The Mind, Body, and Soul of Cosmos.

The Cosmos technology has emerged as one of, if not the, premier solutions for new blockchains. The quality of the chains that use it is testament to its power and robustness. It has unleashed a new marvel, the Internet of Blockchains, an emergent topology of sovereign, interoperable communities on the frontier of the Community Computer revolution. Consider this technology, run in production by its many communities, to be the Body of Cosmos.

But Cosmos is not just a technology. From inception, Jae and I conceived of Cosmos as a philosophy of blockchain design.

At the heart of Cosmos are the principles of sovereignty and interoperability — the right for communities to be sovereign over their own infrastructure and applications, and for sovereign communities to be able to peacefully interoperate with one another. This philosophy is grounded in our humility before the extraordinarily rich cultural diversity of human beings. It is a tacit recognition of the fundamental limits of our discretionary reason in organizing planetary sustainability, and yet a call to use technology as simply and as best we can to facilitate sustainable self-governance. Cosmos offers a meta political economy, one that recognizes the need for representation of different interests at different scales and for an approach to money that can bridge the gap from local to global and back. Let’s call this philosophy the Mind of Cosmos.

The philosophy of Cosmos, its Mind, permeates the entire project, from the modular design of the software, to the independence of each blockchain, to the emergent topology of their interconnections, and on to the structure of the core development teams themselves. Cosmos is unique among L1 blockchains in that it has many organizations and lines of business contributing to the core software, including Interchain GmbH, Informal Systems, Strangelove, Iqlusion, Regen Network, Osmosis Labs, Confio, Orijtech, Hypha, Vulcanize, Iris, and more among a long tail of contributors. There is no one core team. The thrust of Cosmos has grown far beyond Jae and I, its original founders, both technically and organizationally. Among other L1s, perhaps only Bitcoin is like that. This makes Cosmos an incredibly unique and exciting place to build the future of blockchains as we live and breathe our values, of sovereignty and interoperability, at every level, in our pursuit to transform the landscape of decentralized organizations.

At the same time, it poses challenges. The lack of a singular centralized company led by a singular figurehead means decision-making can be more complex — but it can also be more representative and robust. The proliferation of blockchains and entities with a stake in the core development of Tendermint, the Cosmos-SDK, IBC, and the Cosmos Hub means there are more interests to align and organizational challenges to sort out. Yet, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it’s a sign of the long-term vitality and value of the project. This grand social experiment is propelling development forward across the entire Cosmos stack, staying true to a product market strategy that emphasizes simplicity, modularity, and generality as key to a secure, scalable, and sustainable blockchain design. The team’s current focus, across the stack, is a major infrastructure upgrade to enable another explosion of innovation around the core technology.

In Tendermint, the upcoming ABCI++ will allow chains to experiment with leading innovations, from threshold encrypted mempools to zero-knowledge proofs of execution, and more. In the Cosmos-SDK, upcoming improvements to the module system, the wiring of applications, and the storage abstractions collectively allow much more independent experimentation and release cycles that will unlock all kinds of new possibilities to collaborate more effectively on Cosmos software development. The Cosmos-SDK is also seeing a major upgrade to the governance and multisig system to allow much finer grained and powerful delegation of capabilities within Cosmos chains. IBC, having proven itself in token transfer across Tendermint chains, is expanding to more diverse interchain application logics like Interchain Accounts and more diverse consensus engines. And the Cosmos Hub, after sacrificing itself for years at the altar of service to the wider Cosmos, will, with Interchain Security, finally unlock its own development ecosystem and capacity to innovate in the provision of interchain services and the support of interchain organizations. The dawn of a new era for the Cosmos Hub is here.

The success of Cosmos, coupled with its organizational diversity, calls for a more deliberate and positive construction of our collective self-governance. One of the entities that has stepped up to provide stewardship in the midst of this complexity is the non-profit Interchain Foundation. The ICF is committed to engaging with the community more directly, providing more transparency and accountability in funding, and serving the needs of the core development teams in their own efforts to achieve sustainable self-governance.

The Cosmos Hub, too, has an essential role to play here. To date, governance on the Hub has been relatively limited, with a focus on small community spend proposals and parameter changes. Of course there have also been larger, more contentious signalling proposals about product direction, like the recent Prop69 around CosmWasm on the Hub. Prop69 was an incredible demonstration of how much the community cares about the future of the Cosmos Hub. But it was also an opportunity to ensure we nurture a political landscape of collaboration, trust, professionalism, and respect; a political environment where we can safely share our opinions, rigorously debate technical merits, and balance the demands of the market today against those of the market tomorrow while being excellent to one another. This is what Cosmos strives for.

The Cosmos Hub has a unique role to play. As a conservative chain with a long-term orientation to be an anchor in a thrashing sea, it is a center for the politics of the larger Cosmos ecosystem. But the Hub will need to step up to this role, to expand its capacity to organize and fund the core development of public goods so critical to the ecosystem. We are already seeing the ecosystem working towards this, as each sovereign team builds expertise and contributes to improving the technology, and initiatives like the new Builders Foundation get off the ground. But the opportunity to accelerate our progress through tight collaboration is enormous:

Once upon a time, many of us worked together in a single company: All in Bits, which did business as Tendermint Inc., and now Ignite Inc, or possibly NewTendermint Inc. The past and present of All in Bits is confusing. But due to strong disagreements on how an organization should be run, most of the core development team left that company in 2019/2020. However, virtually everyone that left All In Bits is still working hard on Cosmos today, leading teams and companies in a new constellation of organizations working to realize the future of Cosmos. And that future is incredibly bright.

The constellation of core Cosmos development organizations is operating on the frontier of decentralized internet services. They are experimenting with new ways to organize themselves, to collaboratively finance and develop public goods, and to push the boundaries of what is possible, both technically and organizationally. It is this collaboration of sovereign organizations, from core development teams to individual community members to anyone dedicated to the success of the Interchain, that we can rightfully call the Soul of Cosmos. It is not something we battle for, but something we nurture, and grow, collectively.

This constellation of organizations successfully shipped the Cosmos whitepaper with the Stargate upgrade in 2021. This was a monumental effort, the result of a huge cross-entity collaboration across the Cosmos technology stack to pay down past technical debt and launch a new interoperability standard that would define the future Internet of Blockchains. Thanks to that group of organizations, the Internet of Blockchains is emerging before our eyes. And this is just the beginning.

The Cosmos whitepaper has shipped. Sovereign Cosmos chains are seeing enormous success and usage of IBC is exploding. This new era of interoperability calls for a renewed vision of where the Internet of Blockchain goes from here — Cosmos 2.0, if you will. A vision of how we, a decentralized collective of blockchains, organizations, communities, and individuals, collaborate to build a more sustainable future — for the planet and its people. This is the task we are working on. Stay tuned.