Hi everyone, I’m Susannah. I am the product lead of the talented ibc-go team at the Interchain Foundation.
Thank you for raising this proposal. While the Interchain Foundation stands behind, endorses, and continues to pursue decentralised contributions to the Interchain stack via both fiscal and human resources, we feel that the stated goal of maintaining the highest quality ibc-go repo and the points stated in this proposal diverge. In everything we do, we keep in mind that ibc-go is fundamental infrastructure securing millions in value transfer, and it is vital to the entire ecosystem that we prioritise security over speed of development.
The contributions and features mentioned above are both meaningful and accessible to teams that want to use them. Like you, we hope that increased coordination and communication between teams can help play a role in increasing the visibility of these features. In line with this objective, we have been working with Strangelove and made what we hope to be a collaborative breakthrough in creating a new repository dedicated to ibc applications and middleware - GitHub - cosmos/ibc-apps: IBC applications and middleware for Cosmos SDK chains.
It’s worth noting that all application modules including token transfer are not enabled by default for a chain that wants to use ibc-go. Each chain developer has to wire up the application modules they want to use. This is also true for middleware. So, by putting middleware and apps into a consolidated repo managed across teams, we believe that we have a strong balance between the security of ibc-go and accessibility and visibility of new features.
However, we do not want to ossify ibc-go either. The work that is being done by Cosmos core teams is of both high quality and importance. At the moment, we are in the process of merging the wasm client into ibc-go because it is a core transport layer primitive. In this regard, both Composable and Strangelove are working to finish the spec, documentation, and testing on this feature. Once our collaborators have finished development and the PR has been reviewed, we will merge this feature into ibc-go.
Thank you again for laying out these suggestions for process improvements and we hope that the above provides an insight into our current thinking. We look forward to continued collaboration with the talented teams in the ecosystem and will continue to work alongside you all to do our utmost to ensure that the most important, innovative, and secure code finds its way into the Interchain stack.