Meet the Teams: IBC at the Interchain Foundation
As stewards of the interchain, the Interchain Foundation (ICF) advances the creation of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem. We do this by building foundational protocols and funding teams working on developing and furthering the adoption of the Interchain Stack.
The ICF’s IBC Team stewards the IBC Protocol and develops and maintains the IBC specification and ibc-go, the IBC implementation in Golang used by the majority of IBC-enabled chains.
In this Meet the Teams series, written by the teams that the ICF works with, we explore their work and how it benefits the interchain.
Introduction to the IBC Team at the Interchain Foundation
The IBC Team at the Interchain Foundation was founded in 2020 to develop and launch the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. We steward the protocol, coordinating its technical product roadmap towards shared goals across contributing organizations. We also develop and maintain the IBC specification and ibc-go, the IBC implementation in Golang used by more than 90% of the IBC-enabled chains.
Our team is committed to expanding the adoption of IBC and improving developer experience with the protocol. We envision a future where seamless interoperability unites diverse on-chain communities and applications, fostering a permissionless digital landscape. We aim to cultivate a user-friendly environment where secure and reliable communication is the norm and innovative, feature-rich applications thrive.
Our team is responsible for developing and maintaining the core IBC Protocol, including the IBC spec and the ibc-go implementation, coordinating IBC product development across multiple organizations, and promoting the protocol to builders. Team leaders include IBC Product Lead Susannah Evans, Project Lead Carlos Rodriguez Vega, and Lead Protocol Architect Aditya Sripal. The team is a mix of new and long-term members, some of whom have been working on the protocol since 2020. This blend ensures an influx of new ideas and continuity of knowledge and information-sharing. The team has collectively over 100 years of experience in software development and blockchain technology.
As part of our commitment to decentralization and fairness, the IBC team participates in the same technical roadmapping and funding process as all the other distributed development teams funded by ICF.
Developing the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol
The IBC team at the Interchain Foundation launched the IBC Protocol in March 2021. Its robust implementation and security have driven explosive growth. Today, 116 chains are IBC-connected, and the protocol transfers $2.1Bn USD or more in asset value every 30 days. 2M monthly users are active in the interchain.
[The protocol’s] performance, coupled with IBC’s flawless security record, highlights IBC’s prominence as one of the most utilized and reliable cross-chain communication protocols.
We designed IBC keeping in mind the structure and function of TCP/IP, the protocol that underlies the internet. It is a general-purpose message-passing protocol, allowing for the development of cross-chain features that go far beyond simple token transfers.
Our team coordinated the development of industry-first features like the Callbacks Middleware for complex token transfer + follow-up action workflows and Interchain Accounts with queries, which remains the only cross-chain account control feature on the market. Our primary ICF-funded collaborators are Informal Systems, who develop ibc-rs and the Hermes relayer, and Strangelove, who maintain the interchaintest framework, the Go relayer, Packet-Forward Middleware, and the ibc-apps repository. In addition, we collaborate with ecosystem partners on the protocol’s development.
As of writing, the ibc-go protocol has never been exploited. We endeavour to keep it that way by maintaining strict security and testing standards. We are grateful to the IBC developer community and the Interchain Stack’s security services provider, Amulet, for their continued support in maintaining the security practices that have contributed to this success.
What’s Next
The IBC team at the Interchain Foundation is focused on the strategic goals of ecosystem expansion and protocol usability. In 2024, we are improving the usability and composability of existing features such as Interchain Accounts and fungible token transfer. We are working on simplifying the core protocol so that it is easier for non-Cosmos-SDK chains and rollups to join the IBC network, including chains using the EVM.
Follow the IBC Protocol X (Twitter) for the latest protocol updates. For developer news and community, join the interchain Discord, hop into our Telegram announcements channel, and meet us at our monthly developer community call hosted through the IBC developer Google Group.
Thank you to Aditya Sripal, Lead Protocol Architect at IBC, for the context of the team’s history and founding, and thank you to Susannah Evans, IBC Product Lead, and Rob and Daniela at the Interchain Foundation for your detailed input on this post.
