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.