This is an update for Proposal #839 (Fund 2024 Hub development by Informal Systems and Hypha Worker Co-op). Since Q4 was the last quarter that Informal Systems was developing and maintaining the Cosmos Hub, it was decided by the oversight committee that a meeting and grades would be unnecessary. However, we’d still like to share our progress and detail our expenditures during Q4.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Cosmos Hub v20 and v21 upgrades.
- Completed the integration phase for Gaia v22.
- Launched Forge.
- Launched Hydro.
We reduced our headcount during Q4 in preparation for the new team led by Interchain Inc. (formerly Skip) taking over.
Note that we use CHIPs to track the progress of our work. Hence, throughout this update, we refer to different phases of the CHIPs framework.
Growth
During Q4, we onboarded 3 consumer chains onto ICS:
- Dungeon Chain - Dungeon Chain (DGN) revolutionizes gaming with fast, low-cost blockchain tech secured by Cosmos Hub validators; first game, Kosmic Quest, launches Q1 2025.
- Elys Network - Elys Network makes crypto simple with universal access to tokens from all ecosystems. Whether you’re a novice or an experienced user, you can easily navigate the DeFi space through a complete set of features, all in one place.
- Comdex - Comdex is an asset issuance and RWA aggregation chain secured by the Cosmos Hub. It enables users across the Cosmos ecosystem to diversify into RWA yields through a unified, secure platform that bridges traditional finance with DeFi.
You can see these chains on Forge. They are utilizing many of the features that we have added to ICS over the past year.
Technical upgrades
Gaia v20 Upgrade
On October 2nd, the Cosmos Hub upgraded to Gaia v20.0.0 (as per prop 966). This is a major release that adds the following features to the Cosmos Hub:
- ICS with Inactive Validators (as per prop 930) enables validators from outside the Hub’s active set to validate on Consumer Chains.
- Permissionless ICS (as per prop 945) enables users to permissionlessly launch opt-in Consumer Chains on the Cosmos Hub.
- Removal of Unbonding Pausing from ICS (as described by ADR 018) reduces the complexity of the ICS protocol and removes the dependency between the liveness of undelegation operations on the Cosmos Hub and the liveness of consumer chains.
We thank the Cosmos Hub community for voting on the software upgrade proposal and the validator community for a smooth upgrade with around 6 minutes of downtime.
Gaia v21 Upgrade
On November 6th, the Cosmos Hub upgraded to Gaia v21.0.0 (as per prop 971). This is a major release that bumps ICS to v6.3.0 and, as a result, adds the following features to the Cosmos Hub:
- Enables consumer chains to use the memo field of the IBC transfer packets to tag ICS rewards with the consumer ID. Consequently, consumer chains can send ICS rewards in any denomination and on any IBC channel. For example, a consumer chain could send USDC as ICS rewards (directly from the Noble). Note that this feature is compatible with consumer chains running ICS v4.5.0+ (for Cosmos SDK v0.47) and ICS v6.2.0+ (for Cosmos SDK v0.50+).
- Enables every consumer chain to permissionlessly add up to three denoms that will be accepted as ICS rewards.
We thank the Cosmos Hub community for voting on the software upgrade proposal and the validator community for a smooth upgrade with around 8 minutes of downtime.
Gaia v22 — Integration Phase
We completed the integration phase of Gaia v22, a release that will bring the following changes to the Cosmos Hub:
- Update to the latest version of Cosmos SDK v0.50 with support for the Liquid Staking Module (LSM) — v0.50.11-lsm. This includes the changes introduced by Cosmos SDK v0.50.10 and v0.50.11, as well as fixes for issues identified by OtterSec and Zellic during their audit of LSM. Note that none of the identified issues are critical. For more details, see the changelog for v0.50.11-lsm.
- Update to ICS v6.4.0, the latest version that brings a series of features, improvements and bug fixes to the provider module. For more details, see the section below.
Both the testnet and governance phases are planned for January 2025, and will be handled by Hypha and the new Interchain Inc. (former Skip) team.
ICS v6.4.0
We completed the implementation of ICS v6.4.0, a release that brings a series of improvements to both provider and consumer chains.
- Remove the
VSCMaturedPacketsfrom the consumer module (as per ADR 018). ICS v6.1.0 already removed the handling ofVSCMaturedPacketson the provider side, which entailed the removal of unbonding pausing. This change completely removes the logic from the consumer and, thus, completes the implementation of ADR 018. - Add a priority list to the power shaping parameters. This enables consumer chains to further customize their validator set by setting a list of validators that will have priority regardless of their voting power.
- Remove the governance proposal whitelisting from consumer chains. Initially, this feature was added as a protection against malicious consumer chains that might change configurations to affect the provider chain. However, with the introduction of partial set security and the removal of unbonding pausing, the governance proposal whitelisting feature is no longer needed. See this discussion for more details on the motivation.
- Enable the chain ID of a consumer chain to be updated after creation, but before launch. As a result, it brings more flexibility to consumer chain deployment, especially to chains that are not yet sure about their final chain ID.
