Astronauts, it is already the end of April, and there was a ton of big stuff over the past weeks for you! Read below for basic updates.

With Game of Zones right around the corner, how close are the team to enabling interoperability across different blockchains? Tune in to watch the April 9th’s recording of the IBC Ecosystem WG call to find out. Furthermore, watch AMA recording with Zaki Manian, Jack Zampolin, and Jessy Irwin below to find out more. And 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. Registration is open till April 25th and the game starts on May 1st!

For those of you looking for something exciting to buidl while staying home, the Gitcoin Cross Chain Hackathon is starting later today, on April 20th, and it 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. If you missed the Cross Chain Pre-hackathon livestream earlier last week, check out the recording in our report.

As of the latest releases, on April 9th, 2020, Tendermint Core released versions 0.33.3, 0.32.10 and 0.31.12 patching the vulnerability security issues identified through the Bug Bounty program. To stay in the loop, read Cosmos Network engineering newsletter.

A lot has happened in Cosmos ecosystem since our last issue! The Terra team announced a new high-speed token bridge with Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain. The bridge will facilitate the transfer of Terra stablecoins between the two networks. Band Protocol’s Wenchang Testnet #2 launched on April 14 successfully with all 17 validators participating and with over 30,000 blocks mined already. Moreover, Kyber Network published a full-feature spotlight on Band Protocol. Blockchains in Cosmos ecosystem such as IRISnet and Kava are successfully connected with each other under IBC protocol. Irishub was improved with many functions: new versions were released to Rainbow wallet and IRISplorer. IRISnet Core Dev team Bianjie won the First Developer Competition Award of China Blockchain Services Network (BSN). e-Money will be supported by Rainbow Wallet. Moreover, IRIS Foundation announced a Community-Centric Delegation Campaign and the Second One-Year Token Burn Plan. And it became the first batch of ecosystem partners of OKChain. Kava partnered with Coinone, one of the largest Korean exchanges offering spot, OTC, and staking. Bluzelle kicks off its march to Mainnet with the launch of Bluzelle’s Swarm of Duty program — the Incentivised stress test. IOV latest update covers: listing and Network upgrade; Antoine Herzog appointed CEO and Karim Ganem, Chairman of the Board. Over 50,000 people have downloaded the Sentinel dVPN Android app on Google play. The new version of Mooncake built with Desmos Network is now available. Everett Protocols’ Keplr v0.5.3 is live for Chrome and Firefox. Cyber Congress launch scheduled for April 27th. The Oasis Labs introduced Parcel, an API that can help companies store sensitive data and return control of it to their users — increasing trust and improving customer loyalty. Ki Foundation roadmap and future plans were published. Check out Agoric’s weekly updates. Join Althea for their community call and AMA on April 23rd. THORChains’ Bitcoin integration completed: it can now observe transactions, execute swap logic, and process outgoing transactions in a single-node env. The Forbole team announced that they have established a partnership with Band Protocol. In the latest Chorus One podcast episode, Brian was joined by Lukas Vogelsang, CEO of Centrifuge, to speak about the technologies Centrifuge is building to enable more efficient, transparent, and privacy-preserving supply chain financing. Recently, Illia Polosukhin and Zaki Manian discussed the future of blockchain on the Blockchain Debate podcast. Tune it on!

Cosmonauts, that’s a wrap! We will come back in May with more exciting Cosmos updates. Stay tuned!

Development

Github metrics:

IBC working group call — April 9th, 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.

Engineering Updates: Cosmos Network Engineering Newsletter, March 2020.

Vulnerability Coordination Retrospective: Cosmos Mainnet Security Advisory Lavender, 2020–04–09.

Awareness and social encounters

The future of blockchain will be an oligopoly of public blockchains (Illia Polosukhin vs. Zaki Manian)

Cross Chain Hackathon with Cosmos, Agoric, and Band Protocol

📅 Date: 20 April — 11 May

The Gitcoin Pre-Hackathon Livestream:

Registrations for the Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon: 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

Start preparing 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.

Game of Zones AMA

In this video Zaki Manian, Jack Zampolin, & Jessy Irwin host an evening AMA about all things Game of Zones

Other events:

Finance

The Interchain Foundation (ICF) raised $17 million in April 2017 to shepherd the development of the Cosmos network. “To date, we still have over 1,400 BTC, over 50,000 ETH and just over 20 million ATOMs in the treasury,” ICF director Arianne Flemming says. At today’s prices, that’s worth over $104 million. And that’s even after the nonprofit deployed $25 million in capital to fund over 50 projects.

Cosmos validators

POS Bakers has 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:

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 77% complete

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

Ecosystem updates

Brave New World of Staking: A Primer on Proof of Stake (PoS).

IRISnet Biweekly Report(2020.3.23–4.5):

Irishub is improved with many functions. New versions were released to Rainbow wallet and IRISplorer.

