Welcome Cosmonauts to the April edition of Cøsmos biweekly! Today we cover the ecosystem events, the progress of existing projects and community conversations.

A few days ago, quick updates on IBC testnets by Jack Zampolin appeared. The team is incorporating Dynamic IBC (dIBC), which uses a smart contract or VM platform to deploy new contracts, and other learnings from the first IBC testnet (opaque packets). They are also completing features (packet ack/timeout, protobuf, event tags, etc…). The integration test framework is working for a few chains, but the testnet needs to be updated because of breaking SDK changes. According to Zampolin, the team will wait for the above changes to land and then restart the testnet mid-week next week to test these changes.

With Game of Zones right around the corner, how close is Cosmos to enabling interoperability across different blockchains? Watch March 26th’s recording of the IBC Ecosystem WG call to find out. Game of Zones is happening now! Register to complete before April 25th. If you’re interested and need help, Jack Zampolin has made himself available! You can also join the related channel on the Cosmos Discord server to chat with other people willing to help you get used to IBC and prepared for GoZ.

For those of you looking for something exciting to buidl while staying home, the next Gitcoin Hackathon starting on April 20th turned out to be the perfect one to be part of your virtual life. Getting involved is as easy as ABC — that is, Agoric, Band Protocol, and Cosmos. For this hackathon, they’d like to see what real-world applications developers can build using the Cosmos SDK, Agoric’s SDK, and Band chain. The team would also love to see what you can do with IBC, the protocol used to connect all these blockchains together. Stay tuned for more details!

In Interchain.FM new episode, Andreas Antonopoulos joins Christopher Goes and Chjango Unchained to talk about the future of the cryptocurrency industry amidst an ongoing pandemic and the beginnings of a worldwide recession in light of a recently passed $4 trillion stimulus package. In the latest episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua, he interviews Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein, the artist formerly known as Jae Kwon. Tune it on!

Cosmos ecosystem is moving, there was a ton of big stuff the past two weeks! Check out CosmWasm Ecosystem Call — March 24th, 2020, and get familiar with their recent progress below. Cosmos March governance update (Q1 2020) is now out! It includes quick look at the state of Cosmos Hub gov power (not much different from last month) and a look at Cosmos governance Q2 2020. Cosmos governance Q1 2020 deliverables complete and the Cosmos Parameter-Change documentation has been published with templates. Want to find out how researchers and institutions around the world are leveraging blockchain, AI and cloud computing to battle COVID-19? Check out Akash's latest blog by its CMO Maly Ly. To address the immediate need for more broadband infrastructure the Althea team has put together a Rapid Connectivity Response, a plan to build a 100Mbps, affordable broadband network in as little as two weeks. This method can be deployed in both rural and urban environments to rapidly build or expand a network. Nym testnet was launched. Bitsong continues to test and prepare for a mainnet. e-Money mainnet has launched: the first block was produced on March 25th, with more than 30 validators joining in the first few hours. All of the 40 validators slots are now occupied. Furthermore, addresses on the e-Money mainnet can now be associated with Starname names. Check out a simple tutorial on how to create a starname with Neuma in the IOV blog. On March 31st, 2020, the IRIS Foundation completed the 4th IRIS token burn under a one-year token burning plan with 14,230,476 IRIS burned. The current total supply is 2 billion IRIS. Also, IRITA Healthcare was featured on “Platform for Digital Healthcare Resources” of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). The goal of the platform is to fully support healthcare providers utilizing innovations from internet technology. Kava’s testnet-5000 is live. It supports BEP3, a protocol for securely transferring assets between Binance Chain and Kava via Atomic Swaps. Moreover, Kava has formed a long-term partnership with Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle network, making it Kava’s official/default oracle. Recently, the two legendary CEOs of Chainlink and Kava came together for a panel discussion about the very powerful partnership — that’s unlike any other — between Kava and Chainlink. If you missed it then watch the video below! Cyber testnet launched. The LikeCoin team has created its grant through Gitcoin matching fund for public goods projects. Check out THORChain monthly expenses, budget and runway report for March 2020. 88% of RUNE is now locked, and participating in the RUNEVault.org program. Chorus One monthly roundup for March is out. The Lunie team is officially unveiling the Terra staking interface, and it feels so good! Read the latest Enigma updates in their March recap. Check out Keplr v0.5 new features by Everett Protocol. Band Protocol has strategically partnered with the Cosmos Singapore founders and Singaporean government-backed StakeWithUs. The Band Protocol team also published its future roadmap. And much more!

Cosmonauts, in these times of Covid19 we hope that you and your loved ones are all staying well and safe. See you in two weeks!

