Cosmos News /// by ZKV #4
Growing in numbers, growing in speed
A little bit of Chit-chat
We will start this edition with very big news from the Cosmos Ecosystem. In January, according to mapofzones.com there were 7 million IBC transfers between 36 connected chains. That’s 250% more transactions than from December, which had a total of 2 million transfers from 27 connected chains.
February also started with news from Bitcanna’s Woocommerce and Prestashop plugins, beta versions are now fully functional with Keplr wallet allowing users to pay for e-commerce orders in less than 25 seconds in BCNA. Soon, this functionality will also be available in $ATOM, $OSMO, and $HUAHUA.
A new kid on the block ✋
A new project is coming to town, and it’s called Quicksilver protocol. They are planning to launch their testnet in Q2 2022, and their goal is to provide an improved liquid staking experience for the Cosmos ecosystem.
Quicksilver base its value proposition on three main points:
Permissionless validator set: many Liquid Staking providers have a select list of validators, which fosters centralization and can make a protocol less secure. Quicksilver will tackle this by allowing a user to pick any validator in the Cosmos ecosystem, unless excluded through a governance decision,rewarding stakers with Quicksilver (QCK) tokens for delegating to decentralised validators.
Maintaining governance rights: in other liquid staking applications, delegators lose their governance votes by staking through them. One of the main differentiators of Quicksilver is enabling the stakers to maintain their voting rights. This is made possible by the Quicksilver protocol mirroring the proposals of the native chain, allowing qAsset holders to vote on Quicksilver, and those votes will then be mirrored back to the native chain.
Scalability: Quicksilver will be able to onboard any chain built with the Cosmos SDK after governance approval through interchain accounts.
Bridging Zones with the Bridge 🌉
Two governance proposals passed this week to support the distribution of a total of 123 million Graviton (GRAV), the Gravity Bridge’s token, among $ATOM stakers, $ION holders and the Osmosis community pool.
The proposal was intended to give the Cosmos community some kind of ownership of Gravity Bridge, which was born from the community’s desire to reach other horizons beyond the Cosmos ecosystem. The Gravity Bridge is a blockchain that connects EVM chains and Cosmos.
Also, according to the proponents, their goal was to “create a market for the GRAV token” by aligning the Cosmos ecosystem with the Cosmos Gravity Bridge chain.
Partnering up! 🤝
Oasis, a privacy-enabled and scalable layer-1 blockchain, and Celer, an inter-blockchain and cross-layer communication platform, have announced a partnership, in which the Oasis community will be able to use cBridge as a gateway to low-cost and instant transfers to and from other cBridge-supported blockchains and Layer-2 networks.
Both networks will explore other ways of collaborating, specifically through the newly-launched Celer Inter-Chain Message (Celer IM) Framework. This will eventually give the opportunity for Oasis-based DApp developers to create efficient inter-chain applications and for users to enjoy a multi-chain ecosystem with a single-transaction user experience.
A little bit of intergalactic music for you
Wrap up
Keep in the loop because we’re about to announce our in-person Privacy in Cosmos event, which will take place in April. We’re currently working to find the best place to serve the Cosmos community and foster the sharing of knowledge among Cosmonauts.
Be sure to follow up and get in touch, we can be found on Twitter @zkvalidator . If you want to support privacy in the blockchain space, check the delegation instructions at zkvalidator.com