Latest in Cosmos — (Critical) Community Update, May
What to expect after launch & how to prepare for on-chain governance
May 29, 2018
Greetings Cosmonauts,
The Cosmos Hub is launching this summer. The team is focusing on landing the last set of MVP features and we’re getting closer and closer to feature-complete testnets. The initial network will have a limited set of features, while additional features will be rolled out over time with approval from the on-chain governance mechanism. We look forward to seeing the community of atom holders start to set goals and directions for the network. For those of you who want to actively participate, joining our testnets is a great place to start getting involved.
Join the testnets: Cosmos Testnet
TL;DR
- The initial network will support staking, delegation, and governance.
- Token transfers will be implemented but disabled at launch, to be enabled by governance via a parameter “switch” after network stabilizes.
- IBC will not be implemented at launch, to be enabled by governance via a Software Upgrade Proposal (SUP) after IBC is fully implemented and tested.
- The photon hardspoon will be enabled by governance, perhaps in late 2018 or early 2019.
- We’re rolling out an Interchain Standard for tokens derived from application-specific blockchains built using the Cosmos-SDK (dAppzones) for accelerated integration with third-party entities.
Countdown to Launch — What to Expect
Phase 1 | Mainnet launch
At genesis, the network will be unstable and we anticipate something will go wrong. The network will inevitably halt as validators find their footing, and should something go catastrophically wrong, we will need to perform a rollback to the genesis state.
Roughly, we estimate that it could take somewhere between a few weeks to a few months for the network to become stable.
Key takeaways:
- Staking, slashing, and governance are features that will be enabled at launch as modules in the SDK.
- Before Phase 1, we highly encourage you to join the testnet.
- Before Phase 1, delegators should become familiar with the list of validators and decide which ones to stake atoms with.
- During Phase 1, atom holders should get familiar with staking, unstaking, and restaking.
Phase 2 | Enable transfers
At launch, the transferring of atoms will be explicitly disabled. This means that while atoms will be allocated to fundraiser participants in the genesis, atom holders will not initially have the ability to move them around. Yes, this means that no exchange activity can occur in the meanwhile.
The goal here is to ensure network stability and iron out any bugs before atoms become transferable. Actually enabling transfers will be left to governance.
Phase 3 | IBC launch
As of this writing, the interoperability mechanism of the Cosmos Network, the Interblockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, is in the final stages of specification and is largely implemented.
After mainnet is stabilized, transfers are activated, and IBC is completed, governance will vote on a Software Upgrade Proposal (SUP) for a code update to enable zones to start opening up IBC connections to the Cosmos Hub.
Then the fun begins.
You can refer to the GitHub issue which addresses Phases 1–3 here: Issue #1053. Comments are welcome on the issue, as this is a discussion topic that’s relevant to the broader atom holder community.
Phase 4 | Ethermint & Photon Hardspoon
Ethermint development is currently on hold and will undergo a massive redesign. The prior approach to Ethermint wrapped geth in the ABCI interface so it could run on Tendermint. In the new proposed version of the design, instead of shoehorning the Cosmos stack into the existing geth codebase, Ethermint will utilize lower-level components of geth to provide the EVM and Ethereum transaction semantics as a module within the Cosmos-SDK. We are targeting Q4 of 2018 for an initial implementation of this new design.
Ethermint README: Issue #407.
As for what to do about the photon, the decision is up to atom holders to vote on:
- Whether or not to bring photons into the Cosmos Network. If atom holders decide to introduce photons into the network, they then get to decide…
- how many photons will be minted every block…
- what the total supply of photons will be. While photon supply will depend on the account state based on a snapshot of the Ethereum Network, governance decides what the ratio of photons to ether will be.
- When the snapshot occurs.
- How much of the percentage of the photon supply will go to atom holders and how much of it goes to ether holders.
Announcements
Introducing: Interchain Standards (ICS)
Cosmos is rolling out an Interchain Standard (ICS) for Cosmos-SDK based tokens. The idea is that while you can implement anything imaginable using the SDK, there will be some advantages to be gained for a variety of dAppzones from common API usage which will accelerate integrations across platforms in the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Follow the specification and implementation progress on GitHub here: Interchain Token Standard
Rolling Out: Cosmos Academy
We’ve been working hard to bridge the information gap for people who are new to blockchain tech, non-blockchain developers who are skeptical about decentralized applications, and investors who want to learn the fundamentals behind cryptocurrencies. Cosmos Academy is an effort to spread education first along with providing hands-on guidance for developers who decide to go with the Cosmos-SDK or LotionJS application frameworks for building their dAppzones. This effort is still in its infancy and will evolve over time. The Academy can take shape in many forms: meetups, workshops, virtual Q&A sessions, etc.; we’re still experimenting with the ideal format. Currently, we are working with Blockgeeks and Blockchain at Berkeley to roll out online courses. Later, we could begin producing courses in-house. You can check in on said courses to see if they will become available after Q4 2018.
Academy resources are currently aggregated here, which, for now, take shape in technical documentation for developers:
We hosted the first Cosmos Academy Meetup of the year this past weekend. We will be scaling up this program (and improving the viewing/sound quality) as the Cosmos Academy matures.
