Q2 Retrospective
ICS 2.0
- ICS 2.0 in production in the first week of June
- At least one consumer chain launched on ICS during Q2
We met our goals for an early June deployment of ICS 2.0. It has now been in production for more than a month, and is being used by Stride and Neutron (with settings that mimic their previous Replicated Security deployments).
We have had more chains announce joining ICS, including Evmos and Comdex, but we did not have a chain deploy to full production with ICS during Q2. Elys’s production deployment will not take place until August due to additional development their team is doing- however, their consumer addition proposal is already up on the forum.
Gaia upgrades
- v16 deployed
- v17 deployed
- v18 in voting
v16 and v17 were deployed on time and v18 is currently in voting. 4 hours of downtime during the v17 deployment indicates a need for more randomized testing.
Babylon Integration
- ADR and signaling proposal on the forum in early May
- Informal’s part of the code in a private devnet by mid June
After bringing the proposed Babylon integration ADR to the forum in early may, we received feedback that the proposed design was too complicated and burdensome for validators. We revised the design and got the integration into testnet by the end of the quarter.
Hydro
- Audit and testnet deployment in mid-May.
- Production deployment end of June.
Audit, testnet, and mainnet deployments of the contract have been completed. However, frontend development is still underway, and the first projects will launch on Hydro in Q3. The contract’s audit by Oak Security was concluded June 26th, and the contract was deployed to mainnet in early July.
CosmWasm on the Hub
- Draft Hub CosmWasm guidelines.
- Put signaling prop on forum and incorporate community feedback.
- Received clear community feedback that a guideline signaling prop was not needed and the community wanted to get CosmWasm live ASAP
Put signaling prop on chain.- Cosmwasm on chain with Gaia v18.
We originally intended to publish a signaling proposal with a set of guidelines for what type of contracts should be deployed on the Hub’s permissioned CosmWasm. When bringing this up on the forum, we received feedback that guidelines were not necessary, so we stopped working on the signaling proposal and focused on getting CosmWasm to production in Gaia v18.
Growth: Marketing and Business Development
This quarter was a foundation-laying quarter. We heard the feedback from last quarter, which was that BD and Marketing were the big gaps. We put a lot of energy into hiring the right staff, setting up processes for sustainable marketing systems, and strategizing for the long-term marketing vision of making the Hub “the best place to launch a chain.”
- Entirely took over Hub marketing from the ICF, now managed in partnership with AADAO
- Hired a full-time content strategist for the Cosmos Hub, to start in Q3
- Co-organized and co-hosted 7 of ATOM Zones
- Our team appeared on 4 podcasts: 0xResearch by Blockworks, The Interop, Bare Metal, and MACROCOSM
- Planned first dedicated event for the Cosmos Hub @ ethCC with AADAO
- Two talks given by the Informal team about Cosmos at the Consensus main event
- Hired a full-time Business Development lead for the Cosmos Hub
Financial Transparency Reporting
Now that the quarter has closed, we have reconciled our FTE headcount at 12.74 FTEs. We will be transferring the following back to the community pool based on the 12.74 FTE headcount for Q2:
- $71,187 USDC
- 3,221.43 ATOM
We have changed the FTE headcount allocation to better align with our plans and the success of the Hub.
In Q2, a security review was required for the permissioned version of ICS 2.0, as indicated in our Q2 plan. The cost of this security review is represented in the 1.20 headcount for a security reviewer in our FTE Headcount Actuals.
We also hired a new Business Development Lead for the Cosmos Hub late in Q2, who will support go-to-market strategy for ICS 2.0 and Hydro. Finally, we have remapped our Finance/Economics Researcher role for a full-time Content Marketing Lead to support go-to-market activities.
The wallets are linked below:
- Budget vesting address: cosmos1r0t2zplulmfnuhx3de6wu4njg69yct0wv9383z
- Bonus vesting address: cosmos1rn5dpfpp20slrt0h3p79lspcpjpnhnlhtrlem9
Q3 goals, in service to the Vision: Make the Cosmos Hub the best place to launch a chain
As outlined in our strategy, we believe that Cosmos appchains provide distinct benefits over smart contracts and rollups for ambitious crypto projects, but that the process of manually building a validator set and bootstrapping a staking token has acted as an impediment in the past. Our overarching goal is to remove these obstacles to allow more ambitious projects to be built in Cosmos and to make the Cosmos Hub the best place to launch a chain.
Our goals for Q3 are to give projects launching as Cosmos Hub consumer chains three superpowers:
- Effortless launch: Help projects launch consumer chains quickly, easily, and permissionlessly.
- Asymmetric advantage: Give Cosmos Hub consumer chains an asymmetric advantage over other projects in attracting users, attention, and liquidity.
- Rock solid security: Make sure that the security provided by the Cosmos Hub continues to be rock solid.
Forge (ICS launchpad)
Launching an appchain involves more work than a rollup or smart contract, but bringsit offers power, flexibility, and decentralization. The ICS launchpad is a front end which will also further two of our goals:
Effortless launch: Provide projects with a smooth path through the idea, pre-launch, testnet, and mainnet phases.
Asymmetric advantage: Access to maximum visibility and momentum before launch, as well as integration from partners such as community and airdrop platforms, and our own Hydro liquidity platform.
Goals:
- Bring attention to ICS and upcoming ICS chains:
- KPI: 6 chains featured on the dashboard.
