ICF Funding Program 2024

The Interchain Stack — composed of CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol and CosmWasm — is a modular, customizable and reliable technology stack for building application-specific blockchains. In stewarding this free-to-use and fully open-source software stack, our goal at the Interchain Foundation is to fund the functionality for the Interchain Stack that best serves the needs of the various sovereign communities that are powered by these technologies.

With a commitment to foster long-term sustainability and growth, our funding strategy for 2024 is shaped by a focus on addressing the critical deliverables for the Interchain Stack — as identified by the development teams and the broader builders community through the roadmap consultation process.

To address the most pressing needs of the interchain communities, the development teams have produced a comprehensive roadmap that balances technical and market priorities. It is the first time the Interchain Stack has a unified roadmap, and going forward, the development teams will further refine the roadmap process — giving builders and users further opportunities to be involved — ensuring a balanced and well-rounded perspective.

Our strategy is to fund essential components of that roadmap that are crucial for the builders’ community, particularly in areas where commercial funding is scarce.

Overall Funding for 2024

For 2024, the ICF has earmarked $26.4 million for our Funding Program — to fund the development and adoption of the Interchain Stack.

To ensure the long-term sustainability of the ICF and our ability to fund the core development of the Interchain Stack, we are further focusing our Funding Program while reducing the overall budget of the program — a continuation of the approach initiated in mid-2022.

The proposed roadmap for 2024, reviewed and collaborated on by the community, outlines aspirational goals for the Interchain Stack. Our approach at the ICF is to fill the gaps where community or commercial funding is less accessible, allocating appropriate resources to ensure that the Interchain Stack remains at the industry’s cutting edge. As the interchain ecosystem grows, more teams and entities are developing custom modules and contributing to the core development of the tech stack. In line with this, we encourage communities to bolster initiatives through their funding pools, aligning communal interests with ecosystem growth.

In addition to the $19.2 million core stack funding detailed below, the 2024 Funding Program budget will allocate:

• $3.5 million to the engineering of the Cosmos Hub, which together with the community funding approved in the recent governance vote, will help fund the teams (Informal and Hypha) maintaining the Cosmos Hub;
• $1 million to the Interchain Builders Program, to work on BD efforts that further increase adoption of the Interchain Stack by web2 and web3 projects;
• Funding for the Interchain Developer Academy and other developer onboarding initiatives, to be defined early next year.

The remainder of the budget will be kept as a strategic reserve to accommodate for changes and adjustments that we may need to make during the course of 2024.

In addition to this Funding Program budget, we are glad to announce that we will be restarting our Grants Program in 2024, giving a wider range of organizations the opportunity to receive ICF funding for the vital work they do in the ecosystem. More details on the Grants Program will be shared next year.

Breakdown of 2024 Funding

The following summarizes our funding commitments for each area of the Interchain Stack, for the coming year. It’s important to note that the figures presented are approximate values, rounded for ease of presentation.

1. CometBFT: Modularity, Efficiency and Stability

We will be allocating $3,000,000 to Informal Systems for work on CometBFT in 2024.

CometBFT is the beating heart of our ecosystem — the consensus layer that revolutionized the PoS blockchain landscape.

Informal Systems has maintained CometBFT, and its predecessor Tendermint Core, since late 2022. The team recently finalized and launched groundbreaking functionality, including ABCI++.

For 2024, as well as maintaining CometBFT, we will be funding Informal Systems to deliver in the following key areas:

• Improve modularity, allowing for the consensus engine to be applied to a wider set of use cases
• Improve efficiency, through both bandwidth and storage optimizations, thus ensuring CometBFT keeps being a relevant and a highly performant consensus engine
• Improving stress testing and other QA elements, to ensure CometBFT continues to remain a stable and secure consensus engine, regardless of the load put on it by growing web3 dApp adoption.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

2. Cosmos SDK: Modularity and Expanded Composability

We will be allocating a total of $4,500,000 to Binary Builders & Zondax, for work on and related to Cosmos SDK.

Cosmos SDK is the world’s most popular framework for building application-specific blockchains. It is the native application-building toolkit at the core of the interchain, allowing developers to quickly and easily build and deploy blockchains, reducing time to market, using a framework that is stable, secure and highly performant.