Development

Github metrics:

Quick updates on IBC testnets by Jack Zampolin:

Incorporation of dIBC by Agoric & new features completion

“The team is incorporating dIBC and other learnings from the first IBC testnet (opaque packets). They are also completing features (packet ack/timeout, protobuf, event tags, etc…). The integration test framework is working for few chains, but the testnet needs to be updated because of breaking SDK changes. The team will wait for the above changes to land and then restart the testnet mid-week next week to test these changes.”

IBC working group call — March 26th 2020

IBC working group call open to teams and developers interested in the progress and contributing to the protocol.

The IBC demo is up-and-running with real light clients, real proofs, end-to-end handshakes and working token transfers.

Check out the code and try it out yourself here.

Product highlight: CosmWasm

CosmWasm is a secure and interoperable multi-chain smart contracts tool that enables WebAssembly VMs to be plugged into the Cosmos SDK.

CosmWasm Ecosystem Call — March 24th 2020:

CosmWasm on Github: https://github.com/CosmWasm

Find out about recent updates, current roadmap and how you can build Cosmos SDK compatible smart contracts.

Details: https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm/issues/178

Cosmos Governance

Awareness and social encounters

Interchain.FM

The Great Crypto Recession: Why Bitcoin is Behaving as Expected & How the Receding Tide of Liquidity Will Affect Protocols & Startups:

In this episode, Andreas Antonopoulos joins the hosts to talk about the future of the cryptocurrency industry amidst an ongoing pandemic and the beginnings of a worldwide recession in light of a recently passed $4 trillion stimulus package. Andreas explains his view of how the Bitcoin narrative has played out and how it will shift in the near future. They cover what wallets can do *now* in order to monetize and better enable user adoption of the coins they support, what’s in store for the startups in the industry as venture capital dries up and natural selection takes hold, and how an interchain future will evolve as standards across protocols mature.

Upcoming events

Spend the Pandemic Inside: Join our Gitcoin Hackathon and Win Prizes:

As we had already begun planning to be part of a virtual, asynchronous blockchain hackathon even before the virus spread around the planet, the next Gitcoin Hackathon starting on April 20th turned out to be the perfect one. Do you want to participate and win some prizes?

Registrations for the Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon are now open gitcoin.co.

Getting involved is as easy as ABC — that is, Agoric (agoric.com), Band Protocol (bandprotocol.com), and Cosmos (cosmos.network). They’ll be participating in the Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon, which will run from Monday, April 20th through Monday, May 11th. For this hackathon, they’d like to see what real-world applications developers can build using the Cosmos SDK, Agoric’s SDK, and Band chain. The team would also love to see what you can do with IBC, the protocol used to connect all these blockchains together (more at cosmos.network/ibc).

Here Are the Tools:

Cosmos SDK: The world’s most popular blockchain framework. It’s modular, uses Tendermint BFT consensus, has staking and slashing, is built for IBC, and maximizes security for your application. Agoric’s SDK: A platform that supports the development of smart contracts and market institutions across many different scales, from large public blockchains to small two-party contracts. Band Protocol: A data oracle platform to integrate off-chain information to your dApps using an open API. IBC: The standard for blockchain interoperability. IBC is a reliable, ordered, and authenticated protocol for relaying arbitrary messages between independent distributed ledgers.

The Prizes: Over $24k in total prizes! (ATOMs & BANDs)

Cosmos — build fast, secure blockchains & connect them over IBC

Four challenges, $15k in total ATOMs

Agoric — secure smart contracts

Five challenges, $4k in total ATOMs

Band — trusted on-chain data for dApps

Five challenges, $4.5k in total $BAND + 3 Ledger Nano X’s as a joint prize

Note — challenges will appear on Gitcoin’s prize explorer, stay tuned!

The number of ATOMs rewarded is based on the closing price of ATOM listed on Coincap on May 15th.

Judging Criteria: The best submissions, as voted on by the judges at the end of the hackathon, will be chosen as the winners!

Judges: Experienced leaders from Cosmos, Agoric, and Band will be judging the participants for this hackathon.

Earn Some Swag:

There will be cash prizes (paid in Cosmos Atoms and BANDs) for the top projects, but everyone can win: If your team provides regular, weekly updates on your progress for three consecutive weeks, then each member (up to five per team) will be eligible to receive a Cosmos t-shirt, Agoric t-shirt, and Band t-shirt! These project updates must be provided on GitHub so we can see them in a sequential order. After the hackathon is over, the team will review what teams provided consistent updates and then reach out to ship the t-shirts to those teams.

What to Expect:

If you’ve never participated in a virtual hackathon before, here’s what to expect. The sponsors will provide education, training, and support throughout, and you’ll get fun, possibly some money, and definitely new friends and connections. A virtual hackathon doesn’t necessarily have the 24-hour intensity of an in-person hackathon (though feel free to schedule some all-nighters, if you’d like), but over the extended period you can allot time, making progress on your projects with your team.

