Latest in Cosmos — September 2017

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Interchain Ecosystem Blog

6 min readSep 21, 2017

September 21, 2017

We at Cosmos have been working hard behind-the-scenes to gear up for the heavily anticipated launch of Cosmos mainnet coming this December. As we are not pushing the release of ATOMs to exchanges for trading, we cannot make any promises about the expected timeframe that ATOMs will be tradable. In the meantime, the following is a recap of the latest in Tendermint.

New Hires

Christine Chiang: Strategic Communications Manager

Congruent with the theme of space, Christine joined Cosmos after having left her past life at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She discovered Bitcoin in 2014, traveled to Bali to support development of the Bitcoin community there dubbed ‘Bitcoins in Bali,’ contributed to cryptocurrency-focused publications such as BTCManager and BraveNewCoin, before joining Tendermint as the Content Cosmonaut.

Gautier Marin: Governance

Gautier believes rationality is the lowest common denominator of all human beings. He wants to help large-scale communities engage in rational discussions and reach agreement by leveraging blockchain technology and improving communication platforms. Previously, Gautier worked for a French blockchain startup and wrote a master’s thesis on blockchain governance.

Ola Kohut: Developer Relations Manager

Ola gained expertise in online community building and growth marketing while heading growth at Gitter, a chat for open source communities. Before that, she was figuring out new markets growth and expansion opportunities for the music and audio platform SoundCloud. Ola’s academic background is in public policy and international relations, and she is particularly interested in the application of blockchain and decentralization in tackling global policy issues.

Kevin Cheng: Design Manager for Cosmos China

Kevin grew up in Shanghai and studied in his hometown and abroad in London. He joins the Cosmos China team with his background in visual communication and fine arts, with extensive experience working with international teams.

Huasheng Zhang: Front-end Developer for Cosmos China

Huasheng has had 3 years of experience in jquery, angular, and vue. He uses vue in his daily framework. He is interested in blockchain technology and values the ethos of open-source, hoping to make contributions in active and promising projects like Tendermint.

News

Oramint — Oracle Forked Tendermint

As a testament to Tendermint’s Bonded Proof-of-Stake technology, Oracle forked Tendermint as their base layer technology.

Oracle submitted a patent application of their consensus algorithm which borrowed from Tendermint software written in 2015. We were used as a demonstration for their technology and referenced 30 times in the document! Patent pending.

If someone at Oracle is reading this, we would love to lend a hand in helping Oracle upgrade to the latest version of Tendermint. Our latest release is in GitHub here!

Summary — Jepsen Security Analysis

The full writeup can be found here: http://bit.ly/2j0KTsU

Industry Best Practice

We think that every decentralized network protocol should be put through a thorough stress test to simulate how it would hold up on a live network. Leading by example, we funded Jepsen.io, a distributed systems security research tool, to conduct the very first in-depth security analysis on a blockchain consensus system — Tendermint Core.

Jepsen.io did a terrific job summing up how the Tendermint protocol works in their analysis.

“Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Tendermint is a blockchain system. However, where Bitcoin defines a currency, and Ethereum defines a virtual machine for computation, Tendermint deals in opaque transactional payloads.”
— Jepsen.io

Key Findings from the Analysis

Three durability issues uncovered. These issues were around Merkleeyes, goveldb, and Tendermint WAL. We confirmed all three of these issues and are developing patches.
Safety guaranteed. “Tendermint appears to satisfy its safety guarantees: transactions appear linearizable in the presence of simple and complex network partitions, clock skew, and synchronized crash-restart cycles. In addition, Tendermint appears to tolerate byzantine faults on less than 1/3 of the cluster, including duplicated validators with or without partitions, dynamic membership changes, and file truncation.” — Jepsen.io

Releases

[Sept 23 Edit] Tendermint v0.11 & Cosmos UI

Version 0.11 has just been released.

Find the latest releases of Tendermint here: https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/releases

Keep up with our blog here for the latest updates, summaries, and guidelines for using and building on top of Tendermint. Better yet…

Read the Docs

Official Tendermint Documentation here: http://tendermint.readthedocs.io/en/master/

We put a lot of effort into making the documentation readable.

Announcements

HackAtom #2 Winners

See the winning projects here.

Cosmos Validator Program

Wanxiang, one of the largest conglomerates in China supporting the blockchain ecosystem in the East, and Bianjie.ai, an AI on the blockchain company, signed on to become the first Cosmos validators.

Read about our Validator Program here.

Cosmos Academy

We will be coming out with the Cosmos Academy. At the beginning of October, we will begin to release tutorials and videos that showcase how to get started with Cosmos and Tendermint Core. If you are a developer and would like to build on top of Cosmos, stay tuned for more updates.

Follow the latest development of the Academy here: (Cosmos Academy)

Ethermint

The first projects are starting to build on top of Ethermint. The first one we are announcing is OpenMined, who is building encrypted, decentralized AI in Solidity. They are using Ethermint to benefit from the faster block times and lower transaction costs compared to Ethereum. Check out their project on GitHub.

Conferences

Recap: Wanxiang’s 3rd Annual Global Blockchain Summit 2017 — Cosmos Made a Splash in Shanghai Last Week

We are very excited for the road ahead — about the burgeoning blockchain ecosystem in China, about Ethereum scaling, and particularly, about our part in making the future of blockchains interoperable as well as scalable. Summing up the last three days, the theme was very much future-focused. Looking ahead to 2018, speakers, organizers, and forward thinkers were buzzing about the technology that is to come.

As we’re gearing up for our mainnet launch in December/late Q4, Cosmos will be the leader in pioneering a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) network secured by Bonded Proof-of-Stake consensus via Tendermint.

The Shanghai Accord

During a panel discussion on Day 2, Cosmos’ Jae Kwon, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, and Plasma’s Joseph Poon announced The Shanghai Accord. We’re looking forward to supporting scalable systems for public and permissioned blockchains alike.

Cryptoeconomics & Security Conference at UC Berkeley — Cosmos is Sponsoring

Link to the event is here: https://cesc.io/

Cosmos’ founder, Jae Kwon, will be a keynote on the first day of the conference. We will have a booth just outside the speaker’s hall. Visitors can also demo the Cosmos UI at our booth, drop off their resumes, and pick up Cosmos swag and physically minted ATOM tokens.

Devcon3 — Cosmos as Ecosystem Sponsor

Cosmos’ international team will be present at Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon3 conference this year in Cancun. Stay tuned for the latest on that via our newsletter. Subscribe here.

Meet up with us in person!

Cosmos China

We’ve been teaming up with the leaders of blockchain in China to make a meaningful presence in the burgeoning industry there. Wanxiang, the largest conglomerate in China supporting and investing in the blockchain ecosystem, joined our Validator Program. Bianjie.ai (AI on the blockchain) is also on the growing list of Cosmos validators.

Our Chinese publication can be found here: http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/52OIbJUUPO-BZCZFZNNcfg