This week’s ‘gateway to cosmos’ conference and hackathon in Prague saw a perfectly organized event, mainly funded by Rockway Blockchain Fund, Juno Network, Agoric and Axelar (and a number of silver-tier sponsors).
It marked a pinnacle-meeting of the greatest minds in the Cosmos IBC ecosystem, sharing their latest insights and visions with over 600 accredited guests in a 2-day panel schedule.
Foreseeable, the central topic and base of discussion during panels and private talks on the conference were the recent events surrounding the implosion of Terra-Luna.
It's a fact, that the erosion of this multi-billion-dollar ecosystem came with huge consequences for a big number of builders, who use Cosmos and CosmWasm technology.
It is this watershed-moment for the industry that inherits a lot of potential. Some projects might not be able to recover from the damage done, but for most of them the time to refocus and rebuild is now. Individuals will keep adding value to the Cosmos IBC ecosystem, in their chosen way and scope, for a number of reasons:
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CosmWasm will continue to make its way to succeed as the preferred smart-contract layer of the future. Onboarding new developers is astonishingly easy: They can use their basic knowledge of a number of coding languages like Rust, Javascript or Go and start to write a smart contract.
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The developer onboarding process will even be made more frictionless soon with the upcoming “CosmWasm Developer Academy”: a documentation and tutorial platform hosted by Confio, focussing on bringing in web2 developers with a certain level of coding skill. Rust has been the most supported language on Stackoverflow for the past 4 consecutive years. Agoric are building a JS implementation on CosmWasm, Archway are working on Go. There is no need to cope with solidity anymore.
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Tendermint consensus and IBC architecture have proven to work as expected, even when under the highest pressure. Utilizing shared security, consumer chains will be able to profit from the economic security of the Cosmoshub. There is no need to cope with economic security anymore. Shared security will be rolled out later this year.
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The UX of Cosmos-SDK based products is comparably frictionless. There is no need to cope with high gas fees or long confirmation times anymore. IBC as a transport-layer has even more power to increase UX, as top-level applications are able to increasingly shield their users from the underlying technology. A good example are Osmosis’ ‘deposit’ and ‘withdraw’ buttons, effectively hiding IBC information (chain-ids, ibc-client numbers, connection and channel-ids) allowing for simple and frictionless deposits & withdrawals, all hosted on one simple interface.
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Chain-specific insights:
Juno is probably the best platform to develop a CosmWasm smartcontract right now and will be the new home for a lot of devs. It uses the latest version of CosmWasm (not a fork), IBC v3 and a permissionless deployment system. Former Terra-devs can port their code with minimal changes, test it on the live Juno-Testnet and release to production on the Juno Mainnet without asking governance for permission. They could also utilize a future CW-enabled consumer chain, or migrate to their own L1 (shared security or individual chain).
Agoric are building $IST, the ‘interchain stable token’. It’s designed to become the interchain’s preferred medium of exchange, overcollateralized by CDPs (similar to Maker DAO’s vaults) using ATOM and other IBC-assets.
Axelar are shipping one bridge after another. The team around CEO and founder Sergey Gorbunov is well funded and will play a major role in bridging assets from other blockchains like Ethereum, Polkadot, Fantom or even Bitcoin. Sunny Aggarwal (co-founder of Osmosis) confirmed there will be a retrospective airdrop of 1% AXL total supply to osmosis users, who use the axelar bridge to bring in new ERC20 tokens like USDC or DAI to osmosis and provide liquidity.
Osmosis with its permissioned version of CosmWasm will be the preferred chain for ex-Terra defi protocols that are still existing and weren’t ‘just a wrapper around anchor’. Imagine levana leveraging IBC assets on the osmosis dex. Or various yield aggregators or defi-managers for osmosis, lending protocols, synthetic assets and more. Permission through governance will be needed, to assure that only very well-tested and functional products are rolled out on the DEX itself, in order not to jeopardize its basic function as a DEX.
Teams like Informal Systems and Strangelove Ventures are pushing forward development of critical IBC infrastructure tools like relayers and are working on expanding the IBC standard to non cosmos-native chains (eg. IBC-enabled Polkadot-Parachains, ETH2.0 integration…) These Teams are well funded, have a very high grade of engineering talent and are used to ship in a high-throughput manner.
Persistance/PStake are developing liquid-staking interchain-assets, stATOM and stXPRT are already live. Solana and Ethereum as yield-bearing IBC tokens will soon be enabled.
Penumbra are building a new privacy network in the IBC ecosystem that is currently in Testnet stage. The protocol integrates privacy with proof-of-stake through a novel private delegation mechanism (that also provides staking derivatives, tax-efficient staking, and on-chain governance with private voting). Penumbra records all value in a single multi-asset shielded pool based on the Zcash Sapling design, but allows private transactions in any kind of IBC asset. Inbound IBC transfers shield value as it moves into the zone, while outbound IBC transfers unshield value.
EVMOS: the number of projects being developed on EVMOS right now is huge! EVM brings the ability to launch battle-proven solidity code right in the Cosmos and combine it with IBC-superpowers. Interoperability options seem limitless on this smart contract infrastructure, also the team is well funded and keeps shipping improvements.
‘The Hub’: The audience at the Gateway to Cosmos conference witnessed a compelling speech by Cosmoshub team-lead Billy Rennekamp, who talked about the upcoming Cosmoshub Upgrades. The upcoming Rho upgrade will introduce tooling to manage public goods (community pool) and a little more flexibility in community spend proposals. It will not include CosmWasm (decided by governance in proposal #69), keeping block size small while ensuring high scalability and performance.
The far more interesting Lambda Upgrade is planned for later this year (q3 or q4) and will bring the first release of Interchain Security. The Hub can act as a so-called “provider chain”, that provides high economic security to a “consumer chain”. On the consumer chain the validator set is replicated and rewards are distributed to validators and delegators on the Cosmoshub, which is essentially an on-going airdrop for ATOM delegators. One of the first consumer-chains to launch will be the Quicksilver liquid staking protocol.
Comdex is another very promising project in the Cosmos IBC ecosystem. The team is developing a synthetic commodity decentralized exchange, based on their own fully-collateralized IBC-enabled stablecoin $CMST which will be backed by an index of Cosmos ecosystem assets as collateral (similar to DAI on Ethereum).
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