Join the Cosmos Community Discord: The conversation about this virtual hackathon will happen in the Cosmos Community Discord. Join using this link and then go to “General” -> “Virtual Hackathon” to get started.

IBC and Game of Zones

Game of Zones is happening now! Register to complete before April 25th.

Prepare yourself for the Game of Zones competition by following Zaki Manian’s advice:

Learn to use the relayer: think about how to run it as a high throughput service. Learn how to build IBC applications. If you’re interested and need help, Jack Zampolin has made himself available!

You can also join the related channel on the Cosmos Discord server to chat with other people willing to help you get used to IBC and prepared for GoZ.

What is Game of Zones?

In preparation for the launch of the forthcoming Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) module, we are announcing Cosmos’s second ever adversarial testnet challenge: Game of Zones. This competition will create an invaluable educational opportunity and environment for the Cosmos community to learn the nuances of the IBC protocol, including exception handling and potential failure modes.

More information on this competition will be coming soon, so stay tuned for updates.

When will Game of Zones start?

Game of Zones launches on Friday, May 1, 2020. Week 1 Challenge will be announced on Friday, April 24. Registration will close at 11:59PM (PST) on Saturday, April 25.

What are the prizes for Game of Zones?

The Interchain Foundation is providing ATOMs (amount TBC) for the prize pool. Unlike last year’s Game of Stakes, there won’t be just one winner, and there won’t be just one prize. There will be multiple prizes attached to multiple challenges.

Finance

Cosmos validators

A few weeks ago, POS Bakers made the Google sheet public if you’d like to take a deeper look at the data.

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

BitMax.io to Launch Innovative Staking Service with Better Access to Liquidity: BitMax launches staking for ATOM.

Roadmap

The Tendermint Core team has decided to share their goals and roadmap for 2020. What follows is a list of their objectives for the year, organized around four high-level goals, which are themselves ordered by approximate priority. However, the team plans to tackle pieces of each of these goals concurrently.

This list is ambitious: It is possible, even likely, that there’s more outlined here than they can achieve in a year. If you are interested in helping the team reach these goals, they’ll be opening up a few new positions soon.

Goal 1: Increase the number of people who can make substantive contributions to Tendermint Core

Goal 2: Ship features and fixes which help Tendermint Core retain its market-leading position

Goal 3: Improve the developer- and user-experience for projects that use Tendermint Core

Goal 4: Expand and curate the number of technologies that can be integrated with Tendermint Core

If you have questions, ideas, or would like to contribute, please open an issue or join Tendermint developer forum.

Governance Milestones

The following milestones will require voting by on-chain governance.

Proposal: Atom Transfers

2019–04–10 An upgrade proposal may be created on the Cosmos Hub to allow ATOM to be transferred to other Cosmos addresses. Read more »

Proposal Passed: Atom Transfers

2019–04–17 Success! The proposal to allow ATOM to be transferred to other Cosmos addresses passes.

Proposal: IBC future TBD

An upgrade proposal may be created on the Cosmos Hub to add support for IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol. IBC will allow other Cosmos SDK-based blockchains to connect to the Hub. Read more »

Proposal Passed: IBC future TBD

Success! The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol is now supported by the Cosmos Hub. The IBC standard will allow blockchains that support it to connect.

Community Governance future TBD

At this point, the critical features of the Cosmos Hub has been activated by the community of Atom holders. Further governance of the network and upgrades to the software or blockchain state are left to the community. Read more »

Due by May 01, 2020, 73% complete:

IBC v1.0.0 issues left to be implemented (on ibc-alpha branch).

Ecosystem updates

Battling COVID-19 with Blockchain, AI, and Cloud Computing. Want to find out how researchers and institutions around the world are leveraging blockchain, AI and cloud computing to battle COVID-19? Check out Akash latest blog by their CMO Maly Ly.

Reducing Cloud Costs for Machine Learning.

Rapid Connectivity Response. To address the immediate need for more broadband infrastructure the team has put together a Rapid Connectivity Response. This is a plan to build a 100Mbps, affordable broadband network in as little as two weeks. This method can be deployed in both rural and urban environments to rapidly build or expand a network.

Althea Network is growing fast!

Bitsong continues to test and prepare for a mainnet.

Mainnet has launched!

The first block was produced on March 25th, 2020 at 12:00 UTC with more than 30 validators joining in the first few hours. All of the 40 validators slots are now occupied.

What’s next?

More web- and mobile wallet integrations in addition to Lunie, SyncNode Wallet and e-Money explorer.

IBC integration with the Cosmos Hub and participation in Game of Zones.