This is a good place to start for those of you who are new to Byzantine fault-tolerance in distributed systems: Software Engineering Daily with Ethan Buchman
Watch the Tendermint 101 Meetup on the Cosmos Network’s YouTube channel.
And here is the same video on qq for our readers in China.
Latest in Development
New Features in the Cosmos-SDK
View the latest releases of Cosmos-SDK: here.
- Fees
Transactions on the Cosmos Network are subject to fees, like they are on any other blockchain. In the Cosmos Network, there are two types of fees. The first is a transaction fee and the second is a commission fee. Unlike most existing blockchains using a single token model, the Cosmos Network will whitelist a variety of tokens — decided by governance — and accept them as transaction fee payments. Delegators can earn a portion of these transaction fees in proportion to their bonded atom share. Validators may charge commission fees to delegators.
For a detailed examination of fee payments and the economic system that runs the Cosmos Network, read this blog post.
- Gas counting
Gas costs are a way of simulating and charging for that underlying cost which doubles as a spam prevention measure in-protocol to prevent expensive-to-compute transaction spam. We’re writing gas accounting into the Cosmos-SDK both for the Cosmos Hub and for downstream SDK developers to reuse the default gas costs (or override them if they’d like) without expending extra effort.
- Genesis transaction
The Genesis transaction tool will allow users who wish to stake to validator nodes will be able to do so using their atom allocations from the fundraiser.
- Reserve pool
The reserve pool is a pool of funds derived from collecting network tax on transaction fees made in the network to fund for common goods decided by governance. Funds from the reserve pool are planned to be used to increase the security, utility and value of the Cosmos Network and may also be distributed in accordance with decisions made from the governance system.
Discussions about the reserve pool are happening here: Issue #32. Community input is welcome.
- Staking
The basic logic landed in gaia-5000 and is running in the backend of Voyager.
- Bech32Cosmos format
We’ve introduced a variant of Bitcoin’s Bech32 format to provide human-readable and error-correcting addresses.
View the issue on GitHub: Issue #1029.
New Features in Tendermint
View the latest releases (with changelogs) of Tendermint: here.
- BFT time
Tendermint aims to provide a decentralized, deterministic, and Byzantine fault-tolerant source of time at the consensus level.
- Key Management System (KMS)
Validation private keys need to always be accessible in a secure way. As such, a simple, secure key management plugin for Tendermint validators is being implemented that will support multiple different hardware backends for validator signing.
See: KMS
- Making the move to Sha256
We are largely replacing RIPEMD160 for SHA256 in our software stack.
- Simplifying how the transaction hash is computed
Hash only the underlying transaction information, instead of hashing the entire Amino encode.
- Using Ed25519 for public key authentication
We are no longer going to Amino encode validator public keys for verification and for computing addresses.
- Adding NextValidatorSetHash to improve light client verification time
Currently, when the validator set changes, the old validator set doesn’t get a chance to actually sign on the new validator set directly. They only sign the changes that lead to the new validator set, so it’s harder for a light client to verify. But if we delay the validator set change by 1 block and put NextValSetHash in the header, then the previous validator set does get to sign on the new validator set hash and this saves time and effort for the validators’ verification process.
- Other upcoming breaking changes
A number of other breaking changes are in the works, all being tracked here: Issue #1568
Tendermint New Hires
Billy Rennekamp, UI /UX Developer
Billy was a winner in the Cosmos Hackatom2 Hackathon building an artwork incentive game. He’s joined the Voyager team as a software developer to work on the user interface for staking and governance on the Cosmos Hub.
Dev Ojha, Summer Intern
Dev is a developer focusing on applications of cryptography. He is currently working on the use of BLS signatures in the Tendermint consensus algorithm, as well as researching other applications of novel cryptography to the Cosmos platform.
Ismail Khoffi, Software Engineer
Ismail is a Software & Research Engineer with over a decade of professional programming experience. He worked on a wide range of projects, from enterprise web applications to implementing academic research prototypes in the blockchain scalability frontier. At Tendermint, he is responsible for the backend and “database stack”, including Amino, the IAVL+ Merkle tree, and our go-crypto library.
Jeremiah Andrews, Summer Intern
Jeremiah is a researcher and developer in the areas of mechanism design and cryptography. His focus is on the applications of said areas to the construction of scalable, secure, and private distributed systems. He is currently working on the use of BLS signatures in the Tendermint consensus algorithm, as well as researching other applications of novel cryptography to the Cosmos platform.
Michelle Leech, Marketing and Communications Manager
Michelle is a bilingual IT marketing and sales professional with over five years of experience in the cybersecurity industry with specific focuses on encryption and cryptography (e.g., blockchain and cryptocurrency technology), enterprise identity and access management and markets including machine-to-machine, wireless, and banking and payment card technology. She has held different roles within the marketing organization from product marketing to field marketing to communication specialist.
Conference Digest for the Month of May, Retold in Frames
Blockchain Week
De/2018
Edcon
Women Leaders in Blockchain, TrustToken
Jessy Irwin, our Head of Security, spoke on a panel at TrustToken’s Women Leaders in Blockchain event on May 1st that showcased the work, experience and accomplishments of women working in law, finance, growth and marketing, and engineering.
Until next time Space Ranger,
:: Static outro::
End telemetry.
