Cosmos Hub is now moving toward permissionless smart contracts via EVM, as announced by Interchain Labs (evm.cosmos.network/develop). This is a major shift, especially considering the Hub’s traditionally conservative stance on permissionless execution.
But it raises an important question:
Why enable permissionless EVM contracts before permissionless CosmWasm contracts — the native smart contract VM of the Cosmos SDK?
CosmWasm is already powering permissionless smart contracts on chains like Osmosis, Juno, Neutron, Nibiru, and more. It supports IBC out of the box and is tightly integrated with Cosmos’ modular architecture.
Yet Cosmos Hub has never enabled permissionless CosmWasm, despite multiple governance proposals (like Prop 69) that aimed to do so — all of which failed due to concerns about complexity, attack surface, and philosophical alignment with the Hub’s minimal mission.
Now that the Hub is taking the leap into permissionless smart contracts via EVM, does this reopen the discussion for permissionless CosmWasm on the Hub itself?
Is this about adoption strategy, developer base, or governance dynamics?
Curious what others in the community think.
1 Like
The main reason ICL is going for EVM is the large developer base and this will allow them to accelerate their plans.
The fate of Cosmwasm long-term is very murky. There’s just not enough developer interest in it these days.
1 Like
It’s over for CosmWasm. Hub will leave it alone, somebody else will string it along into oblivion. Bummer that a homegrown thing is dead, but it’s clearly for the best. EVM has more devs, more money, more opportunity. You could build a perfect product but if no one uses it it’s worthless. Time to forge ahead.
1 Like
no it isn’t…
longing for EVM is mainly a desperate move towards already established structures, not paving new ways in blockchain development.
going opensource never been bad to any projects in the past
I’m actually a CosmWasm fan myself. I’m surprised to see this sentiment taking root in the ecosystem.
As a side note ---- I was reading the threads you linked here…and came accorss the post from Larry — this Grug and future plans.
Future plans
Grug V1 won’t come with verifiable computation; our team set this aside for now and focus on shipping some apps first. Eventually though, we plan to make Grug ZK-provable utilizing one of the zkVMs: RiscZero, SP1, Jolt, Fluent, or zkLLVM.
Besides these, we will also investigate state eviction, which is a solution to state bloating, believed to be the greatest obstacle for Ethereum scaling. Our solution will be similar to what is proposed in the Diem whitepaper (§4.4).
We will also investigate parallel transaction processing using Block-STM.
When was the last time – the DB was compacted of flattened? It’s all indexed somewhere permantly, right? Does the database get compacted every upgrade on the kernal? Does anyone know? That reduces the costs for validtors running a node.
1 Like
Babylon chain will run Cosmwasm, EVM and Bitcoin Staking in one place, so actually its not my business what people think will benefit the Hub anymore
1 Like
I sympathize honestly. I’ve written 3 smart contracts in CW, and sold two of the projects. I prefer CosmWasm immensely to EVM. But the “best” product doesn’t always win, and tradeoffs are required for the ecosystem to grow. FIDO like authentication has been around a lonnng time (SQRL!!!), but only caught on seriously (for regular users) in the past 5ish years. Something like CosmWasm might win out eventually, but in the short-term the best thing for Cosmos is to attract capital and developers.
1 Like