Cosmos is generally referred to as the internet of blockchain but it has gone way beyond just being the internet of blockchains, Cosmos is now a way of life; a design philosophy for blockchains; the blueprint of blockchains. We will be exploring Cosmos Technology superiority as well as the various technological advancements Cosmos has embarked on in this article.
Let’s dive deeper.
What is Cosmos?
Cosmos is an ever-expanding ecosystem of interconnected apps and services, built for a decentralized future. Cosmos apps and services connect using IBC, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol. This innovation enables you to freely exchange assets and data across sovereign, decentralized blockchains.
There are currently more than 262 apps and services in the Cosmos network, including Binance Chain, Terra, Crypto.org, and Cosmos Hub, with over $59 billion of digital assets under management. There have also been news of other non-native blockchains using Cosmos proprietary technology “IBC” with the likes of Avax, Near Protocol announcing their intentions.
The cosmos blockchain allows developers to build upon a secure and stable foundation such as:
- Decentralized Finance Applications
Create exchanges and marketplaces that allow anyone around the world to buy, trade, invest, and lend – even without a bank account.
- Resilient, Decentralized Autonomous organizations
Empower your community to organize and allocate resources to its members. Vote on impactful governance decisions.
- Game economies, owned by players
Create in-game assets that are available forever. Bring lasting value to gamers by letting them take their loot to another game or into the real world.
Cosmos Hub
At the core of the Internet of Blockchains is the Cosmos Hub, the economic center of Cosmos, secured by its native ATOM token. The Cosmos Hub was the first blockchain to launch on the Cosmos network—the first of hundreds of thousands of blockchains, working with one another and enriched by their connections.
The Cosmos Hub is designed to be a service provider to the chains that connect to it—a vast decentralized marketplace that provides a wealth of value-added services, such as shared security, a decentralized interchain exchange, bridges to Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC), and secure custodianship of digital assets. All these services create powerful incentives for other sovereign chains to connect and transfer assets to the Cosmos Hub, driving its utility. Just like a port city is valued by the amount of trade that flows through it, the Cosmos Hub’s value is measured by the blockchain economies that conduct business on the Hub through IBC.
Popular terms to know in Cosmos
Tendermint Core
The underlying technology behind Cosmos is the Tendermint Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm, which is designed to ensure finality, order consistency, and optional availability.
Cosmos SDK
The industry standard for building blockchains, Cosmos SDK is built to deliver the best in decentralized technologies: speed. Transaction throughput and latency are core components, and speed is what matters most—no one wants to pay a fee to have their transaction take hours or even days to confirm.
IBC
The standard protocol for inter blockchain communication, IBC allows blockchains in the ecosystem to connect so that they can transfer tokens and other data between each other frictionlessly and seamlessly.
Ignite CLI
Ignite CLI is the fastest way from zero to mainnet, accelerating chain development by scaffolding everything you need so you can focus on business logic. It is built on top of Cosmos SDK, the world’s most popular blockchain framework.
Interchain Account
Interchain accounts allow users to give permission to an application running on one blockchain to perform an action on another. This requires the blockchains to set up a mutual interchain account and be based on either Cosmos SDK or Tendermint, protocols used to replicate and launch blockchain applications.
One secure account for all your digital assets.
Cosmos 2.0
Cosmos2.0 is coming soon, forecasted to be live january 2023. Cosmos will also be having the cosmoverse september 2022, with lots of amazing announcements expected to be shared. Cosmos2.0 will also birth the most talked about Interchain Security which boasts to be revolutionary for Cosmos.
Interchain Security
Interchain Security is the Cosmos-specific category of Shared Security that uses IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication).
At a very high level, Interchain Security allows for a provider chain (like the Cosmos Hub), to be in charge of producing blocks for a consumer chain. It does this by sharing the set of validators who are in charge of producing blocks. The participating validators would run two nodes, one for the Cosmos Hub and one for the consumer chain, and receive fees and rewards on both chains. In order to be eligible to produce blocks on the consumer chain, the validator would use the ATOM tokens they’ve staked on the Cosmos Hub. If the validator does a bad job producing blocks on either chain, they risk having their ATOM tokens destroyed by a mechanism called “slashing”. The consumer chain uses IBC to communicate with the provider chain to keep track of which validators are participating in Interchain Security using Cross Chain Validation. In this way, the security gained from the value of the stake locked on the provider chain is shared with the consumer chain.
There are two primary reasons that Interchain Security is valuable to the Cosmos Hub. The first reason is because it allows for “hub minimalism” and the second is to lower the barrier to launching and running secure sovereign decentralized public blockchains.