Social encounters

by All in Bits (Tendermint Inc)

The Cosmos Hub recently launched its mainnet, which also marked the launch of the Cosmos Network. Analogous to the vision of the Internet, which was to interconnect smaller networks through a common set of protocols like TCP/IP, the vision of Cosmos is to become a major part of the Interchain, a network of interoperable and scalable blockchain token economies.

The end goal of Cosmos is to interconnect heterogeneous blockchains by defining better and more modern ways to build these blockchains using new tools like Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK.

The launch of the Cosmos Hub is an important step towards the realization of this vision. It is also a big event for the larger blockchain community.

Multiple pieces of software (Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, Amino, IAVL+, …) were used to build a new blockchain that launched in March. These pieces are open-source and designed so that people can customize them, upstream modules, and ultimately launch blockchains of their own. Blockchains built with these tools are scalable, secure, sovereign, fully customizable, and soon, they will also be interoperable. These tools usher in a new era — the blockchain Space Age — for the blockchain ecosystem.

What Cosmos brings to the table

1. A production-grade BFT engine that can operate on the public Internet

2. A stable, upgradable SDK for building public or private chains from scratch

3. A fully-functional Proof-of-Stake layer

What’s next

First, let’s recount all the new production-ready tools battle-tested by the launch of the Cosmos Hub:

Tendermint Core, a BFT consensus engine that can operate at scale on the public Internet.

The Cosmos SDK, a modular framework that lets you build production-ready blockchains on top of Tendermint Core.

A full suite of SDK modules to deploy a Proof-of-Stake incentive layer for your public blockchain with full incentives implemented in-protocol.

With these tools, you can build a custom public Proof-of-Stake blockchain application from scratch that can accommodate hundreds of transactions per second. This is a first step the team has taken along a long roadmap.

The next milestone for the Cosmos ecosystem is the specification and deployment of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). The goal is to make the specification as general-purpose as possible, so that it can become the de facto Interchain communication protocol used across every chain.

by All in Bits (Tendermint Inc)

Just prior to the Interchain Conversations, a gregarious gang of cross-blockchain interoperation aficionados from Tendermint Inc, the Interchain Foundation, and Agoric gathered together in Berlin for an intense two-day work session focused on the IBC protocol. The session consisted of specification review, multi-color protocol whiteboarding, and vigorous design debates, and resulted in many useful conclusions as to both the desired form of IBC v1 and compelling directions in which to take the protocol in the future.

IBC protocol architecture

Day One

Day one started out with a recap of the protocol architecture designed thus far, as outlined in the IBC architecture document. They discussed the host state machine requirements (ICS 23, 24), client (ICS 2), connection (ICS 3), and channel (ICS 4) abstractions, relayer requirements (ICS 18), and higher-level module-facing interfaces (ICS 25 & 26), and drew out the whole dataflow system on the whiteboard.

Categories of failure

Once the team had a collective understanding of how each individual IBC component worked, they examined what would happen if a certain one didn’t. They categorized failures into five distinct groups, and considered how best to architect consensus equivocation detection, packet acknowledgements & timeouts, and connection/channel closure & recovery into the protocol in order to provide applications with clear ways of handling different failure cases.

Handling packet & channel failures

The day concluded with a discussion of two advanced inter-blockchain communication feature-sets: multi-hop routing and directed-acyclic-graph cross-chain partial packet ordering. Three kinds of multi-hop routing, with various trust requirements and storage / execution / latency cost tradeoffs, were outlined: application-layer multihop, validity-proxy multihop, and routing-layer multihop:

They decided to prioritize shipping v1 of IBC, and thus omit these features for now, but both in-protocol multi-hop routing and directed-acyclic-graph ordering are fascinating research directions that will add useful capabilities — perhaps to IBC v2! Discussion has continued on Github (multi-hop routing, DAG packet ordering), and IBC v1 will appropriately choose channel & connection data structures to facilitate future multi-hop support.

Day Two

How best to acknowledge packet receipt?

The second day of the workshop started with a deliberation on acknowledgements: how best to inform senders that their packets had been received and executed upon, while minimizing the amount of computation and storage necessary. The team discussed whether acknowledgements should be solely an indicator of packet receipt or whether they should be synchronous with packet execution and whether they should happen only on failures or also on success.

IBC <-> Agoric Integration options

Day two continued with a presentation by Mark Miller on Agoric’s object-capability stack, partitioned into two parts: relative routing and e-rights pegging. After the presentations, they discussed Agoric-IBC integration possibilities and came up with a plan to merge Agoric’s VatTP cross-machine transport layer and IBC:

Finally, they listed out planned IBC implementations in various languages and discussed how best to coordinate between implementers, construct language-agnostic specification-compliance test-suites, and safely deploy the IBC protocol into production.

IBC implementations & testing strategy

Following the workshop, conclusions were summarized and partitioned into separate issues, the subset of which required for IBC v1 have been collected in a milestone. Joon and Christopher are now back to monkeys-on-keyboards finalizing the v1 specification and prototyping the implementation — they look forward to future collaboration between the Tendermint company, the Interchain Foundation, and Agoric, and they invite help from anyone who shares their vision of a versatile, modular, secure and permissionless inter-blockchain communication protocol.

To track progress on IBC, follow this issue on the ICS repository.

Videos:

Cosmos HackAtom Berlin

In this video, the team gives a complete overview of HackAtom Berlin. Check it out!

Cosmos — Proof of stake debate | Sunny Aggarwal and Christopher Goes:

Sunny Aggarwal and Chris Goes have a decentralized debate — check it out!

Podcasts

BlockchainBrad chats with Terra’s head researcher, Nicholas Platias. They compare Libra coin with Terra Money: a global cryptocurrency. Terra’s stablecoin and monetary system is the foundation for the future of decentralized finance. In contrast, Libra is a highly centralised, corporate-led coin. Terra is a price-stable cryptocurrency aimed at mass adoption. As its scale grows, Terra leads a new financial infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized apps. It is also arguably the best evidence today of blockchain-based global money, as they have more e-commerce partners than most. Mainnet Columbus has also been operation in the real world for 2 months, whereas Libra is still theory and is being challenged by governments right now!

In this episode of Conspiratus recorded live at ZCon1, Sunny and Drew Stone of Commonwealth discuss Edgeware, governance of ZCash, and the implications of Facebook’s new Libra project.

Topics of the first 3 episodes:

#1: Intro to the podcast and the motivation behind it with the Chorus One team.

#2: NPoS: Polkadot’s algorithm that seeks to maximize decentralization with Alfonso Cevallos.

#3: Terra’s stablecoin stability mechanism with Nicholas Platias.

These weeks events:

June 24th: Interoperability of Blockchains & the Future of Internet, rent24 room in Berin, Germany.

June 30th: Cosmos Japan Genesis #1.

Upcoming events:

July 11th: Cosmos Seoul SDK Dev Meetup Nonce Coworking in Seoul, Korea.

July 19th — 21st: HackAtom: Seoul, Seoul Startup Hub room in Seoul, Korea.

Winners take home $35k prize pool equivalent in ATOM

Other prizes include: Cobo Wallet Vault & Tablets

July 24th — 27th: Cosmos Comes to GopherCon, Marriot Marquis room in San Diego, CA.

August 19th-21st: Zaki Manian, Tendermint team’s head of research, was presenting on the latest developments in multichain networks and Cosmos IBC during Web3 Summit 2019, Funkhaus, Berlin.