ICF Update — Sept 7th
Note: The Cosmos ecosystem is constantly growing and expanding. This article's content is now outdated. For the latest content, see https://cosmos.network/.
Today marks two weeks since our update about the Q2 funding recipients. We’d like to use this time to begin a new bi-weekly update where we can highlight some of the more exciting activities that took place at the Interchain Foundation. This will include some check-in meetings that occurred with various recipients as well as general meetings and 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.
Q3 Applications Closed
August 31st was the last day to submit Q3 funding proposals. The application form is still open at apply.interchain.io but all applicants until November 30th, 2020 will be considered for Q4 2020 funding opportunities. Now we will begin the process of reviewing and providing feedback with applicants until the Board of Management comes up with a final list of proposals. These will be reviewed by the Technical Advisory Board who will provide comments on the proposals. Afterwards the proposals and comments are submitted to the Foundation Council which will review and ultimately decide on the outcomes of the various proposals. If all goes well this process should be the second complete cycle of the new funding program and should be complete by October 1st, 2020.
Nomic Check-In
We had our regular check-in with Matt Bell and Judd Keppel from Nomic.io building a Bitcoin sidechain. They’ve been developing a new rust based SDK called Orga utilizing Tendermint via ABCI in order to build performant applications. They’ve been active in the Cosmos-SDK issue “What do to about IAVL” where use of merk, their rust based merkel key/value store, may end up playing a vital role in an IAVL solution. This could furthermore increase the portability of IBC across codebases.
Althea Update
Althea has been working with the newly founded UniFi DAO in order to expedite the Peggy bridge delivery schedule. The DAO successfully raised 30,000 ATOMs that will go towards onboarding new developers and ensure the codebase becomes production ready ahead of the original schedule as funded by the ICF. Integrating the Peggy module directly into the Cosmos Hub is an exciting proposal that is gaining momentum and community support that would allow transfer of tokens from Ethereum mainnet onto the Cosmos Hub and the greater Internet of Blockchains. If you’re interested in following along, follow Althea’s blog, join the Peggy discord channel or UniFi DAO telegram group.
Akash IBC Relayer Maintenance
Akash network finalized a service agreement with the ICF to support maintenance of the IBC relayer in golang. This was the relayer initially built by Jack Zampolin and Iqlusion during Game of Zones. Jack recently became VP of Product at Akash and will oversee maintenance as well as a few new features in order to be the primary relayer during the Stargate upgrade of the Cosmos Hub. Join the Stargate Discord channel to follow along.
Web3 & ICF Co-Funded Simply VC’s PANIC Validator Monitoring Suite
Simply VC recently finalized a service agreement with the ICF to support the next iteration of the PANIC Validator Monitoring service. This work was co-funded by Web3 Foundation in order to ensure that Substrate validators are supported by the suite as well. The current version of PANIC requires a relatively technical installation and interface process while the new version is a web based, user friendly version that offers a variety of insights and integrations to give validator operators and network data providers deep insights into the state of various proof of stake networks.
NFT & Metadata Working Group Led by ixo & Persistence One
Last Friday, September 4th, was the kick-off call for the new NFT & Metadata working group being led by ixo and Persistence One (video here + passcode “GF+aP4EE” & blog post here). They recently finalized a joint service agreement with the ICF to do spec design and development of the NFT Module as well as a new Metadata module that will allow a rich system for asset introspection and management of capabilities across blockchains. That means not only will you have basic NFT information available like Name, Image and URI but also provide a format for information like whether the NFT can be transferred, burned or sold. This metadata module should be furthermore useful outside of strictly NFT contexts as a standalone module that can augment any number of other modules and their capabilities. The call was joined with presentations by NFT users IRIS Network, Regen Network and Left Gallery. To take part in the discussion join the discord channel on the Cosmos Community Discord.
Lunie Notification Support
We recently had a check-in call with Jordan Bibla, CEO of the Lunie Wallet for Staking and Governance. They’ve been hard at work adding support for Polkadot as well as incorporating a new notification system. This feature is really great, I tried it out with an account I use for testing and saw that one of the 0% commission validators I staked too were incrementing the commission rate on a daily basis. I would have never been monitoring this so closely and their system made it immediately apparent.
Left Gallery Pair Programming
left gallery’s Harm van den Dorpel and Alberto Granzotto, previously of Ascribe and BigchainDB stopped by the Interchain GmbH offices for a pair programming session with Billy Rennekamp and Sam Hart to kick off their development of the Cosmos SDK interaction of left.gallery. They’ll be working on a semi-custodial module system to allow delegated management of certificates of authenticity for digital artworks.
Dystopia Labs and 2020 Cosmos Conference
Dystopia Labs finalized a service agreement this week with the ICF to begin work planning the 2020 Cosmos conference to take place Sat Dec 12th — Sun Dec 13th. We’re excited to be working with Hsin-Ju who has done fantastic work on previous events DeFi Discussions, Trust-Less 2020 & Liquidity2020. Keep an eye out for more details as this work develops and we finalize the speaker list! You can already ensure you stay up to date by signing up at crowdcast.io.
Thanks for catching up on our first of (hopefully) many regular updates. 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.
See you in 2 weeks!