Seamless bank and credit card integration through the website.

Longer-term:

Support for on-chain trading algorithms on DEX using WebAssembly (CosmWasm). This includes automated market makers similar to UniSwap or custom strategies.

Offer connectors to the DEX in software packages for automated trading, such as HummingBot.

Integrations and partnerships in the retail payments space.

Support for additional currencies, such as GBP, JPY and USD.

Addresses on the e-Money mainnet can now be associated with Starname names:

Setting up a donation account — Registering and resolving a Starname with Neuma:

The IOV Name Service is getting closer to full speed and it is time for a first tutorial on what you can do with it.

You can watch this tutorial video by Antoine:

The 4th IRIS Token Burn is Completed: On March 31st, 2020, the IRIS Foundation completed the 4th IRIS token burn under a one-year token burning plan with 14,230,476 IRIS burned. The current total supply is 2 billion IRIS.FF

This is also the last burn in a one-year token burning plan announced in 2019. Until now, 62,754,558 IRIS tokens have been burned. Every burn maintains an original balance of 2 billion IRIS to keep the actual inflation rate as 0.

The token burning plan is to support the healthy and sustainable development of IRISnet ecosystem.

IRISnet Biweekly Report(2020.3.9–3.22):

IRITA Healthcare is featured on “Platform for Digital Healthcare Resources” of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

Various improvements are made to the iService module of IRIS Hub. Modules such as Oracle and Asset are optimized.

An IBC demo doker environment is delivered for GoZ prep.

New features are added to Rainbow Wallet and IRISplorer.

UniCoins which is based on IRISnet, has gained new features.

IRISnet was invited to AMAs in 14 major Binance communities around the globe

IRISnet was invited to share its technology in Cosmos India and the Ourea Community.

IRISnet core development team, Bianjie, was interviewed by Cyzone.

Cross-chain Transfers with Kava’s Testnet-5000: Kava’s testnet-5000 is live! Testnet-5000 supports BEP3, a protocol for securely transferring assets between Binance Chain and Kava via Atomic Swaps. In order to make it all work, the team has expanded Binance’s BEP3 deputy process that relays information between the two blockchains and introduced the Kava JavaScript SDK for sending transactions to its blockchain.

Everything is open-source, so feel free to check out Kava’s BEP3 module, deputy, or JavaScript SDK on GitHub.

Kava Integrates Chainlink as its Official Oracle Network to Bring DeFi to Cosmos: Kava has formed a long-term partnership with Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle network, making it Kava’s official/default oracle.

Integrating Chainlink’s world-class oracles strengthen the Kava DeFi platform with secure price data, now made available for the first time to all Cosmos chains. Kava’s scalability combined with Chainlink’s oracles provide the Cosmos ecosystem with the highest-quality data to make secure, truly reliable Decentralized Financial Products.

What You Don’t Know about DeFi, Kava and Chainlink: An AMA Recap: On Wednesday, April 1st at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST the two legendary CEOs of Chainlink and Kava came together for a panel discussion about the very powerful partnership — that’s unlike any other — between Kava and Chainlink.

If you missed it then watch this video! Here’s the informational AMA on the groundbreaking integration and partnership between Kava and Chainlink. You won’t believe what Chainlink Co-Founder Sergey Nazarov said about half way through!

The LikeCoin team has created its grant through Gitcoin matching fund for public goods projects.

900+ WordPress websites have LikeCoin button installed. Check out LikeCoin WordPress Plugin:

A new CryptoZombies course is now live:

Loom Universe Bi-Weekly Highlights:

Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 10: Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein: This blog is a transcription of the 10th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.

The Lunie team is officially unveiling the Terra staking interface, and it feels so good!

Seeding the THORChain Network: Solving how the THORChain network can be joined by new peers or queried by services.

Monthly Treasury Report: THORChain Monthly Expenses, Budget and Runway Report for March 2020.

RUNE Distribution Update: RUNE Distribution Analysis for March 2020. 88% of RUNE is now locked, and participating in the RUNEVault.org program.

The Road to Dynamic IBC. The Agoric team announced their work on Dynamic IBC (dIBC). The idea is to use a smart contract or VM platform to deploy new contracts that support new protocols, all on an existing chain without having to wait for chain upgrades.

Chorus One monthly roundup for March is out:

Next LiquidStaking WG call by Chorus One is on Apr 8, 4pm CET.

Other:

Nym testnet was launched:

Cyber testnet launched:

Latest Enigma updates in their March recap:

Check out Keplr v0.5 new features by Everett Protocol:

Band Protocol has strategically partnered with the Cosmos Singapore founders & Singaporean government-backed StakeWithUs:

Band Protocol future roadmap was published: