September 15, 2017

At the 3rd Annual Global Blockchain Summit hosted by Wanxiang Group today, we agreed with Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon on a shared roadmap during The State of the Ethereum Union panel. Based on our fundraiser, which closed earlier this April, we received significant backing from Ethereum stakeholders, receiving much more ETH in proportion to BTC during the crowdsale. We took this as an indication of the enthusiasm the Ethereum community has for Cosmos.

Since the Cosmos Network is optimized for Proof-of-Stake, we concluded that working with the Ethereum community and furthering a scaling solution on our platform is symbiotic for both ecosystems. Ethereum has the most to benefit from Cosmos, since there is no scaling solution yet implemented.

Our objective is to create a token hub, the foundation for experimentation and first order scaling. Ethereum’s smart contract system is a perfect fit for our blockchain communications protocol, called the Inter-blockchain Communication, or IBC.

As of September 15, the Shanghai Accord is agreed as follows:

Interchain Foundation is supporting the creation of peg-zones to Ethereum (we’re hiring). ETH pegging is a high priority on the Cosmos roadmap.

ATOMs will not conflict with ETH.

We want a separate fee token. We will “hard spoon” Ethereum as a separate zone, and it will be the second whitelisted token for fee payments within a Cosmos zone. A hard spoon is where a new cryptocurrency is created by taking the account balances from an existing cryptocurrency. Our governance system can approve of more such fee tokens in the future.

Cosmos Hub’s design goal is for fast finality with many validators. (Wanxiang and Bianjie.ai have already signed up to become Cosmos validators.) There may be yet more use-cases of applying Cosmos’ performance enhancing technology to Ethereum even post-Casper and Ethereum scaling.

We will be supporting cross-chain ERC20 tokens, not just ETH, as ERC20 tokens are now officially an approved EIP

Plasma will be supported on our Ethermint zones. We’re looking forward to working with Joseph Poon to implement it on Cosmos-SDK.

We’re looking to collaborate with OmiseGO (OMG) to make scalable fully-decentralized exchange on Ethereum/Plasma a reality as soon as possible.

That said, we are looking forward to Casper. When it is ready, we will support that as well.