Greetings Cosmonauts,

November is the month of Thanksgiving. In that spirit, we’re thankful for our vibrant community of validators who have asynchronously launched over 18 public testnets in the past 8 months, who have hardened their setups, built tooling that contributed back to the growing ecosystem, and dedicated hard work in order to maintain the uptime that’s needed to run a smooth network.

For those anticipating the start of the games with bated breath, here’s what you need to know.

Dev Update

Game of Stakes

You should expect the GoS testnet to launch shortly after Gaia-9002 has been launched. Gaia-9002 has been launched as of November 30. The software it’s running beta tests Cosmos-SDK 0.27.0 , which is the candidate code version intended for use in GoS. Gaia-9001 was originally the version we intended to use but too many bugs were found during the testing phase. Both Gaia-9002 and the GoS testnet will be running in parallel.

We will be publishing a blog post and sending out an email to all GoS participants when the game goes live so be on the lookout for it. Alternatively, another place to look for real-time GoS updates is on the forum.

Testnets

Cosmos Hub validators are some of the most sophisticated players in the PoS validating business. And to that, we tip our hats off to those operators. A testament to that came after we hit 1M blocks on the Gaia-8001 testnet in the first week of November right after Devcon4 ended.

Cosmos-SDK

Cosmos-SDK 0.27.0 PR landed at the end of the month.

The latest release is here: github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/releases/tag/v0.27.0

Tendermint Core

November saw a new major release of Tendermint (v0.26) and various minor releases.

The major release primarily adds Version fields to various data structures,

optimizes consensus messages for signing and verification in

restricted environments (like HSMs and the Ethereum Virtual Machine), and aligns the consensus code with the new Tendermint protocol specification. It also includes our first take at a generalized Merkle proof system and changes the length of hashes used for hashing data structures from 20 to 32 bytes. See the changelog for more details.

optimizes consensus messages for signing and verification in restricted environments (like HSMs and the Ethereum Virtual Machine), and aligns the consensus code with the new Tendermint protocol specification. It also includes our first take at a generalized Merkle proof system and changes the length of hashes used for hashing data structures from 20 to 32 bytes. See the changelog for more details. Minor releases contain many bug fixes, improvements, and features, with considerable contributions from community members!

v0.27.0 is on the horizon, with primary focus on fixing the proposer selection algorithm.

The latest release of Tendermint Core is here: github.com/tendermint/tendermint/releases

KMS

v0.1.0 of the KMS was released! It is now ready to be used on live testnets. Some validators are already using it to successful sign votes on Gaia-9002.

For more details, see the forum post.

Docs

Reference guide — cosmos.network/docs

— cosmos.network/docs Tutorial on an example nameservice app — github.com/cosmos/sdk-application-tutorial

Cool Stuff Corner

bitfish, a Cosmos Hub validator, created a stunning visual display folder. Here’s a preview.

Find the rest of the images in this directory here: github.com/bitfishlabs/cosmos-validator-design

Tendermint’s visual designer, Gong Cheng — who happens to be the creator of all of the images on the Cosmos blog — designed the Game of Stakes badges, flair, and desktop/mobile wallpaper.