Unification: Unifying the Cosmos Hub, Stack, and Ecosystem.

In part one of three of this series, we dive into our plan to reunite the three pillars of Cosmos and supercharge their development.

Interchain
The Interchain Foundation
5 min readDec 13, 2024

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In the last few days, the ICF has embarked on a transformative journey, completely redefining how it executes on its mission. With the acquisition of Skip, we are solidifying our effort to grow the Cosmos Hub, the Interchain Stack stack, and the Cosmos ecosystem under a singular, focused organization: Interchain Inc.

One of the biggest changes is the ICF’s decision to sunset the stewardship system, and focus contributions to the development of core stack components under Interchain Inc.

Supported by Skip’s leadership joining Interchain Inc., this is an unprecedented step for the ICF to become a more agile, aligned, and growth-focused ecosystem partner for the entire Cosmos.

At the end of this article, you can find a detailed breakdown of maintenance plans for key Interchain Stack components and libraries.

The Evolution of Cosmos’ Core Technology Stack

For the past five years, Cosmos has been at the forefront of blockchain innovation. Our principles of sovereignty, permissionless interoperability, and decentralization drove the development of the Interchain Stack and built a vibrant ecosystem in Cosmos consisting of hundreds of chains.

The Interchain Stack, composed of the Cosmos SDK, the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), CometBFT, CosmWasm, and CosmJS — was developed through a distributed model in which third-party, “steward” teams were funded to lead the vision for and maintain each component separately.

Through the work of steward teams such as Binary Builders, Confio, Cosmology, Hypha, IG, Informal Systems, Zondax, and many other contributors, each component thrived individually, and in its own specific vertical.

As we enter a stage of Growth for Cosmos, we decided to focus our contributions to the vision and development of the stack through Interchain Inc, including security.

The shift will enable key changes needed for the ecosystem’s growth:

  1. Acceleration of engineering excellence
  2. Development of full-stack product initiatives
  3. Unification of developer support and guidance

Acceleration of engineering excellence:

As an ecosystem, we need to shorten our feedback cycles and ship faster without sacrificing security or reliability. A streamlined team structure will allow us to do this. Interchain Inc. will allow us to employ consistent standards and processes across the development of all components, share best practices and infrastructure quickly across all teams, and reduce general coordination overhead. The result will be a leaner development team that can be more responsive to user needs.

Development of full-stack product initiatives:

With deeper unification of the different teams and components of the stack, we can successfully take on big initiatives that require coordination across all components of the stack. We are especially excited to work on paradigm-changing evolutions of the Interchain stack that have the potential to redefine what Cosmos is — expanding to rollups, developing easy-to-use privacy primitives, improving latency or throughput 100x, making the Cosmos ZK friendly… All of these will benefit from this new structure, where we can efficiently orchestrate complex changes across multiple components of the stack.

Unification of developer support and guidance:

With a cohesive team, we are able to offer an end-to-end developer support platform for the Interchain Stack that reflects the reality that devs usually use Cosmos SDK, IBC, and Comet together. We’ll offer live support that developers can rely on for any issues they’re having across the stack, regardless of which component (or components) are involved. We’ll also unify documentation, resources, and tutorials, so developers can learn and leverage the whole platform effectively. All together, we’ll work to ensure that developers have the learning and support resources they need for their whole journey.

The short-term roadmap: Getting the basics right to onboard new users and capital

The goal of the 6–9 month Interchain Stack roadmap right now is to help developers onboard new users and capital to the Cosmos ecosystem by focusing on the basics

  • CometBFT — Reducing block times to improve user experience, especially cross-chain user experiences. Using Cosmos, and navigating the ecosystem, should feel as seamless and fast as using 1 chain. Milliseconds matter.
  • Cosmos SDK — Finalizing the Cosmos SDK V2 work alongside Binary Builders to massively improve performance and eliminate the need for many teams to maintain forks.
  • IBC — Expanding the Inter-blockchain Communication Protocol to connect Cosmos applications to users, liquidity, and use-cases beyond Cosmos (Ethereum, Solana, Move).
  • Skip Go — Open sourcing the Skip Go platform to facilitate integrations with many new bridges, to allow faster onboarding to the ecosystem; as well as integrations to DEXes, for accessing their liquidity from any chain in a unified manner.

Our first new initiative: An Open Source EVM on Cosmos

For years, we have heard that most Cosmos chains want a simple, reliable, free path to add EVM functionality (e.g. Solidity smart contracts, Ethereum JSON-RPC compatibility, Metamask support) to their app chains. It’s essential that the solution is performant and supports automatic “interop” between the EVM and CosmosSDK.

We have begun working with Injective and Cronos to make an improved fork of Ethermint open source and maintain it as part of the official Interchain stack. This will include a lot of improvements over the old, unmaintained version of Ethermint:

  • Bank module / ERC20 token equivalency that means Metamask users will be able to see/use their Cosmos tokens, and Cosmos wallet users will be able to see/use their ERC20s
  • Precompile contracts that allow Solidity smart contracts to interact with Cosmos SDK modules (and vice versa)
  • Support for Cosmos SDK V50 with V0.52.x coming soon

In the future, we hope to make other popular VMs (e.g. SVM, MoveVM) first class citizens of the Interchain Stack too.

Interchain Inc. has a new focus on the Interchain Stack & Cosmos Hub

Newly Acquired Skip IP

With the acquisition, Interchain Inc. has acquired all of Skip’s IP and existing software, including Skip:Go — the end-to-end onboarding platform for Cosmos apps.

Skip:Go has become a mainstay in the Cosmos ecosystem, and processes between 50–80% of all IBC volume across the Cosmos. Interchain Inc. will continue the development of Skip:Go as a core piece of Cosmos infrastructure, integrating it deeply with the Interchain stack as a chain-abstraction suite. Additionally, Interchain Inc. will strive to deploy any on-chain components of Skip:Go natively on the Cosmos Hub.

Cosmos Hub Development

The primary focus for Interchain Inc. will be the acceleration and development of the Cosmos Hub. Interchain Inc. will start conversations with the community and ecosystem in early 2025 to develop a new product proposal and roadmap for the Hub, ATOM, and its various products.

Maintenance & Hand-off Plans for the Interchain Stack:

For more information on the maintenance and development plan for existing Interchain stack software, click here. The ICF will condense its contributions to core components, seeking to impact its mission with more focus, and has shared in the above-shared repository the current breakdown and statuses.

The Road Ahead

Aligning the Cosmos Hub, stack, and ecosystem marks a pivotal moment for Cosmos. It is a long-overdue step toward competing and innovating.

We are excited about Cosmos’ future as we build our teams up, and refine the roadmap. Together, we aim to build a unified, collaborative future — one where sovereign ecosystems work in harmony to define the next generation of the user-owned internet.

Stay tuned for part two of this series: Expansion focused on the growth of Cosmos, and its ecosystem.

Interchain Inc. is hiring! — apply here for open positions.

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The Interchain Foundation
The Interchain Foundation

Published in The Interchain Foundation

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) is a Swiss foundation pushing the frontiers of blockchain-related infrastructure. As stewards of the Interchain, we fund and advance the creation of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem. Visit interchain.io

Interchain
Interchain

Written by Interchain

As stewards of the interchain, we advance the development of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem. https://interchain.io/

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