ICF Update — Dec 15th

ChainSafe Conference Highlights;Cosmos Conversations Highlights; Trust Graphic Novel; Cosmos Quicksync from Chainlayer; Bianjie Agreement for Enterprise Compliant SDK; CosmosCash Research Paper; Althea Peggy Public Standup; WalletConnect Spec and Presentation; Map Of Zones Updates; Cosmos Rust Meeting; cdot and Substrate IBC; cdot and Substrate IBC; Gaia team lead Shahan Khatchadourian;

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The Interchain Foundation

5 min readDec 15, 2020

Welcome to the eighth edition of our bi-weekly update! We’ll be using this space to highlight some of the exciting activities that took place at the Interchain Foundation over the last two weeks. This will include some check-in meetings that occurred with various funding recipients, as well as goings-on that members of the Interchain ecosystem might find interesting and informative.

If any of the updates are especially relevant to what you are working on, feel free to drop us a line at hello@interchain.io.

If you’re interested in applying for funding, take a look at our process, our request for proposals and submit at apply.interchain.io by February 14th for consideration in Q1 of 2021.

If you missed the last update, check it out at ICF Update — Dec 1st.

ChainSafe Conference CSCON[0] Highlights

Two weeks ago was the first ChainSafe conference that highlighted their unique position building technology across so many projects and ecosystems. They utilized a really cool online conference platform that allowed for side channels and tables of conversation between conference attendees between talks. Take a look at their full agenda and especially Cosmos contributor talks from:

Cosmos Conversations II Highlights

Last weekend ran the annual Cosmos Conversations as an online only version in collaboration with Dystopia Labs. There were two full days of top notch talks and we recommend you take a look over the entire list that are still online at crowdcast (soon to be uploaded to youtube). Especially exciting are the following high level talks:

Overview of Cosmos from Billy Rennekamp and Ethan Buchman
Tendermint 1.0 from Tess Rinearson
Cosmos SDK 1.0 from Aaron Craelius
And the fantastic Starport demo as part of A Million Blockchains from Peng Zhong

Trust Graphic Novel

We are also happy to say that we’ve received an update from Trust Graphic Novel about their project. Trust received some funding from ICF in Q4 2019 to work on a graphic novel that tells an inspiring story. It is very gratifying to hear that the project is coming to fruition, and it is also receiving additional support from other entities in the Blockchain ecosystem. Check their fantastic teaser with stunning graphics!

Cosmos Quicksync from Chainlayer

Q3 funding recipient, Chainlayer, has completed the first milestone for their work on the Cosmos Quicksync tool available at cosmos.quicksync.io. This provides snapshots of the Cosmos hub chain data at various heights to allow a new node to quickly sync to the current state of the blockchain. The current snapshots are for the `cosmos-hub3` but would soon include the to-be launched stargate upgrade gaia hub chain.

Bianjie Agreement for Enterprise Compliant SDK

Bianjie, the IRISNet core team, has finalized a service agreement with the ICF to extend the capabilities of the Cosmos Hub in order to be enterprise compliant in China’s upcoming Blockchain Service Network (BSN). This could make the Cosmos SDK eligible as a Open Permissioned Blockchain (OPB) for use by Chinese enterprises. As an early iteration of this work it could make the EVM module and the CosmWasm module available for compliant enterprise developers.

CosmosCash Research Paper

Tendermint Inc. has recently completed a deliverable on a service agreement with the ICF to research the regulatory landscape for EU compliant e-money services. The results of this work could go towards a new class of compliant finance applications that utilize the Cosmos SDK for their operations. They’ve accompanied this research with a series of proof-of-concept modules that can be seen here.

Althea Peggy Public Standup

Althea Networks, builders of Peggy, the Cosmos SDK Ethereum Bridge, ran another successful standup this week. The recording can be seen here and outlines a competed migration to the Cosmos SK v0.40 release candidate for Stargate, which includes IBC. Furthermore they expect a new testnet on Friday, December 18th and confirmation of adversarial testnets coming in 2021, leading up to a mainnet launch and then proposal to be included directly on the Cosmos Hub.

WalletConnect Spec and Presentation

Since our last bi-weekly update, WalletConnect has released a series of specs to outline the architectural considerations that have gone into WalletConnect v2.0 that addresses the needs of an Internet of Blockchains. Furthermore Pedro Gomes, the founder of WalletConnect, presented an update on WalletConnect 2.0 at the recent Cosmos Conversations. Take a look at his presentation here!

Map Of Zones Updates

ZTake, the validator group building the interactive overview of IBC connected blockchains that was first prototyped during Game Of Zones, has completed their first milestone towards a revamp of the project. This includes a refactor of the backend and the creation of new documentation material outlining the backend., plus a few tweaks to the UI that can be seen on the current website that still uses Game of Zone data. Keep an eye out for further updates including new features and further updates to the interface — as well as of course live IBC data with the launch of the Stargate upgrade.

Cosmos Rust Meeting

Representatives from Informal, Iqlusion, Althea, Nomic, CosmWasm discussed collaborating on common data structures in the following repo: https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-rust as well as standardizing client interfaces to work across various Cosmos development environments. Find out more in the #rust 🔧 Discord channel.

cdot and Substrate IBC

cdot is making progress integrating Informal’s IBC handlers into Substrate. They’re currently working on translating native ibc-rs types to Substrate’s data storage types and connecting Cosmos’ proto serialization format to Substrate’s SCALE codec. Keep tabs on the ibc-substrate repo (https://github.com/cdot-network/substrate-ibc) as well as the #substrate 🤝 channel in Discord.

Gaia team lead Shahan Khatchadourian

Shahan Khatchadourian, founder of ConsenSys’ Pegasus team, joined Interchain GmbH as the new Gaia lead dev. He’s been familiarizing himself with the Gaia codebase and speaking with key Gaia stakeholders to get up to speed with all things Cosmos Hub.

Thanks for catching up on our eighth update. We’ll be working on the format to keep it brief but informative. If there are things you’d like to hear more about, feel free to reach out to hello@interchain.io or ping us on Twitter at @interchain_io.

If you’re interested in applying for funding, take a look at our process, our request for proposals and submit at apply.interchain.io by February 14th for consideration in Q1 of 2021.

We’ll be taking a hiatus over the holidays but look forward to catching up in 2021!