Latest in Cosmos—December Update
December 31, 2017
Happy New Year, Cosmonauts!
This month’s community update is all about the progress we’ve made on the development front. We’re rolling out communications in higher frequencies at each phase of every release. In particular, we have a lot of technical and cryptoeconomics-oriented material in this update, so you’re in for a treat.
New Hires
Zarko Milosevic: Research Scientist
Zarko is a software engineer and researcher. He holds a PhD in Byzantine fault tolerance computing from EPFL, Lausanne. In Tendermint, he works on formal specification and proofs, contributing to the formal soundness and correctness of Tendermint as a BFT consensus algorithm.
- Zarko’s Google Scholar Page: here.
Juwoon Yun: Software Developer
Juwoon, or Joon for short, is a software developer who caught our attention by winning first place in our second Hackatom competition this year for the development of ETGate. Joon is particularly interested in functional programming, scalable blockchains, and building decentralized applications.
- Read the full blog post about his story here.
- Juwoon’s GitHub: https://github.com/mossid
Announcements
ETGate
This month’s new hire, Joon, released ETGate, which acts as the bridge between the Ethereum blockchain and Tendermint zones. The codebase is still in alpha, but the master branch is available for developers to clone and experiment with.
- Technical announcement here: ETGate Blog Post
Cosmos Economics—Dual Token Model
Some members of the community have expressed their dissatisfaction with the distribution of Photons to ETH rather than ATOM holders. To emphasise, the impetus driving all changes within the Cosmos ecosystem is the responsibility of the ATOM holders through governance. Governance will decide on the distribution of Photons and whether it goes to ETH or ATOM holders or both.
The Photon conception was made late this year as the Tendermint research team iterated through various mechanisms designs. The final iteration led to the dual token model, as we believe that the Ethereum hard-spoon can incent developer adoption of the Cosmos Network, thus growing the pie for all participants. To help the Cosmos community more fully understand the economics behind the dual token model, we are releasing the full Cosmos Token Model paper. Please read through it in order to gain a deeper understanding about how it should work.
- Photon announcement here: Cosmos Fee Token Blog Post
- Full cosmos-token paper here: Cosmos Token Model
Bug Bounty Program—”Hack the Cosmos”
Tendermint has created a Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Policy for security bugs, and is launching a “Hack the Cosmos” bug bounty program to incentivize people who report bugs within the program scope. We’ve been working with HackerOne to get the program off the ground, and they will host the bug bounty once it is live. Rewards for the most critical bugs start at $2,500 points, and the lowest payout is $100. The launch date is TBD, but Tendermint will send updates via our blog and Twitter to announce when it is fully live.
- Website: https://cosmos.network/security
Releases
Tendermint Core v0.13.0 — v0.15.0
We’ve released three new versions of Tendermint Core over December.
The key features implemented in the latest Tendermint (v0.15.0) are:
- Support for light client proofs—Light clients significantly improve the usability of interacting with blockchains. This acts as an important stepping stone toward finalizing IBC, since IBC requires blockchains to act as light clients to each other.
- Evidence transactions in the blockchain and a new reactor for gossiping it—Accountability and slashing for Byzantine faults are some of the most novel things that Cosmos is doing. Adding evidence support to blocks is critical infrastructure which enables peers to report faulty validators who violated consensus rules and, subsequently, punish them.
- Timestamping—Timestamps provide a source of monotonic time that Tendermint applications can use. They’re also used in votes in order to get Byzantine fault tolerant time in blocks.
- Enable PEX (peer-exchange reactor)—Enables dynamic peer discovery by default. Now peers can be gossiped on the p2p layer. This is a huge improvement over the default configuration in previous testnets where peers would connect to Tendermint nodes and subsequently crash those testnets. Concurrently, this feature allows us to test the sentry node architecture for validators.
Latest releases can be found here: Tendermint GitHub
Cosmos UI Alpha v0.3.0
A new release of the Cosmos UI Alpha is out! Now you can:
- View transaction history
- Delegate stake (bonding and unbonding)
V0.3.0 is running on gaia-2-dev testnet.
Latest release here: Cosmos UI GitHub
Conferences
Recap: Token Summit II, San Francisco
The very last conference of the year we sponsored was Token Summit II. Below is the Blockchain Scalability panel where Jae Kwon talked about how implementing Cosmos inadvertently led us down the path of horizontal scalability solutions for a variety of blockchains.
To the Cosmos!
Your Fellow Cosmonauts
