⚛️ Notes from Cosmoverse
The good, the bad and the ugly
📝 Special Edition: Notes from Cosmoverse
We wanted to share our notes on the Cosmoverse 2024 that took place this week in Dubai:
TL;DR
- The Cosmos Hub in 2025 will consolidate resources, focusing on growth and blockchain as a service.
- CometBFT introduces key updates like improved block timing and spam protection.
- IBC plans to add an economic layer to incentivize relayers.
- ATOM aims to simplify chain launching and revise liquidity incentives.
- Neutron combines efficient technologies, wallet integration, and DeFi synergy.
- Osmosis plans to minimize on-chain data, strengthen trader guarantees, and enhance privacy through threshold encryption.
⚛️ The Hub in 2025
In 2025, the Cosmos Hub is poised for a bright future, according to the panel discussion. The key focus areas are:
Consolidation and Focus: The next 12 months will see a focus on consolidating energy, capital, and resources to ensure the Cosmos Hub stays competitive in a rapidly evolving ecosystem. The Hub is seen as a service provider that supports blockchain development, interoperability, and liquidity.
Blockchain as a Service: The Cosmos Hub is envisioned to be a blockchain as a service provider, making it easier to launch and scale chains, addressing challenges in liquidity, interoperability, and user onboarding. The goal is to offer a more seamless experience, potentially akin to services like Netlify or Vercel in the web space.
Interoperability and Liquidity: The Hub will focus heavily on enabling better connectivity between ecosystems and offering liquidity solutions. This includes building more direct and simplified connections to Ethereum and other ecosystems, enabling easier on-ramping, and abstracting complexity for developers.
Unified Leadership and Coordination: There is a strong push for more unified leadership and better coordination among the various entities involved in the Cosmos ecosystem. The goal is to reduce governance entropy and create a more decisive and productive structure, potentially even with AI-driven decision-making processes.
Governance and Community: The panel acknowledged governance challenges and emphasized the need for a more streamlined decision-making process. The vision for 2025 includes moving towards a more efficient and coordinated governance model, possibly through councils or subDAOs that make more informed decisions.
Growth-First Approach: The Hub will shift its focus from being "tech-first" to being "growth-first." This includes putting more emphasis on marketing, growth, and business development to attract builders and developers, while maintaining its status as a pioneer in blockchain innovation.
☄️ CometBFT present and future
⏰ Recent Features:
Proposer-Based Timestamps (BBTS): Improved block time accuracy, essential for time-sensitive applications, and paves the way for signature aggregation.
ABCI 2.0: Enables optimistic block execution and allows Cosmos SDK to attach arbitrary data to votes, which can be used in decentralized price oracles, privacy for transactions, and cross-chain coordination.
Performance Optimizations: Working with Osmosis to optimize performance, particularly focusing on bandwidth reduction.
Spam Protection: Introducing a new mechanism with sublists of transactions prioritized by application, helping protect against spam.
QUIC Transport Protocol: Aimed to replace the existing protocol with features like zero-handshake and TLS encryption, enhancing the speed and security of communication.
🗓️ Near Future Features:
MLE Lanes: An experimental feature that allows prioritization of transactions, potentially mitigating spam by disseminating higher-priority transactions faster.
BLS Signature Aggregation: Further reducing bandwidth and improving efficiency in transaction validation.
Soft Upgrades: To avoid hard forks, the team is working on features for soft updates.
Resource Management: Enhancing network, memory, and disk resource usage for better stability, especially under heavy transaction loads.
🌉 IBC Next Step
An Economic Layer for IBC: One of the current goals for IBC development is integrating an economic layer to incentivize the relaying of channels. This would enable relayers to be compensated for their work, solving issues around altruistic behavior and bringing economic incentives directly into IBC.
✅ The three things ATOM needs to attract builders
Further Simplification of Chain Launching: While Forge has already simplified the chain-launching process, there are continued efforts to make it even easier. The vision is to have an automated, streamlined system where projects can configure chains with minimal technical overhead, possibly with a validator marketplace and integrated relayer services.
Exploring New Incentive Models for Liquidity: There is an ongoing discussion about revising Hydra's incentive structure. The goal is to shift from simply locking up Atom tokens to incentivizing active liquidity provision in a more efficient and transparent way, potentially through a marketplace that better aligns with the needs of liquidity providers and seekers.
Integration of Light Chains and Halo: The development of "light chains" and ICS-based solutions is expected to offer more flexible options for projects looking to launch in the Cosmos ecosystem. These chains could integrate relayers directly, making cross-chain operations more seamless and reducing infrastructure burdens on validators.
🧪 Osmosis 3-point plan forward
Minimizing the On-Chain Footprint: The goal here is to reduce the amount of data that needs to go through the blockchain consensus mechanism. Most orders (around 99%) are canceled and never executed, meaning they don't need to leave an on-chain footprint. By pushing order books off-chain and into validators, Osmosis can achieve a significant throughput increase—up to 100x.
Strengthening Trader Guarantees: A key concern with off-chain order books is that validators could potentially exploit traders by censoring orders or manipulating trades. Osmosis introduces the concept of "clobber," which stands for "central limit order book with batch executed rebates." This mechanism allows multiple validators to contribute to block creation, providing stronger guarantees to traders and reducing censorship risks. Validators are incentivized with rebates for their contributions, making the system more secure.
Hardening the System with Privacy: To prevent validators from selectively censoring orders, Osmosis plans to use threshold encryption. This means the proposer of a block won't know which transactions to censor because they are encrypted, and only after the block is finalized are the votes decrypted. This final step helps ensure fair order execution and strengthens the integrity of the DEX.
✴️ Neutron’s Integrated Apps Thesis
Neutron is enabling builders to build Integrated Apps by focusing on three core strategies:
Combining Efficient Technologies: Neutron is integrating advanced on-chain infrastructure, such as order books, oracles, and Supervolts (market-making vaults), to enhance capital efficiency. This approach allows for better aggregation of market preferences, tighter spreads, and improved liquidity, which leads to higher profitability for liquidity providers (LPs) and better trading conditions for users. Neutron is combining these components to reduce inefficiencies that exist in traditional market-making models, like Automated Market Makers (AMMs).
Enhancing User Experience with Simplified Access: Neutron is lowering barriers to entry by integrating wallet creation and transaction management directly into apps. Users can create wallets with a few clicks and bypass complex steps, like downloading separate apps or managing gas fees. They are also incorporating cross-chain functionality, enabling users to interact with multiple ecosystems using familiar wallets like MetaMask or Phantom, or creating new wallets easily through passkeys.
Fostering Ecosystem Synergy: Neutron is intentionally designing its apps to work seamlessly with other DeFi protocols. For example, its collaboration with Mars Protocol allows users to use various assets, including liquid staking tokens and LP tokens, as collateral in leverage positions. This integration increases the capital efficiency of the entire ecosystem by unlocking new use cases and maximizing the utility of assets across multiple platforms.
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