April 2, 2018

Dear Cosmonauts,

We estimate that the Cosmos Hub will be launching short of 3 months’ time. There are a lot of exciting announcements jam packed into this month’s update so here goes.

Tendermint New Hires

Christopher Goes—Software Developer

Christopher Goes hopes that distributed ledgers will shift the economics of network effects in favor of aligned incentives and positive-sum games. He plans to help Cosmos make this happen by developing robust software infrastructure layers and reducing barriers to entry. Christopher previously cofounded Stash.ai and led CUAUV.

David Braun—Software Developer

David is a full-stack generalist with broad experience of diverse languages, platforms, and technologies including specialization in Node.js and 2 years of blockchain experience. He created Deterministic.js, a deterministic version of JavaScript for writing distributed smart contract applications. David designed Eris Worker, a distributed computation framework designed to support autonomous operations on blockchains. David is working on the Cosmos-UI, codenamed: Voyager.

Zaki Manian—Head of Tendermint Labs

Zaki Manian, Executive Director of Trusted IoT Alliance, is a prolific contributor to the development of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology. Zaki has deep expertise in cryptography and distributed consensus systems. He is an advisor to the Cosmos project and several other investment funds and startups in the space. Zaki is now joining us as the Director of Tendermint Labs: a proprietary incubator for Cosmos-enabled business models with Tendermint.

Announcements

Crypto 4 Your Thoughts Hackathon

Jae Kwon will be giving a demo of the Cosmos-SDK for the first time to a live audience at the Purse.io hackathon, Crypto 4 Your Thoughts, in San Francisco, CA, on the first week of April. Judd Keppel, lead maintainer of LotionJS, will also be giving a live demo of building a dApp using Lotion. This week, we will be doing testing on which livestreaming platform we’ll use for the demos. The demo of Cosmos-SDK and LotionJS will occur at roughly 7pm PST on April 6th at the hackathon, which is free to attend. We may either decide to livestream from the Cosmos Twitter feed from @cosmos or livestream from the official Cosmos YouTube channel. Stay tuned for updates on Twitter.

Blockchain Career Fair

We will be scouting for talent at the largest blockchain career fair in the Bay Area on April 17th. Special thanks to Blockchain at Berkeley for making this happen.

News

Interview with Ethan Buchman

Tendermint CTO, Ethan Buchman, had a great interview with Software Engineering Daily, covering the origins of fault-tolerant consensus (aircraft control electronics) and how it paved the way to today’s ecosystem plans at Tendermint and Cosmos.

Listen to the podcast here: Consensus Systems with Ethan Buchman

Ethereum Community Fund

The Cosmos project and the initiatives behind it, driven by the spirit of open-source, is built upon the theme of nurturing education, robust growth, backed by fundamentals through infrastructure, community, and research development.

We’re backing the grant initiatives of the Ethereum Community Fund, as the program has aligned objectives consistent with the ethos at Cosmos. We believe in enriching the soil that the nascent blockchain industry is dependent upon by donating grants to promising infrastructure, research, and philanthropic endeavors. We believe that by doing so today will bear implications for broader cryptocurrency adoption later as well as lend welfare to positive social impact.

Notable Projects Using Tendermint

OmiseGO DEX

Yesterday, OMG announced a lighthearted but factual blog post on April Fool’s Day announcing a non-contentious but rather, “consensual”, as they put it, hard spoon. Well, this confirms it. OMG is, in fact, spooning the balances of the OMG ERC20 token into the genesis state of their DEX built on top of the Tendermint consensus engine. The spooned token will be used as a staking token on the DEX zone, which will connect to the Cosmos ecosystem over IBC.

The link to their Honte-daemon open-source repository, once public, is here:

The question remains though: Who is the big spoon and who is the little spoon? We’ll leave it up to the readers’ imaginations to decide.

Ex Spoonibus Unitas

IBM Cloud on Tendermint & LotionJS

Blockchain application developers have reached out to us from IBM and we were impressed with their educational initiatives to teach others to build on top of Tendermint. Here’s the chat app that they built using Tendermint and LotionJS:

Read about “Deploying Proof of Stake Blockchain Applications on IBM Cloud Using Tendermint” by Saif Rehman

Attend IBM’s free Webinar on Apr 21st to learn how to build your dApp using Tendermint ABCI and LotionJS: (Meetup.com Link)

Past Events

ScalingNow

In summary, this was a great event that allowed us to educate 70 attendees about the Cosmos-SDK and Tendermint. We were able to raise public awareness of Cosmos to the European cryptocurrency community. For that, we thank Web3 and GiveEth for organizing such an event and for having us there.

EthCC

Cosmos and Tendermint were very well received by 350 attendees at this event covering the theme of 3 Dimensional Blockchain Scaling. Our presence there gave attendees insight into our latest developments. We were able to showcase our blockchain stack about how developers can leverage the Cosmos-SDK to build scalable blockchain applications.

ETHUofT

Toronto is quickly becoming a rich hub for blockchain education development. Students at the University of Toronto formed a new association called the U of T Blockchain Group, organizing a series of blockchain-related talks, workshops, and hackathons, which Cosmos happily sponsored.

Cosmonauts sighting at ETHUofT

Ethereum Japan

Jae Kwon gave a talk about the current progress behind the Cosmos Network in Tokyo on March 28th and gave the audience a tour of the Cosmos-SDK code. We thank the Japanese community for being the gracious hosts of this event organized by the Ethereum Community Fund. Cosmos is excited to be donors to the grant initiative to support blockchain ecosystem development at the lowest infrastructural levels.