- Hit our deployment milestones:
- KPIs:
- v0.5 permission version in early August.
- v1 full permissionless version launched alongside permissionless ICS by end of quarter.
- KPIs:
Permissionless ICS
Permissionless ICS furthers the goal of effortless launch, both by eliminating the hurdle of a governance proposal, and by allowing consumer chain creators to modify parameters of their consumer chains before and after launch. This further reduces the friction of launching an ICS consumer chain, and the ICS launchpad will act as a frontend to this functionality
Goals:
- Enable effortless, permissionless launches
- KPI: We would like to see 3 new consumer chains launched permissionlessly
- Hit our deployment milestones:
- KPI: Code deployed to production in Gaia v20
Hydro
Hydro furthers the goal of asymmetric advantage by allowing consumer chains and other Hub-affiliated projects to bid for liquidity from the community pool. This will also have the benefit of increasing the “moneyness” of ATOM by putting more of it to work in DeFi.
Goals:
- Increase the utilization of ATOM as interchain capital
- KPIs:
- 100k ATOM liquidity deployed
- 8 projects participating
- 10k stATOM locked in voting
- KPIs:
- Hit our deployment milestones:
- KPIs:
- Deployment in August
- KPIs:
ICS: Fault Resolutions
Fault resolutions further the goal of rock solid security. This feature will allow validators to be slashed for intersubjective faults such as incorrect execution, oracle attacks, and chain halts. They are a redesign of ICS fraud votes, incorporating lessons from prop 818, as well as insights from the EIGEN token design.
Goals:
- Dissuade bad behavior by validators on the network, with functioning fault resolutions
- KPI:
- Fault resolutions deployed to production in Gaia v20
- KPI:
Growth: Marketing and Business Development
With the hire of two full time growth roles for Q3, we are ready to take on more responsibility for the Hub’s growth efforts. We are focusing our growth efforts on helping more projects launch as appchains on ICS.
Expanding the Funnel
We are developing new channel strategies for engaging early-stage projects and establishing new feedback loops to enrich our offering for potential consumer chains. This approach aligns with our narrative that Cosmos Hub is the best place to launch a chain. We will be spending time in Q3 developing and expanding a more targeted top-of-funnel approach with these primary audiences:
- early projects evaluating ecosystems
- early projects using the Cosmos SDK (shared with us via partner organizations)
- development studios
- investment partners (VCs, etc)
- tooling and service providers
Goals
- Our current three new consumer chains fully live: Evmos, Elys, Comdex
- Three additional consumer chains launched on ICS during Q3, for a total of six.
Gaia releases
We intend to continue with a fast release cycle of around one Gaia release per month in order to meet our KPIs around the ICS launchpad and permissionless ICS.
Goals
- Continue the fast release cycle and upgrading of the Cosmos Hub, enabling new features to launch
- KPIs
- v18 deployed
- v19 deployed
- v20 deployed
- KPIs
Oversight committee grades
This quarter, the committee provided a document along with their grades. Here is an excerpt:
Execution: The committee did not achieve consensus between “Meets Expectations”, as the team did deliver on most of the KPIs they had set to achieve in Q2 and delivered robust technical work, and “Needs improvement”, as business development efforts were perceived as still nascent and the key objective of onboarding one new consumer chains was not achieved.
Direction: Needs improvement, with a call for a more aggressive and visionary approach to ensure product-market fit.
Feedback: Meets expectations, acknowledging the team’s responsiveness to community input.
Smoothness: Meets expectations, despite minor concerns about one downtime incident.
Overall: Needs improvement.
While we decided to send a strong signal via our grade, the committee is not advocating for the removal of Informal, on the contrary, it seeks to convey that it has high regards for the team at Informal Systems, and, in the face of such a competitive market, expects outstanding performance. We are hopeful that this signal will help reinforce the desire to self-evaluate and refine the team’s strategic direction. A retrospective on Q2 and a shared strategic workshop to focus on key objectives across all core teams may be valuable tools in this endeavor.
You can read the full report here.
Statement from Informal on the oversight committee grades:
The oversight committee intended to send a strong signal with these grades, and we have heard the signal loud and clear. While BD and marketing were not a significant part of our original mandate, we did agree last quarter to take more responsibility for them. Our first full time BD lead for the Hub joined in June, and content strategist in July. We agree with the oversight committee that this is a pivotal quarter for the Hub.
While we did not achieve our goal of launching the first new consumer chain by the end of Q2, since the launch of ICS v2 in June, several chains have publicly announced that they will join, including Evmos, Comdex, Elys, Lorenzo, and Piccaso, and there are more in the pipeline. Supporting these chains on their journey through launch is our top priority, in order to prove out the Hub’s mission to be the best place to launch a chain.
We are confident in continuing to meet or exceed our technical KPIs (code written, tested, and deployed), but the goal we have set of onboarding 6 new consumer chains in Q3 is ambitious. However, we agree with the committee that showing momentum with ICS at this point is a requirement for continued investment in ICS new feature development.
Now that ICS v2 is fully featured and functional, and will be permissionless in the next upgrade, we are shifting more of our attention to BD and to supporting the growing group of chains interested in leveraging it. We will continue to maintain, secure, and support the core ICS protocol, and to continue to improve it as its adoption grows. At the same time, the launch of Hydro and CosmWasm on the Hub open new directions for the Hub to grow its utility and bring value both to ICS chains and the wider ecosystem.