Cosmos Hub Engineering Update — July 2023

It’s time for the July update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team! This month, the team helped ship the v11 release — upgrading Replicated Security and removing the legacy Liquidity module, to prepare for the upcoming Liquid Staking Module. We also supported Stride in launching as the Cosmos Hub’s second Consumer Chain — making history for being the first standalone appchain that migrated over to Interchain Security.

Liquid Staking Module review process

We’ve been working with the Stride team, the Cosmos-SDK team, the Iqlusion team, and others to finish the review process of the LSM, and integrate it for release on the Cosmos Hub in Gaia v12. Pending a few more fixes of issues raised by the Cosmos-SDK team and others, it will be ready to go into the v12 release soon.

Gaia v11 release

We cut a release of Gaia v11 and put it up for voting. The target upgrade date, if the proposal passes, is August 16th 2023.

Gaia v11 contains:

• An update of Replicated Security to v2.0.0
• A refactored version of the Global Fee module
• Removal of the Liquidity module state with forced withdrawal for all pool coins as preparation to remove the module, in accordance with passed Proposal 801

You can find the release binary here, and the full changelog here.

Launch of the Stride consumer chain

The launch of Stride went surprisingly well, considering it was the first time seeing the standalone-to-consumer migration protocol in action. The migration took 45 minutes in total and proceeded uneventfully.

The first version of CometMock

CometMock is a testing tool that simulates the CometBFT consensus engine, but runs much faster and more deterministically, enabling us to dramatically reduce our run time from around 20 minutes to around 1 minute. You can take a look at the code here. We’re also working with Starship to bring it into their Cosmos testing environment.

Cryptographic equivocation verification (double signing slashing)

Work continues on the code which will allow the Cosmos Hub to cryptographically verify instances of double signing. This is important because cryptographic verification will allow the Hub to immediately slash validators who misbehave on Consumer Chains, instead of the governance-gated process in use today, which requires a vote to verify the slashing. For more information, you can find the documentation here, and the code is in progress in this branch.

Atomic IBC

We’ve been thinking about how Replicated Security can be used to build a moat, network effects, and differentiate itself in a crowded future of shared security. One possible option is atomic IBC — allowing Replicated Security Consumer Chains to compose seamlessly with one another using a special form of IBC that is instant, atomic (if one part of the transaction fails, it all fails), and isolated (nothing else changes while the transaction is running). There’s a lot of conversation happening about this, but the place to get up to date is the discussion here.

About the Author:

Jehan Tremback is the product owner for the Cosmos Hub at Informal Systems, where he works on exciting new features for the Hub.