Cosmos – The Internet of Blockchains

A Network of many Distributed Ledgers

March came with an event that many expected and few acknowledged by importance. The Cosmos Hub is the first public BFT blockchain powered by proof-of-stake, and the first BFT system deployed at scale in almost 40 years of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) research history. Cosmos proudly uses Tendermint, a software designed back in 2014 by Jae Kwon and later Ethan Buchman.

Cosmos is a network of many independent blockchains, called zones. The zones are powered by Tendermint, which provides a high-performance, consistent, secure PBFT-like consensus engine. Other said, the ecosystem scales and allows blockchains to interoperate with each other. Therefore, the blockchains benefit from a new technical vision that supports a higher number of transactions per second than before.

The first zone on Cosmos is called the Cosmos Hub. The Cosmos Hub is a multi-asset proof-of-stake cryptocurrency with a simple governance mechanism which enables the network to adapt and upgrade. In addition, the Cosmos Hub can be extended by connecting other zones.

This architecture solves many problems that the blockchain space faces today, such as application interoperability, scalability, and seamless upgradability. For example, zones derived from Bitcoind, Go-Ethereum, CryptoNote, ZCash, or any blockchain system can be plugged into the Cosmos Hub. These zones allow Cosmos to scale innitely to meet global transaction demand. Zones are also a great t for a distributed exchange, which will be supported as well.

What Is Cosmos?

Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Before Cosmos, blockchains were siloed and unable to communicate with each other. They were hard to build and could only handle a small amount of transactions per second. Cosmos solves these problems with a new technical vision. In order to understand this vision we need to go back to the fundamentals of blockchain technology.

The Issues that Cosmos Solves in the World of Cryptocurrency

#1 Scalability

As we all know, blockchains are networks of bitcoin and ethereum. Since these two currencies are already getting some attention, they need to be able to compete with other types of systems that work by transactions.

Scalability reflects the way that these two crypto coins can work. At this point, imagine what happens in just a second in the world. Bitcoin itself can manage 7 transactions, while Ethereum is in charge of 20. Meanwhile, on another side of the issue, Visa can successfully manage 1.667 transactions.

The main issue of scalability so far has been the limitation of physical servers and broadband connection. So, allowing the blockchains to perform in a hub such as Cosmos improves their scalability.

#2 Interoperability

The inability of crypto coins to communicate with each other has been long discussed in the still young history of digital currencies. The evolution of bitcoin and Ethereum occurs individually and there is no genuine information sharing process. This limitation slows down the development of cryptocurrencies as they face challenging processes in communication with banks from the real world. Hence, a tough exchange process. Cosmos is addressing the interoperability issue and also solving other limitations of this ecosystem

Why Cosmos?

At least for now, Cosmos has proven that the team can deliver, the community is supportive, tools are already built around Cosmos and may more are yet to come. It offers everything we need right now for the next level of adoption