Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.

We’re excited to announce that the Interchain Foundation is acquiring Skip, one of the leading ecosystem teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos.

Skip will be renamed to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary; leading Cosmos’ product, vision, and go-to-market with Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck at the helm. The ICF will remain as a Swiss Foundation, and its Foundation Council will soon expand with new members, as Ethan Buchman steps down from his seat and continues his contributions to the ecosystem as its co-founder.

This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and begins a new, growth-focused stage defined by a deep focus on the Cosmos Hub as the center of the ecosystem, internalized development across the Interchain Stack, and a mission to grow users and liquidity across Cosmos.

The Cosmos Ecosystem Today

Cosmos is founded on the principles of sovereignty, permissionless interoperability, and decentralization. These values set us apart from other ecosystems that rely on closed-source frameworks, trustful messaging protocols, and centralizing architectures that replicate the rent-extracting monopolies of the current web.

Cosmos’ progress is demonstrable:

• Hundreds of blockchains are built with the Cosmos SDK across multiple industries
• 115+ mainnets are interconnected natively via IBC
• The Cosmos SDK is the #1 blockchain stack by value secured and number of chains
• IBC does over $1 billion in monthly transaction volume across 90+ chains, making it a top bridge and messaging protocol
• CometBFT secures billions of dollars and has produced millions of blocks, and is the #1 pluggable consensus protocol by adoption

In the fast-paced, fiercely competitive environment of Web3, Cosmos has defined the bleeding edge of decentralized technology. Despite its technical innovation, Cosmos still has a massive, untapped opportunity to attract users and liquidity into the ecosystem.

Why focus on liquidity? Liquidity is more than a capital issue; it affects the entire Cosmos ecosystem and its participants. It is driven by developer experience, quality of applications, and ease of user onboarding. For new builders, liquidity is opportunity. When users and developers can leverage deep liquidity to achieve more, the ecosystem thrives.

Building outstanding technology was just our beginning. Cosmos’ next chapter will focus on adoption, success, and distribution; and the ICF has acquired Skip to do just that.

Addressing the challenges, head-on.

The acquisition of Skip and the creation of Interchain Inc. accelerates the ICF’s transition to becoming an agile and powerful force in growing Cosmos. Skip is a trusted, user-driven team that has earned its reputation by building excellent, highly-used products. After assessing multiple options, and doing an extensive review of community feedback, the ICF decided to join forces with Skip for its next chapter.

Skip’s expertise and closeness to builders will be key in revitalizing the stewardship of Cosmos, which is defined by three pillars:

1. Bringing in strong leadership with a hands-on approach.
2. Unifying the Cosmos Hub, stack, and ecosystem.
3. Embarking on a focused mission to expand Cosmos, its user-base, and its reach.

1. Bringing in strong leadership with a hands-on approach.

In this new chapter, the ICF will:

• Restructure to be closer to the ecosystem: Interchain Inc., as a subsidiary of the ICF, will be deeply ingrained with users and builders in the ecosystem and help the ICF accomplish its mission more directly. This includes unifying the support given to developers, increasing accountability to Cosmos teams, and building new programs to attract new builders into the ecosystem.
• Transition from the ICF’s distributed development model (the “stewards”) to in-house development: Individual stewardship has brought technical excellence to each component of the Interchain stack. Now, the ICF will switch to a unified, in-house approach to bring these components together and form a best-in-class platform for building decentralized applications.
• Build a product and growth-driven organization: Interchain Inc. is building new product, engineering, growth, business development, and marketing teams to support the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos ecosystem’s success end-to-end. We have opened a multitude of roles for Interchain Inc. — join us!

While the stewardship model and funding program will be spun down, the development of the Interchain Stack will forever remain open-source and open to external contributions. There will be many ways to collaborate as well in the future.

The leadership of the former stewards has been instrumental for Cosmos. We are extremely grateful to the core teams and those who have contributed over the past six years and will work closely with each steward, security included, to transfer knowledge, support final key milestones, and hand off critical components as Interchain Inc. prepares to lead development.

2. Unifying the Cosmos Hub, Stack, and Ecosystem.

In this new chapter, the ICF will:

• Massively invest in improving the Cosmos end-user experience: Cosmos should be a breeze to onboard to and a joy to use. Skip’s expertise in product development, especially chain abstraction, will redefine the ICF’s strategy for ecosystem growth. Powerful technology is not enough. Developers need a platform that helps them distribute and grow their products.
• Develop the Interchain Stack into a cohesive, integrated platform: This will unlock much faster iteration cycles for improving performance, ease of use, and reliability. It will also enable Interchain Inc. to expand the Interchain Stack to new architectures and environments, like sovereign rollups, L2s, and restaked services.
• Integrate the Cosmos Hub and ATOM as key components of the Cosmos vision:
  The Hub, and ATOM, have a crucial role to play in the growth and success of Cosmos. Interchain Inc. will create its own Hub team comprised of Skip leadership and engineering talent, cementing it as a primary focus for the ICF. The Hub will become a true hub, connecting Cosmos applications to users, liquidity, and services, helping each of them thrive. Consequently, the growth of Cosmos apps will drive growth to the Hub, creating a flywheel to lift the ecosystem up.

The Cosmos Hub, stack, and ecosystem, when acting as one, can drive massive expansion and succeed in building an open, thriving, user-owned internet.

3. Embarking on a focused mission to expand Cosmos, its user base, and its reach.

With a focused team, stack, and mission, the ICF together with Interchain Inc. will strive towards our next goal: to 100x liquidity in Cosmos. We are tackling this in four ways:

1. Create new ecosystem liquidity: by creating opportunities for developers to build new technical use cases and launch new assets, projects, or applications. This can include efforts beyond innovation, such as reducing the cost and complexity of appchain development, increasing infrastructure availability, accelerating builder outreach and onboarding, as well as simplifying multi-chain app experiences for users.
2. Onboard external liquidity: by improving user onboarding, interoperability, and composability to connect Cosmos to the wider world. For example, by supporting more native VMs in the stack, additional development languages such as Rust, and the launch of IBC’s v2, IBC Eureka, we can broaden Cosmos’ reach off-chain and within other ecosystems.
3. Unlock existing staked liquidity: by starting new efforts to unlock the vast amounts of staked liquidity in the ecosystem by creating new ways it can be used productively, for example through novel PoA applications, yield programs, and liquid staking.
4. Expand existing ecosystem liquidity: by deepening the attractiveness of the existing ecosystem through unified marketing, improved app experience, and better integrations with the Interchain Stack. Additionally, we plan to fully unleash the possibilities of the Cosmos Hub to impact the ecosystem’s growth more directly.

From now, until the end of the year — the Interchain Foundation and Interchain Inc. will be highly focused on restructuring both organizations to prepare for 2025 and our new strategy. The road ahead is challenging, yet we have an unprecedented, strong commitment to its urgency and importance. We welcome everyone to join us in taking Cosmos to new horizons.

We will dive into two of these pillars above (unification and growth) in further articles in the coming weeks. Join us on the 12th of December in a live-streamed town hall on the Cosmos X account with Josh Cincinnati, Foundation Council President, Maxime Monod, Foundation Council Member, incoming executives of Interchain Inc. Maghnus Mareneck and Barry Plunkett, and Ethan Buchman, Co-Founder of Cosmos.

Interchain Inc. is hiring — apply here, roles are continuously opening.