A lot has happened for the Cosmos Hub since April of this year, and this is our chance to go over the big-ticket items that Notional has been working on.
Interchain Security (ICS)
As we mentioned back in April, Cosmos Hub proposal #792 saw the ATOM community overwhelmingly vote 90% in favour of enabling Interchain Security (also referred to as Replicated Security). This means that new projects can elect to have the Cosmos Hub validator set provide security for their blockchain rather than assembling their own dedicated validator sets. The group of chains that will be secured by the Cosmos Hub is becoming known as the Atom Economic Zone (AEZ), and there was (and still is) a large amount of work to be done to ensure that this zone is secure, flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. Credit must go to Informal Systems for their critical work on the core development of ICS, which has gone live in April and is currently in production. Both Neutron and Stride have been approved by governance to be included in the AEZ with Duality lined up to be a potential third consumer chain, and there have been a multitude of conversations about whether other chains should consider this option as well. It is undoubtedly exciting days for the Cosmos Hub's killer app.
Where does Notional fit in? One of our main areas of focus has been getting both the Cosmos Hub as well as the consumer chains upgraded to SDK v 47 (see PR 869), as the current v 45 is simply not adequate to handle the demands of ICS. Additionally, we have been focused on issues like
- IBC connections between chains in the AEZ, and general IBC updates (see PR 951, PR 923, PR 921, and PR 1079)
- More rigorous testing procedures (see PR 957, PR 958, PR 923, PR 1080, and PR 1077)
- ICS scaling (see PR 2595)and
- code organization (see PR 926, PR 925, and PR 1034)
Liquid Staking
Zaki Manian and his team at Iqlusion have done some incredible work on the Liquid Staking module for the Cosmos Hub, which promises to liberate the liquidity currently locked in securing the chain and free it up for trading, defi, and other use-cases. It will get added to the Cosmos Hub as part of the SDK v 47 upgrade. Much like with ICS, we are focused on a few key areas of development:
- Testing (see PR 80, PR 5, and PR 7)
- Refactoring and complexity reduction (see PR 100 and PR 101)and
- incorporating safety features (see PR 81 and PR 83)
The SDK
As the demands on Cosmos chains increase, so must the capabilities of the foundations on which they are built. The SDK is the foundation for all Cosmos chains and if we want to continue being the premiere environment for appchain development, our launch pad needs to evolve with the times. In addition to the inclusion of the erstwhile mentioned features, we are also working on some key aspects of the SDK including:
- Upgrading the errors module (see PR 2471)
- Improving the linting procedures (see PR 16605 and PR 2608)
- Upgrading the simapp application (see PR 3874 and PR 2883)
- Applying the Barberry patch (see PR 3810)
- Improving the management of imports and dependencies (see PR 16667 and PR 2596)
Conclusion
As the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place for the Cosmos Hub as a central security hub in the interchain, Notional is grateful for all the support we've received from
- other validators
- development teams and
- our delegators.
We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways to the growth of this ecosystem. We are confident that these new technological improvements will allow for a vast and colourful interchain ecosystem, brimming with innovation and opportunity. As always, live reporting for our activity on the Cosmos Hub can be found here.