Cosmos dynamics (end of March 2020): Looking back at the development of blockchain from Game of Zones

Long in the making, the Big Hackathon Game of Zones (GoZ), the biggest event in the Cosmos, is now accepting entries until April 25, 2020. Recalling that the Game of Stakes (GoS) of Cosmos became a legend in the blockchain world more than a year ago, it not only established the status of Cosmos in the new generation of blockchain, but also made the incentivized testnet as the main network. The practice of pre-rehearsal has become the norm for blockchain projects. We hope to use the launch of GoZ to see the development trend of blockchain driven by Cosmos from our perspective.

[Editor: @Terence+ @Shilin]

The first generation of blockchain: Bitcoin

Recall that in October 2008, when the global financial tsunami triggered by the subprime crisis in the United States was the worst day, the Bitcoin white paper was born. In just nine pages (including the last page of references), Satoshi Nakamoto showed the world a peer-to-peer electronic currency payment system that does not need to be dominated by a central bank. At that time, central banks frantically printed money to save greedy bankers, which was equivalent to robbing the poor and helping the rich. Bitcoin appeared in front of the world as a solution to subvert the hegemony of this currency.

The design details of Bitcoin sound weird, such as the data structure of the blockchain, the consumption of electricity for "mining", UTXO, etc., ordinary people sometimes feel that it is unnecessary, this is because we have long been used to a currency system dominated by a central authority , and obeying authority is often easier because you just have to be governed. Bitcoin, which sounds counterintuitive, is directly or indirectly designed around one goal: how to maintain a reliable payment and settlement system without a central authority to provide third-party credit. In fact, our ancestors used to trade like this: I have cattle and you have sheep. If everyone thinks the exchange is reasonable, I will give you three cattle in exchange for your five sheep. Uncles and brothers come to witness, but there is no need for a central leader to provide a medium of exchange (such as currency) to facilitate this cattle and sheep transaction.

The emergence of Bitcoin has opened up our minds, and a small number of responsive people have awakened to the fact that the payment system can not be dominated by the central government, and we have begun to understand the infinite possibilities of decentralized applications. Are there any other possibilities besides Bitcoin? People started to want to do other things with bitcoin technology, and when they wanted to do it, the most convenient way was to copy the bitcoin code and change it to suit their needs, but the bitcoin code was complicated and difficult to understand and could be applied things are very limited. To develop a decentralized application from scratch, the technical threshold required is very high, and it also requires a long development time.

Second Generation Blockchain: Ethereum

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin came up with the idea of Ethereum. The goal of Ethereum is to become a decentralized world computer, running various decentralized applications (DApps) on a blockchain. Developers don't need to worry too much about the bottom layer of the blockchain and the network, they just need to concentrate For developing DApps suitable for application scenarios. The ideal of Ethereum is very grand, and it has attracted many developers to join. Even today, after the emergence of many blockchain projects, Ethereum still has the largest developer community.

But the grand ideal of Ethereum has also produced some seemingly innate deficiencies:

• Limited scalability. Since Ethereum still uses the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism, the transaction volume (TPS) it can process per second is still very small (15 TPS), and many DApps in Ethereum will compete for this very limited computing resources. (In the past few years, there have been many different proposals for scaling Ethereum.)
• Limited availability. Since Ethereum is designed to support various usage scenarios, it cannot provide too tailored functions, but can only provide some popular functions that are used in many scenarios.
• Limited sovereignty. When the application runs on Ethereum, the governance of the application itself will be subject to the governance of Ethereum. For example, if the application wants to use some functions different from Ethereum, it needs to first seek Ethereum to add this function. It would involve seeking acceptance from Ethereum. This is a bit like the governance of regional governments is subject to the central government.

Third Generation Blockchain: Cosmos (?)

In fact, the aforementioned limitations of Ethereum are not unique to Ethereum. All projects that try to use a single blockchain to meet all application scenarios are likely to face the same problem. The most important thing we like about Cosmos is that it brings structural reforms from the original design: it resists the idea of winners taking all and one chain ruling the world, and advocates letting a hundred flowers bloom, and everyone develops suitable blocks according to their different usage scenarios chain.

Cosmos is not a single blockchain, but a new Internet - the internet of blockchains. The internet of blockchains will consist of many distinctive blockchains through the inter-blockchain communication ("IBC") protocol. Connected in a decentralized way. The key work of the Cosmos ecosystem is to provide corresponding tools for developers to quickly develop blockchains (Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, and other development tools that appear one after another), connect these chains (IBC), and use a hub as a hub. The blockchain demonstrates to the world how to use these tools (Cosmos Hub), and thus fosters a strong community of validators, which has rushed out of the Cosmos ecosystem to support other ecosystems, such as @Forbole is currently As a validator on nearly 20 blockchains, in addition to the blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem, it also includes Solana , Polkadot, Aion, etc. We also participate in other ways in V Systems and Celo.