The team at Binary Builders were previously at the Interchain Foundation, and have been working on the Cosmos SDK since 2020. The team recently pushed out the highly anticipated Cosmos SDK v0.50 — a huge stride in the evolution of the toolkit, ushering in an era of enhanced modularity and performance. The team at Zondax has been a crucial partner in the development of the Cosmos SDK, working on cryptographic solutions and Ledger hardware support for all Cosmos-SDK appchains in the interchain, since 2018.

For 2024, as well as maintaining Cosmos SDK, we will be allocating $3,500,000 to Binary Builders to deliver in the following key areas:

• To significantly improve the modularity and composability of the Cosmos SDK, deliver a way for users to write custom modules in different languages, thus expanding the use cases for the SDK to rapidly expand across ecosystems.
• To increase the composability and addressable market for the Cosmos SDK, adding fraud and/or validity proofs to support integration with Rollups
• To improve both the efficiency and maintainability of the code, undertake rewriting the Bank, Staking, Mint and Distribution modules of the Cosmos SDK.
• To help improve infrastructure provider operations and chain stability, deliver a method to allow node operators to upgrade their binaries before coordinated upgrade heights.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

The team at Zondax will be allocated $1,000,000 in 2024, to deliver the following:

• Maintenance and development of Cosmos SDK, with a special focus on keys and cryptography-related aspects
• Ensure the Cosmos Ledger App continues to maintain feature parity with Cosmos SDK and is supported on all Ledger hardware devices.
• Aid in redesigning the Cryptography module to ensure modularity and future adaptability, accommodating for broad spectrum of cryptographic techniques, including Threshold Signatures and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).

View the full Scope of Work here >>

3. IBC Protocol: Exponential growth across blockchain ecosystems

We will be allocating a total of $7,500,000 to Informal Systems, Interchain GmbH and Strangelove Ventures.

Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) is the leading blockchain interoperability protocol, enabling secure and permissionless transfer of arbitrary data. IBC’s light client-based interoperability removes the need for a trusted third party in cross-chain interactions, securing tens of billions in annual value transfer without a single exploit since launch. Outside of Cosmos SDK chains, IBC has now been connected to the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems, with integrations coming soon to the NEAR Protocol, Avalanche, Hyperledger and Corda blockchains.

ICF
The IBC team at the Interchain Foundation maintains and develops the Interchain Standards (ICS specs), the Go implementation of IBC used by 100+ chains, and coordinates the development of multiple IBC light clients, middlewares and related infrastructure and tooling.

For 2024, we allocated $3,500,000 to maintain the feature-rich ibc-go and to work on:

• Expanding the user base of ibc-go, by scoping an integration with the OP Stack and Rollkit.
• Improving the usability of IBC significantly, by enabling cross-chain queries via Interchain Accounts, e.g. returning the account balance in an acknowledgment, improving the usability of middleware, and enabling workflows with multi-channel atomicity e.g. with transfer and interchain accounts.
• Maintaining supported releases of ibc-go, improving testing packages, E2E testing and CI improvements.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

Informal Systems
Informal Systems have been working on the Rust-based implementations of IBC since 2020. Their work resulted in the creation of ibc-rs — the Rust native implementation of IBC — and the creation of the ever-popular Hermes relayer, which they created in 2020 and maintained since then.

For 2024, the team will be allocated $2,000,000 in funding — $1m each for Hermes and ibc-rs — to work on, among other things:

• Level up the onboarding and documentation material for IBC-rs
• Continue the next iteration of modularization of Hermes, slowly transforming this IBC relayer into an SDK allowing teams to build their own specialized version of Hermes.
• Expansion of IBC into the Sovereign SDK.
• As well as E2E testing improvements, parity and integration of the newest features from CometBFT and SDK into the Rust IBC stack, WASM client relaying, and exploratory defragmentation work.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

Strangelove
Strangelove has been a contributor to the IBC protocol since 2021. The team at Strangelove has developed the IBC-go relayer, the e2e InterchainTest suite, the Horcrux multi-party-computation signing service for CometBFT validators, the Async Interchain Query module and Packet Forward Middleware. The team also contributed to the development of the Wasm IBC Light Client.

