Community Newsletter

Make your New Year’s Resolution to

Win the Cosmos Network ‘Game of Zones’

Highlights of the December Cosmos Hub & Spoke Edition

✨ Win Game of Zones this New Year

✨ Cosmos Hub 3

✨ Get GoZ ready by testing the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) prototype for token transfers

🏅 Game of Zones: Coming January 2020

Game of Zones is the sequel to the first adversarial testnet in Proof-of-Stake history (Game of Stakes circa 2018) to kick off the incoming paradigm of incentivized testnets. This time, players will build and connect zones using the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol and try to break each others’ chains. In exchange, the Interchain Foundation is donating 100,000 ATOM to the Game of Zones prize pool.

Get a head start by:

🌟 Familiarizing yourself with the IBC branches of the Cosmos SDK on GitHub. Note: these branches will evolve over time.

🌟 Practicing by sending IBC transactions between testnets.

* This isn’t part of the GoZ registration process

⚙️ Cosmos Hub 3 Upgrade

All systems were go for the most recent upgrade! The community has signaled to upgrade Cosmos Hub-2 to Cosmos Hub-3 at an 84% consensus by stake-weighted voting power. State will be exported from Cosmos Hub-2 at Block Height 2902000. The Genesis of Cosmos Hub-3 will happen within 60 minutes of reaching the aforementioned Block Height.

 

🚀 2020 rings in the Launch of IBC to User in Era of Internet of Blockchains

Learn about IBC from the recently launched the IBC webpage for a high-level understanding about the technology. If you’d like to receive regular IBC-related communication, subscribe to the IBC-specific newsletter on that webpage.

If you’d like to be an active contributor of IBC join the technical IBC working group. The next IBC Ecosystem WG call is this week, December 19th, at 17:00 CEST. You can contribute to the agenda and find more information on Github.

👏 Congrats to the top 7 projects changing the game in finance

Over 600 people applied to the hackathon from all over the world and over 330 of them made it through the application process, landed in San Francisco, and became a part of building history. We recently published the TL;DR of the winning projects from the SFBW 2019 Cosmos DeFi hackathon. If you couldn’t make it, read all about the winning projects and sponsors on the Cosmos blog.

⚡️ Wasm comes to Cosmos

CosmWasm is a new smart contracting platform built for the cosmos ecosystem. Particularly, CosmWasm is aimed at Go developers with experience using the Cosmos SDK, as well as Rust developers looking for a blockchain platform.

CosmWasm was originally prototyped by Team Gaians at the Berlin Hackatom 2019. In particular, Aaron Craelius, CTO of Regen Network, designed the architecture with respect to avoiding reentrancy attacks such as those exploited in the now-famous DAO hack, Jehan Tremback, founder of Althea Network, led the implementation in Rust, and Ethan Frey, founder of Confio, led the golang piece of the implementation. After the concept was successfully prototyped, the Interchain Foundation provided a grant to Confio to implement a production-ready implementation.

We’ll have more content and tutorials coming soon!

💫 Cosmos Events, News & Meetups

 

Podcast

New Interchain podcast with Kate Sills from Agoric: Smart Contracts & the Incentives for the Crowdfunding of Public Goods

Meetup

Cosmos San Francisco is hosting an upcoming meetup mid-Dec! - Learn about how Binance chain, TrustWallet, Tellor, Agoric, and Cosmos are thinking about using IBC.

@EverettProtocol

We are very proud to announce that 'interchain account' has been merged nto ICS27. This makes Everett Protocol the first ICS contributor.

@DokiaC

There’s a big @cosmos out there, and it’s still expanding: List of projects in Cosmos & Tendermint Ecosystem - Ecosystem - Cosmos Forum

@TradeTalks

.@Nasdaq #TradeTalks: Inter Blockchain Communication will Usher in New Era of Blockchain Globalization @Agoric @tendermint_team @JillMalandrino

@warpaul

#DeFi projects being built in under 36 hours using @Cosmos @XpringDev @Interledger @Dharma_HQ @Agoric #XRP and more at #HackATOM (no, not my sleeping bag)

@cosmos

On a mission to create the Internet of Blockchains, @buchmanster, Technical Director @interchain_io, explains @ethwaterloo2 (34:50) how Cosmos is reaching worldwide adpotion by prioritizing user-sovereignty for developers building their communities.

🎥: bit.ly/34SIIuK

 

✨ Community Conversations

 

The solution to live chain upgrades is here

Live on-chain upgrades have historically been a challenge to pull off. Tezos, along with. he teams behind Regen Network and IOV Network have pioneered on-chain upgrades. Regen and IOV have implemented a testing module for seamless software upgrades for Cosmos SDK-based chains. It is now officially part of the Cosmos SDK.

Tools to improve validator alerting and monitoring

Cosmos Validator, Chainflow, received an ICF grant to develop a validator monitoring and alerting tool. The tool helps validators currently validating on the Cosmos Network (or compatible ones) securely and reliably monitor their systems. If you have user feedback, open a support ticket on the associated Github issue.

The community discusses a DeFi world enabled by staking derivatives

Chorus One’s co-founder, Meher Roy, sees utility in creating a staking derivatives market on bonded ATOMs, where supply is currently illiquid, in order to create a liquid market in which derivatives could be utilized for more vehicles than just staking. The recommendation is made based on considering three derivative inventions: delegation trading, delegation vouchers, and delegation tranches. It’s an interesting discussion in the future of validator services that can be found on the Cosmos Forum.

🪐 Cosmos Ecosystem

 

Akash Network is the 1st peer-to-peer serverless computing

Akash Network is bringing serverless computing to Cosmos by being the world’s first peer-to-peer supercloud for serverless computing. Through Akash’s platform, developers can easily and securely access cloud computing power by integrating advanced containerization technology with a unique staking model to accelerate adoption, built on Tendermint Core and Cosmos.

Oasis Labs is building an application layer protocol to enable data custodianship

Oasis Protocol, running on Tendermint Core, is the first instance of a blockchain with no single entity owning or controlling the totality of the data. Users maintain owners of their data and control how and with what trusted parties the data is shared. Congratulations to Oasis Labs for the launch of their recent testnet!

Kava Network launches DeFi platform on the Cosmos Network

Kava Network is the first DeFi platform on the Cosmos Network and serves to empower digital asset holders not only within the Cosmos community but throughout the blockchain ecosystem. The successful Kava Mainet launch happened on November 14th following initial challenges from the first go around.

LikeCoin explains the move from Ethereum to Cosmos

LikeCoin is a decentralized protocol for digital content that realigns creativity and rewards for platforms & services across the internet. LikeCoin recently stated:

…in order for the (LikeCoin) ecosystem to expand on impact, grow as a protocol and improve on the user experience; there is a need for us to fully migrate and deploy our own Blockchain. Thanks to Cosmos and Tendermint, it provided a solid infrastructure that enables us to build our application-specific Blockchain with flexibility, security, performance, and sovereignty.

 

🌟 Community Updates on Cosmos

 

Let us know if you have Cosmos coverage you want us to include!