Note that I added a question mark to the subtitle, because in addition to Cosmos, there are other projects that are promoting cross-chain operations. One of the most famous should be Polkadot, led by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. Cosmos and Polkadot are completely different. It's very interesting to try to solve the same problem in the same way, and learning these two projects crossover will give you a leap in growth. Looking forward to talking about Polkadot in the future.

GoS

Like many blockchain projects, the launch of Cosmos Hub has been repeatedly postponed. The mainnet launch was delayed from mid-2018 to March 2019, and the launch of IBC has not yet been completed. Therefore, Cosmos Hub, IRISnet, Terra, Cosmos ecological blockchains such as Kava and e-Money that have been listed on the mainnet are still independent chains.

But the launch of the Cosmos Hub still has far-reaching implications. The official launch of the GoS competition before the launch of the Cosmos Hub as a final preview is an important milestone in the blockchain and even distributed networks, because GoS is the largest (maybe even the first) economic incentive in computer history. Adversarial distributed network with Byzantine Fault Tolerance ("BFT"). It sounds a bit complicated, but I'll try to say a few words roughly.

How to reach a reliable consensus in the network world where there is no central leadership, where people don't know each other and can't distinguish between soldiers and thieves is a long-term research topic of distributed networks. Ethan Buchman, co-founder of Tendermint and one of the founders of Cosmos In other words, a distributed consensus mechanism must make a reliable system from unreliable parts. This article will not explain BFT for the time being. You can remember first that having the feature of BFT means that the network has successfully solved the most difficult problem in a distributed network (that is, the Byzantine general problem), and it also symbolizes that the network is like getting a very difficult problem. Hard to get a certificate.

The success of GoS has cleared the obstacles for the launch of Cosmos Hub, and realized the PoS blockchain based on the token economic design (radish and stick) and BFT consensus, which is different from the vast majority of blockchains launched on the mainnet At the time, the foundation dominated most of the tokens. The launch of the Cosmos Hub was relatively decentralized, because Tendermint and the Interchain Foundation each only held about 10% of atoms, and 5% was the most Early investors, the remaining 75% are more than 1,000 addresses that participated in the Cosmos public fundraising in April 2017. GoS is also an important part of the decentralized launch of the Cosmos Hub, because dozens of validators have One year of experience in the testnet stage, and finally in the ultimate test of GoS to show atom holders that they are qualified to become validators.

GoZ

Although the Tendermint team experienced infighting in February, the cryptocurrency tsunami in March, and the new pneumonia epidemic is still worsening every day, there are still breakthroughs in the development of IBC, enough to officially launch GoZ. In the concept of the Cosmos interconnected chain, the blockchain can be divided into two categories according to the role of cross-chain operation: hub and zone. Zone can be a chain with different application scenarios, and a hub is the chain responsible for the connection between chains. In GoZ, participating validators will operate and protect their own zones, and try to carry out various attacks on the zones of other teams. Through such shopping, IBC and other related program codes and mechanisms can be fully obtained before the official launch. stress test.

GoZ brings the interaction between validators and multiple zones, which is one more dimension of complexity than GoZ, but the community has also been fighting on the Cosmos Hub mainnet for a year and has become stronger. In the atmosphere full of haze, I believe that GoZ will push the Cosmos project to another level.

The latest news of the Cosmos ecological project

• A virtual Gitcoin cross-chain hackathon organized by Cosmos, Agoric and Band Protocol will be held on April 20th, and participants will share $24k worth of $Atom & $Band prizes!
• The Cosmos IBC demo version has been launched; the IBC Relayer testnet is tested, check the testnet node tutorial ; participate in the discussion in the exclusive TG group .
• CosmWasm introduces Mask , a contract that allows validators to perform key rotation and trade staking Atoms without changing the staking module.
• Cyber Congress : Decentralized search engine project releases Game of Links rules.
• Desmos : The third phase of the incentive program for Desmos, a blockchain-based social blockchain project, will end on April 3.
• Kava : Decentralized finance (DeFi) project Kava has partnered with market-leading decentralized oracle network Chainlink
• Virgo : The decentralized social Dither based on the Cosmos Hub memo field released by Peng Zhong now supports the channel function .

Cosmos validators and community dynamics

• Dragon Stake will increase the commission rate to 20% starting March 18th.
• ping.pub successfully runs the Libra Move script in Cosmos.
• POS Bakerz compares the major proof-of-stake protocols .

refer to:

What is Cosmos? - Cosmos website
Understanding the Basics of a Proof-of-Stake Security Model - Interchain Foundation

About @BigDipper: Developed by@Forbole, it is an open source blockchain browser and management tool for the Cosmos ecosystem. It is an award-winning work of Cosmos HackAtom. Since its launch, users from 140 countries around the world have browsed it.