May 1, 2018

Greetings Cosmonauts,

We’re 85% of the way to launch. We know that the community is very excited about taking part in this space race (among many other exciting projects that are launching this summer) but it’s prudent to keep expectations reasonable. We remind you to gauge development progress through the roadmap rather than look to any set date. Meticulous software development —indeed, any ambitious engineering endeavor — such as, for instance, building rockets, almost always exceeds estimated timelines. The hard-spoon of Ethereum will occur after the mainnet launches and the snapshot date is not yet decided.

We’ve made contributions in the name of computer science (detailed blog post about this incoming later this month) and iterated through testnets with more and more validating full nodes participating. The SDK is getting much more stable, but there are still some minor breaking changes coming (see issues).

We’ve partnered with educational counterparts like Blockchain at Berkeley, Blockgeeks, Bianjie.ai, and later, Stanford, to roll out a full course meal of videos and lectures for the blockchain development community’s consuming pleasure via the Cosmos Academy (WIP).

Finally, to follow which conferences we’ll be speaking at/sponsoring, see our events page.

Announcements

Reddit AMA

Releases

Go-Amino

We’ve shipped Amino, Tendermint’s custom-designed Amino encoding protocol, which is like protobuf3 but better. An in-depth blog post detailing Go-Amino will be published later this month. In the meantime, check out Amino on GitHub. It has been integrated into Tendermint Core and the SDK.

Tendermint Alpha

Example JSON file

Alpha is a tiny web app which helps you create a genesis file. A genesis file is a JSON file for defining an initial distribution of validators, application state, and other information such as chain ID, timestamp, etc. A genesis file is required to start a node for both validating full nodes and non-validating nodes.

Past Conferences

SHE256, Berkeley

Left to right: Sheila Warren (World Economic Forum), Aya Miyaguchi (Ethereum Foundation), Linda Lee (Zcash), Megan Maloney (General Catalyst), Chjango Unchained (Tendermint/CØSMOS), Awa Sun Yin (Interchain Foundation)

The blockchain sector indeed has more men than women participating in the space. At SHE256, many curious young people showed up to learn and explore the latest developments in the industry. We observed a crowd, mostly composed of young women, who were very timid. Chjango Unchained and Awa Sun Yin mentored the girls in high school who won the scholarship to attend this event, funded in part by its sponsors. SHE256 seemed to provide a safe instead of intimidating space for people just breaking into blockchain, and we were glad to be a part of the introduction.

DApp Dev, Kiev