Cosmos, the “internet of blockchains,” has gone live with the release of the software named Cosmos Hub, the first in a series of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains that will be created in the Cosmos ecosystem. The launch is a significant step toward a broader vision of the company to establish an extensive ecosystem of validators and stakeholders.
Since Satoshi Nakamoto conceived the idea of the blockchain, the technology has come a long way and has been adopted by some of the biggest companies in the world. However, the higher adoption rate of the technology has resulted in complication, namely, come in the fields of scalability and interoperability. Cosmos Blockchain offers the solution to these problems faced by the community and hopes to bring blockchains to the next level.
The Cosmos network is made up of many independent, parallel blockchains, called zones. Each of these zones is powered by Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols like Tendermint. The primary zone is the Cosmos Hub, which will act as a parent ledger that is secured through validators. Tendermint Core is the blockchain networking, and consensus mechanism powering the Cosmos Hub and is a critical tool that is expected to remove barriers to innovation in the blockchain space and help in bringing about an entirely new financial system.
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As per the Cosmos Whitepaper :
“Such flexibility allows Cosmos zones to act as bridges to other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, and it also permits derivatives of those blockchains, utilizing the same codebase but with a different validator set and initial distribution. This allows many existing cryptocurrency frameworks, such as those of Ethereum, Zerocash, Bitcoin, CryptoNote and so on, to be used with Tendermint Core, which is a higher performance consensus engine, on a common network, opening a tremendous opportunity for interoperability across platforms.”
The company was founded in 2016 and raised over $16 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017.
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Users of the network will only be able to trade between blockchains or connect to Cosmos Hub with existing blockchain networks after an official vote by the validators to activate something called the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.
“We want to take the blockchain development cycle from idea to implementation down from years to months. This is how we’re trying to transform the blockchain space,” said Zaki Manian, the director of Tendermint Inc.
