Today, the Interchain Foundation and Cosmos announced that the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) is being contributed to LF Decentralized Trust, the Linux Foundation’s home for ledger and decentralized technology.
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The press release ( Cosmos Contributes IBC to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust to Advance Blockchain Interoperability )
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The announcement blog ( https://cosmos.network/blog/ibc-joining-lf-decentralized-trust ) has the full story and the FAQ, and the LFDT technical article ( Advancing Open Interoperability Through IBC's Contribution to LF Decentralized Trust ) covers the protocol and governance.
I shared my thoughts on X, but I wanted to add a summary- plus a few more words from the ecosystem team on the forum to commemorate! We spend our days with the chains, builders, relayers, and validators that work on IBC, so I wanted to break down this change and what it means for us, builders, and IBC! There’s also an FAQ in the blog above 
An exciting time for interoperability standards.
As of today, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) is a project of LF Decentralized Trust, the Linux Foundation’s home for ledger and decentralized technology.
IBC went live in 2021, connecting a handful of Cosmos chains. Since then, it has processed more than $50B in volume across 115+ networks, and today it runs far beyond where it started:
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Public networks across the Cosmos ecosystem, including Injective and Cronos, and connections to Ethereum through IBC Eureka.
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Institutional settlement networks like Partior, used by DBS, JP Morgan and Emirates NBD.
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Regulated tokenized deposit and issuance platforms like DCP, backed by major Japanese enterprises including IIJ and SBI Holdings, and Progmat, backed by a consortium including Mizuho, MUFG and Japan Exchange Group.
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Central banks in Latin America and the Caribbean.
As I shared on X: in five years, IBC has gone from a protocol for Cosmos chains to interoperability infrastructure used by public blockchains, banks, and market infrastructure, all on the same open standard.
To say more, in recent years, IBC has seen the most demand and interest from all corners of DLT, blockchain, and finance. Whatever the network is, whatever stack it is built on, and whoever runs it (banking, innovators, government), they need point-to-point neutral interoperability.
A consortium in finance needs any kind of ledger to be able to join and interact with it; a bank needs to reach other banks running their own DLTs; a blockchain network needs to interact with all of the above.
At that level, it is not a middleman or a third party that does the trick, but a standard, like IBC.
Five years of open-source momentum
IBC is where it is because of this community, and the amazing contributors it’s seen over the years. The teams who designed and built it. The chains that adopted it early and kept their connections live. The relayer operators who carried traffic for years. The validators securing these networks. The builders who created products on top of it.
With contributions from Agoric, Bianjie and IRISnet, Binary Builders and Strangelove, Chainapsis, Chorus One and Omnity, Confio, Datachain, Succinct, Union and Althea, Informal Systems and Iqlusion, Osmosis, and many, many other teams and individuals… IBC has seen its fair share of open-source momentum over the years, and today that continues to accelerate.
What it means to be governed under LFDT
LF Decentralized Trust is the Linux Foundation’s organization for ledger and decentralized technology. It is a way to neutrally coordinate development and contributions to key pieces of decentralized software. Practically speaking…
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IBC becomes a project of LF Decentralized Trust, and the Linux Foundation holds the IBC trademark on behalf of the project.
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The code stays free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The project charter keeps the protocol layer free of fees or monetization.
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Technical decisions sit with the maintainers and a Technical Steering Committee, under a public technical charter. Discussions and decisions happen in the open, under this governance body.
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Cosmos Labs, Datachain and OpenZeppelin are the maintainers; for the first two-year term, Cosmos Labs engineers chair the committee.
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Anyone can contribute. Contributors can become committers and maintainers based on the work they do.
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Organizations adopting IBC get a formal voice in the roadmap through the project’s product and use-case practice.
This is a well-structured and successful process that has been key for the world to adopt common tech and standards (more on that below); standard setting requires neutral and at-scale coordination.
Why a common home matters
That last point above is the main one. As open source standards scale into world-scale industries, those industries want a say in the technologies that run their critical systems, and in keeping them sustainable long-term.
Banks, enterprises, and technology companies want to contribute to, and depend on, infrastructure that no single company controls. They need a neutral place where they can commit code, shape priorities, and rely on rules that will not change under them. That is what the Linux Foundation does best, and it has done it for protocols in our industry before:
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Hyperledger Besu, the Ethereum client contributed by ConsenSys, has been an LFDT project since 2019. It runs on both public Ethereum and permissioned enterprise networks.
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x402, the internet payments protocol created by Coinbase, moved to the Linux Foundation this year with broad industry backing.
IBC now has the same opportunity: a common place where the companies co-sponsoring today, and many more after them, can support it, build on it, and adopt it. It also lands as one of the biggest launches at LFDT, with a portfolio of supporters that will only add to IBC’s growth.
How we stay involved
The Interchain Foundation, through Cosmos Labs, remains the main contributor to and funder of IBC development. Cosmos Labs engineers lead the maintainer group and chair the Technical Steering Committee.
The IBC roadmap we have been building continues, now with more contributors working on it and more support compounding on the work.
What this means for chains and builders
If you run a chain or build on IBC today, nothing about your setup changes. Your existing connections keep running as they do, and there is nothing to migrate. What changes over time is who is on the other side.
As more networks and institutions adopt IBC, the protocol you already use connects you to a growing set of counterparties contributing to IBC, many of them now outside the Cosmos ecosystem as well!
What this means for the Hub and ATOM
On the Hub side, the fundamentals stay as they are:
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The Hub continues to be governed by ATOM stakers.
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Eureka continues to operate on the Hub.
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Nothing in this change limits the Hub, Eureka, or adjacent products from building and commercializing on top of IBC.
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Any integrations of new IBC features are completely unblocked and unrestricted
The Hub keeps building on IBC as it has until now. As IBC is adopted across finance, enterprise, and the on-chain ecosystem, the set of systems the Hub can reach, and that can reach the Hub, grows with it, with no restrictions on what it can offer on top of IBC.
What this means for teams building around IBC
IBC is free to use, and that openness is a large part of why it can become a shared standard. That isn’t new; it’s the core of IBC. Anyone can run open or private connections, anywhere.
The business around it has always been in the services that make it work in production:
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Relaying, routing, attestation, light client infrastructure
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Integrations and applications.
Many teams in this ecosystem have spent years building expertise in that stack. Every network that adopts IBC from here is a potential new customer for that work, and the more widely the standard is used, the larger that market becomes.
Getting Involved & More Information
The cosmos.network blog has the full details and the FAQ: https://cosmos.network/blog/ibc-joining-lf-decentralized-trust .
If you or your team want to contribute to IBC directly, start here: https://ibcprotocol.dev/.
I will be in this thread and on Telegram over the coming days to answer questions, so bring them here.