC. You can create your own journey, create your vision, and execute on it in a reliable and straightforward way.”
— Jelena Djuric, CEO & Co-Founder, Noble
Why Noble Built Using the Cosmos SDK
The Cosmos SDK is an open-source toolkit for building application-specific blockchains and a core component of the Interchain Stack, which comprises the Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, IBC, and CosmWasm. It allows developers to easily create custom blockchains from scratch that can natively interoperate with other chains.
Like a Lego kit, its modular approach enables developers to tailor their chain to suit their specific needs. These standout features were key considerations for the team when deciding on the tech stack to build the Noble chain.
“Noble is purpose-built for appchains, and the Interchain Stack is the market leader in sovereign chain development. Noble leverages the Cosmos SDK and IBC to provide the greatest utility and usability for developers, institutions, and users within the interchain. The Interchain Stack is the ideal solution for Noble given its resilience, performance history, and flexibility.”
Sovereignty Gives Total Control Over Its Vision
Those building in the interchain value sovereignty above all else. Only sovereign appchains have the autonomy to make their vision come to life, owning important decisions over governance, validators, modules, or network upgrades that steer the project’s path. Jelena says, “What sovereignty means for a builder is having total control over your infrastructure, choosing your validator set, optimizing on the consensus level, and, of course, when it comes to the Cosmos SDK, building and leveraging the right modules that make sense for your application.”
As the interchain grows, it continues to attract more projects from different ecosystems like Ethereum as they realize the benefits of being fully sovereign appchains and not existing as a smart contract on someone else’s chain. These important advantages include not having to wait on the underlying Layer 1 to ship upgrades their project needs, freedom from high transaction fees and slow throughput, and full control over their application’s modules. “We were a very close partner to dYdX, who decided to launch their own appchain migrating over from the Ethereum ecosystem,” Jelena says, “and we look forward to welcoming more projects.”
The Flexibility to Customize Your Chain
For the CTO at Noble, John Letey, one of the most important features of the Cosmos SDK is the freedom to build custom modules. “Deploying your own Cosmos SDK-based chain gives you full flexibility around minting. We have a token factory that mints USDC, with direct access to the bank module, which is like the ledger of the actual blockchain itself. We were able to build really cool and custom IBC middleware components as well, and a custom module specifically for Circle and USDC.”
“We’re launching a module on our mainnet soon called the Reporting module, which introduces a new account type called Automated Accounts. It’s a spin on the traditional IBC term ‘Interchain Accounts’ that allows accounts on one chain, like dYdX or Osmosis to interact with accounts on Noble. What’s cool about these accounts is they’re automated. So any funds, particularly USDC in this case, that are received into these accounts are automatically sent via IBC onto dYdX or Osmosis.”
— John Letey, CTO, Noble
IBC Gives Access to Instant Multichain Liquidity
Finally, Noble chose the Cosmos SDK for the ease of interoperating with an interconnected ecosystem via IBC, granting instant access to multichain liquidity and a vibrant decentralized developer community.
“The interchain is very powerful because we have this decentralized, active community of developers and builders,” Jelena says. “Everyone specializes in their own domain, whether it’s Binary Builders for the Cosmos SDK or the ICF’s work on IBC. It’s a lot more exciting because we collaborate, learn from each other, and build on each other’s success.”
Watch out for more Cosmos SDK Builder Stories coming soon and follow our developments on X.