In 2024, the ICF will be allocating Strangelove $2,000,000 for:

• Significantly improve the experience of developing for IBC by further developing the InterchainTest suite, to support multiple languages and with extensive documentation.
• Providing ongoing maintenance and support for users of InterchainTest, Go Relayer, Packet Forward Middleware, Async Interchain Query module, Wasm Light Client, and Horcrux.
• Drive quantifiable adoption to ensure critical IBC channels are properly tested with InterchainTest

View the full Scope of Work here >>

4. CosmWasm: Enhancing dApp Functionality and IBC Connectivity

We will be allocating $2,500,000 to Confio GmbH for work on CosmWasm in 2024.

CosmWasm is a smart contracting framework built for the Cosmos SDK, focusing on security, performance, and interoperability. Outside of the EVM world, CosmWasm may be the most widely smart contracting platform for public blockchains. With the near-native execution speed of WebAssembly (Wasm), the performance hit for the virtualization layer is minimal, allowing for complex computations practically impossible on Ethereum.

Born out of HackAtom 2019, Confio GmbH has been the developer and sole maintainer of CosmWasm since its creation. CosmWasm today is used in over 30 app chains, including Line’s NFT chain, which boasts an impressive user base of 200 million.

For 2024, we will be funding Confio to deliver in the following key areas:

• Maintain and support CosmWasm, including bug fixes, ensuring compatibility with new releases of Cosmos SDK and IBC, and improving test coverages.
• Improve adoption of CosmWasm, by providing DevRel support, creating better documentation for dApp developers, as well as reviewing third-party contributions upstreamed to CosmWasm.
• Significantly improving the IBC connectivity for CosmWasm, including support for contracts to react to timeouts and package acknowledgments; implementing Packet Forward Middleware in smart contracts; and allowing for in-protocol IBC fee support — all features necessary to drive IBC adoption.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

5. CosmJS: Bridging Gaps in Cosmos SDK Compatibility

We will be allocating $155,000 to Cosmology, for work on and related to CosmJS.

CosmJS is a library that helps developers integrate their JavaScript-based clients — frontend user interfaces or server-side clients — with Cosmos SDK blockchains. It is an essential utility required for end-user adoption of dApps built with the Interchain Stack.

Initially developed by Confio, the team at Cosmology has been contributing to CosmJS since 2022. Their work on the cosmjs-types library, which powers almost all transaction encoding in the ecosystem, currently has 105,000+ weekly downloads. Among other tooling, Cosmology’s Telescope, has allowed large portions of CosmJS to be automated, and they continue to make CosmJS leaner and more efficient.

For 2024, as well as maintaining CosmJS, we will be funding Cosmology to deliver in the following key areas:

• To ensure that CosmJS remains robust and up-to-date with the latest encoders, implement Proto Visual encoding — a more compact and efficient way of encoding messages than amino.
• Rebuild CosmJS’ base functionality to make it leaner and more efficient, but to also ensure faster upgrade turnarounds to keep it up-to-date with Cosmos SDK releases.

View the full Scope of Work here >>

6. Security Audits: Integral to All Projects

We will be allocating a total of $1,500,000 for Security Audits for the Interchain Stack.

This funding is primarily for the audits of the key product upgrades and rewrites mentioned in the 2024 roadmap, including, but not limited to: auditing CometBFT releases; the refactored versions of SDK’s Bank, Staking, Mint and Distribution modules; audits of ibc-go, ibc-rs and the Hermes relayer.

In addition to this $1.5 million to be spent on audits of the Interchain Stack, the ICF also maintains the ecosystem’s security incident response program, as well as the Bug Bounty program for the ecosystem’s core technologies.

Conclusion

As we step into 2024, the ICF remains committed to its mission to nurture and sustain the interchain ecosystem, adapting our strategies to meet the evolving needs of our vibrant community.

View the full scope of work for the teams being funded by the ICF in 2024. For additional context, you can also view the full Interchain Stack 2024 Roadmap here.

And lastly, keep an eye out for our 2023 Annual Report, coming early next year.