Ecosystem

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) runs a general-purpose funding program to fund projects that advance the ICF’s mission of supporting open, decentralized networks. In 2019, they ramped up the program significantly. They put out four Requests for Proposals aligned with their primary focus of “Expanding Environments”, and a separate RFP for a “General Application” to improve information aggregation about network validators. The IFC continued to fund projects outside of these specific RFPs, though most of the funded engineering projects have sufficient overlap with an RFP category. A number of community and social good efforts were also funded in 2019.

In this post, the authors review the projects funded in 2019, the reasons for funding each project, where you can find information about their progress, and what’s next in 2020. A full list of projects funded, including those from earlier years, can be found on Github.

The ICF has funded a wide diversity of organizations in the Cosmos ecosystem to help deliver on its mission (see our 2019 Year in Review). While All in Bits has been the largest recipient of funding in its service as an anchor in the Cosmos, over the course of 2019, many entities took on significant leadership-roles and responsibilities for different components of the technology and the community. Now, as All in Bits undergoes organizational restructuring, it’s worth recognizing the diversity and resilience of the Cosmos ecosystem.

For some entities, the ICF constitutes a significant amount of their current funding, and they’re excited to see them taking steps towards longer term sustainability and sources of funding outside the ICF. For others, the ICF has contributed only a small amount of their total funding, but they are nonetheless taking on important leadership roles within the community. In both cases, the ICF is interested in seeing these entities, and many others, achieve long term financial sustainability, whether in the form of a traditional technology company, a new public Proof-of-Stake blockchain with its own self-sustaining economics, or some other form of novel business structure.

In this post, the authors highlights a few of these independent leaders in the Cosmos community, what they are up to, and how they are financed.

· Agoric

· Regen

· Lunie

· Figment

· Chorus One

· Other Organizations

Of course, there are many more amazing independent organizations making significant contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem — too many to detail in a single post. They’ve highlighted some of the most prominent ones playing a leading role in the current and future evolution of the Cosmos Hub. In the future the IFC hopes to profile many others, to shine further light on the true extent of decentralization and sustainability in the Cosmos. These include teams from IrisNet, BHarvest, Forbole, Binance, Commercio, Persistence, Certus One, Cosmostation, and so many more, all of whom have made major contributions to the core Cosmos software, protocols, tools, and/or community. Some of these teams are mentioned explicitly in reviews of the funding program, or in the ICF’s official funding program repository, but many others have never received funding from the ICF, and yet continue to make major contributions to the ecosystem.

The team is also excited about upcoming developments pertaining to the engineering teams at All in Bits and the Interchain Foundation, some of which have been in the works for months. More details are coming soon!

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Cosmos Community Contributor Grants:

Check out the Cosmos Community Contributors, recognized to have run local meetups, built visualizers or made translations.

These weeks updates:

Akash Network:

Akash new collaboration with Vitwit:

Althea Network:

Althea Development Update #82: Direct router deposit with Wyre!: With the new Beta 11 release users can now use the Wyre widget to buy and send funds directly to their router.

The team has been dreaming about a system like this for a very long time. While Wyre pay isn’t available in every state or region where it is available users won’t have to navigate Coinbase any longer.

The process of buying and then withdrawing to the router was essentailly the largest usability barrier.

e-Money:

Launch of the e-Money Cosmos zone is scheduled for the end of March, bringing EUR, CHF, NOK, SEK and DKK to the interchain ecosystem.

e-Money presale has started.

Forbole:

IOV:

IRISnet:

Kava:

Binance now supports Deposits and Withdrawals for KAVA Mainnet!

FinNexus Hosts Kava Labs’ Aaron Choi in its Weekly Chat (2/17/20): All About the KAVA token and the Future of DeFi.

Brian Kerr, CEO of Kava Labs joins the End of the Chain podcast with host Samuel McCulloch to discuss cross blockchain liquidity provisions. Brian Kerr, Co-Founder and CEO of Kava Labs joins the End of the Chain podcast with host Samuel McCulloch to discuss cross blockchain liquidity provisions. Brian makes a great argument for why instead of protocol maximalism, we should all be “liquidity maximalists”.

Brian Kerr, Kava Labs CEO, talk about KAVA rollout strategy and partnership with Bitrue Exchange:

Recap of an excellent Kava / Sunny Aggarwal AMA now available:

LikeCoin:

Kin Ko talk on LikeCoin latest developments and concepts: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0QwCW1ZYjEm4kWjEHjDaKB?si=DE5GBwBQTXatpijdii9FnQ

Loom Network:

LOOM is now available for trading on Coinbase Pro in New York:

Regen Network:

Community Development Call from Feb. 19th is now live on YouTube and transcribed in the Regen Network Blog:

Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 4: Daniel Christian Wahl: In this episode, Gregory interviews Daniel Christian Wahl, the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures.

Sentinel:

Terra:

THORChain:

Other:

Band Protocol launches Wenchang testnet, the alpha release of their Cosmos-based blockchain for data requests & payments.

The FOAM team publicly announced the release of Kepler, the official Haskell language SDK for building blockchain applications backed by the Tendermint consensus engine.

Cosmos India started the College Community Program on Feb 15 with NMIT Bangalore being the first college in the program:

Commercio Network announces the start of the dev of Sacco & CommercioSDK in C#:

Cryptium Labs updated website:

Desmosprimer phase 2 is ending soon. Get your DesmosTokens: https://primer.desmos.network

Cosmonauts World new additions to Cosmos ecosystem https://cosmonauts.world

Playlist of videos on Cyber’s roadmap, workshops & future plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMUatLPfNJM&list=PLOcP3DXQoNUXmh7ob0Fm6p12L20zn0zbT

Chorus One:

Chorus One is now live as a new Chainlink node operator:

32 Coda: Sound Money and SNARKs with Emre Tekisalp and Brad Cohn: While most other upcoming smart contract platforms seem to have identified throughput as the major bottleneck for why blockchains haven’t found mass adoption yet, Coda has focused on a different part of the stack that they perceive to be a much more important issue plaguing blockchain, which is how long it takes for new participants to verify the blockchain. Coda is using recursive zk-SNARK technology which enables them to create a constant-sized blockchain, making it really easy for clients to verify the correctness of the ledger.

In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Emre Tekisalp, director of BD, and Brad Cohn, strategy & operations from the O(1) Labs team to discuss Coda’s approach to building a new blockchain platform. The podcast starts out going into the background of the two, a high-level overview of Coda follows and we discuss what Coda’s unique design enables and cover the go-to-market strategy of the project. From there the discussion leads us to discuss monetary policy and the implications of taxes on Proof-of-Stake networks. After this quick detour, they get back to discussing how the Coda protocol technically works leading to an extensive celebration of zk-SNARK technology during which Brad and Emre explain the progress in the field and why zk-SNARKs are so exciting. Finally, they wrap up the episode with some information on Coda’s Genesis testnet program.