The 4th token burn was completed, and new burning plan is going to be shared with community soon.

The research director of IRISnet, Jeffrey Hu, was invited to attend a live AMA with Biki to share IRISnet developments.

COIRFAN released new functions including: node ranking also instant messaging.

IRISnet Core Dev team Bianjie won the First Developer Competition Award of China Blockchain Services Network (BSN).

Blockchains in Cosmos ecosystem such as IRISnet and Kava are successfully connected with each other under IBC protocol.

e-Money will be supported by Rainbow Wallet.

IRIS Foundation to Roll Out a Community-Centric Delegation Campaign & the Second One-Year Token Burn Plan! Over the past few monthsthe IRIS Foundation weighed in on several propositions discussed within the community and has come up with a community-centric delegation campaign catered to expanding the utilization of the funds while focusing on aligning the incentives of network participants with their business objectives. On a high level, the campaign highlights several fields of interest in crypto-economic primitives, encourages voluntary staking, and promotes long-term network security.

Outside of the regular execution plans for the Eco-Development funds (e.g. delegations, grants, airdrops, and coin burns), we will continue to explore new territories and work together with our community towards encouraging business growth and building positive relationships on every front.

The delegation campaign startED on April 1st, 2020, and will occur on a monthly basis for one year. Following the conclusion of the campaign, the IRIS Foundation will evaluate the necessity for possible adjustments and/or extension based on performance analysis and community feedback.

IRISnet became the First Batch of Ecosystem Partners of OKChain: OKChain recently shared a list of the first batch of ecosystem partners after open source, including IRISnet, Cosmos, Bytom, CertiK, and Conflux, with a total of 30 leading global well-known blockchain projects.

Both IRISnet and OKChain are built with Cosmos SDK and will achieve interoperability through IBC protocol. The initial list of the OKChain ecosystem partners covers the public chain, PoS mining pool, blockchain explorer, wallet and other fields. IRISnet, as a public chain supporting cross-chain services for various complicated distributed applications such as DeFi, can transfer value and services between heterogeneous blockchains together with OKChain to enrich both ecosystem development.

April 2020 — IOV Update: Antoine Herzog appointed CEO and Karim Ganem, Chairman of the Board, Listing & Network upgrade.

Bluzelle kicks off its march to Mainnet with the launch of Bluzelle’s Swarm of Duty program — the Incentivised stress test:

The new version of Mooncake built w/ Desmos Network is now available! Download the public beta here;

Download the public beta here:

IOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Zh9mWFk

Android: https://mooncake.space/download.html#android

Mint USDX on Kava’s Testnet-5000: the launch of Kava’s testnet-5000 simplifying how you develop, debug, and deploy. With KAVA’s testnet-5000 you’re now able to transfer BNB from Binance Chain to Kava and use it to mint USDX.

The team also released the new JavaScript SDK for interacting with the Kava blockchain. Now you can take advantage of the features that Kava has designed to help developers to engineer their projects best.

Kava partnered with Coinone, one of the largest Korean exchanges offering spot, OTC, and staking.

Terra Partners with Solana to Establish Low-Latency Bridge, Expanding Its Stablecoin Ecosystem to New Web-Scale Blockchain: The Terra team announced a new high-speed token bridge with Solana, the world’s first web-scale blockchain. The bridge will facilitate the transfer of Terra stablecoins between the two networks.

Keplr v0.5.3 is live for Chrome and Firefox:

Band Protocol’s Wenchang Testnet #2 launched on April 14 2:00PM UTC successfully with all 17 validators participating.

With over 30,000 blocks mined already, you can check out the BandChain explorer (powered by Forbole):

KyberNetwork published a full-feature spotlight on Band Protocol:

Guide to Building DeFi using Band Protocol Oracle and Cosmos IBC.

Basechain Build 1376 Hard Fork:

Integration with Huobi: With this integration, Basechain developers are now able to build dapps that accept payment in HT, as well as trade HT for ETH, LOOM, DAI, and many other ERC20 tokens.

A new CryptoZombies course is now live:

Althea Network is growing fast!

Join Althea for their community call and AMA on April 23rd:

Agoric ‘s weekly updates:

Building User Trust with Oasis Parcel: The Oasis Labs introduced Parcel, an API that can help companies store sensitive data and return control of it to their users — increasing trust and improving customer loyalty.

Recently, mainnet has launched. The first block was produced at 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.

Bitsong launched a third testnet, which has well over 40k blocks and 40 active validators. Bitsong continues to test and prepare for a mainnet.

Over 50,000 people have downloaded the Sentinel dVPN Android app on Google play:

THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 07–14 Apr 2020.

THORChains’ Bitcoin integration completed. THORChain can now observe transactions, execute swap logic, and process outgoing transactions in a single-node env. Now on to testing and multi-node validation.

THORChain processes BTC.BTC for the first time.