- Enable querying the provider module for the genesis time for a consumer chain. As a result, consumer chains can set an accurate genesis time in the genesis file when bootstrapping their chain. See this issue for more details.
- Enable consumer chains to have customizable slashing and jailing (as per ADR 020). As a result, consumer chain owners will be able to customize both the jailing period and slashing factor for different types of infractions. For now, only two types of infractions are enabled — double signing and downtime. However, this can be expanded to other types in future iterations. Note that the default params will maintain the current behavior, especially the no slashing for downtime. Also, this will enable consumer chains to run as proof of reputation chains, which is like PoA, but the validators stake their reputation.
- Simplify the changeover from standalone to consumer chains. Basically, this feature enables consumer chains to reused the existing IBC connection to the provider (the one created as standalone chains). This simplifies the process as new clients no longer need to be created, which means the initial height initialization parameter is no longer needed.
In addition to the above improvements, ICS v6.4.0 also adds interchain tests to ICS. This is an effort to simplify the testing framework and increase the confidence of ICS releases. The goal is to eventually deprecate the existing e2e tests in favor of the new interchain tests. For more details, check out this epic.
Forge
We launched Forge, a comprehensive front-end platform designed to streamline the deployment of new projects as Consumer Chains. This initiative aims to dramatically simplify the process of launching and managing Consumer Chains within the Cosmos ecosystem.
We provided support for the Dungeon Chain launch — the first partial set security chain to launch permissionlessly on Cosmos Hub. Since then, two other consumer chains launched on ICS — Comdex and Elys.
With the goal of further improving Forge, we evaluated potential solutions for chain management and decided on assigning DAOs as chain owners instead of individual user accounts. As a result, we started working on integrating Forge with DAO DAO.
Hydro
We launched Hydro, a bidding and governance platform for efficient deployment of liquidity across the Interchain and an important part of the ATOM Wars strategy. See this Cosmos Hub forum post for more details on Hydro.
To date, 10 projects have submitted bids, and 8 third-party teams have expressed interest in building DeFi apps on top of Hydro. The round 1 cap was reached within 24 hours and the round 2 cap in less than 4 minutes.
For now, Hydro is running in pilot rounds. These are meant as a first iteration of the protocol to let us test and iterate, while already providing value to ATOM and its ecosystem.
After the initial launch, we also released multiple features to improve the product. Features aimed at users are:
- We launched an airdrops page to show users the status of which projects are airdropping to Hydro.
- We worked on a metrics page to list statistics about PoL deployments, including ones that were initiated before Hydros launch as well as the deployments managed through Hydro. Thanks to https://www.numia.xyz/ for collaborating with us on collecting & displaying this data.
- We worked further on reward distribution. While the smart contract already allows users to claim rewards, the user experience, especially with respect to being able to bridge and swap the received tokens into ATOM, was not up to our expectations. We have now launched the rewards page to allow users to see their pending rewards, while we continue the work on improving the experience of claiming and compounding the rewards into Hydro.
We have additionally released some features aimed at improving the experience for bidders:
- We have allowed them to specify a custom deployment duration: They can request liquidity to be exported for a certain number of rounds. This means a lower need for coordination, which is particularly important right now, as Hydro still relies on manual work for the deployment of funds.
Overall, the community sentiment during Q4 on Hydro was encouraging. User caps being filled in under 4 minutes, having multiple projects bidding each round, and seeing multiple teams desire to build DeFi apps on top of Hydro shows us that there is significant demand for the protocol. At the time of writing, a subset of the Cosmos Hub team at Informal Systems are requesting funding to continue development in 2025.
Other Initiatives
- We published on the Cosmos Hub forum a CHIPs discussion-phase blog post about using staked ATOM for gas on every Cosmos chain. We thank everybody that participated in the discussion.
- We submitted an on-chain governance proposal to update the feemarket params as per the discussion on the Cosmos Hub forum post. We thank everybody for voting and participating in the discussion.
Financial Transparency Reporting
As we mentioned in our Q4 plan we were planning to reduce our team’s headcount to ensure that we used the Hub’s resources effectively during the transition to Skip / Interchain Inc.
Now that the year has closed, we have reconciled our FTE headcount for Q4 at 10 FTEs. This is on target with our estimates to require a 30% reduction to successfully deliver our Q4 plan.
Due to the ongoing success of Hydro, and at the encouragement of the Skip team to continue building, core contributors to Hydro from the Cosmos Hub team at Informal are currently requesting that unused funds from Q4 be redirected to the Hydro team to provide 6 months of runway. Please see the full details of the Hydro team funding request here.
If the Hydro team’s funding prop were to pass, the amounts to be redirected to the Hydro Team’s DAODAO address would be:
- $225,714 USDC
- 10,214.29 ATOM
If the Hydro team’s funding prop were to not pass, Informal systems will send the above funds back to the Community Pool.
Informal Systems did not receive a bonus in 2024. All bonus funds will be returned to the CP.
The wallets are linked below:
- Budget vesting address: cosmos1r0t2zplulmfnuhx3de6wu4njg69yct0wv9383z
- Bonus vesting address: cosmos1rn5dpfpp20slrt0h3p79lspcpjpnhnlhtrlem9
