At a Glance

Join the Cosmos Stargate announcements channel!

If you’re running a block explorer, wallet, exchange, validator, or any other service (eg. custody provider) that depends upon the Cosmos Hub or Cosmos ecosystem, you’ll want to pay attention, because this upgrade will involve substantial changes.

1. Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)- cross-chain transactions
2. Protobuf Migration — blockchain performance & dev acceleration
3. State Sync — minutes to sync new nodes
4. Full-Featured Light Clients
5. Chain Upgrade Module — upgrade automation

Help us to get the word out -this is a major leap for the Cosmos Network and we want everyone on board 🚀

Cosmos Hub to Lead the Stargate Upgrade

In December 2019, the Cosmos Hub’s only major upgrade delivered new power to ATOM stakers by way of governance: parameter changes and community spending. Prior to the Cosmos Hub 3 upgrade, the chain had to be halted to change economic parameters, which can now be changed via governance proposal. Importantly, funds from the community pool can be spent via governance proposal, a powerful tool to accelerate Cosmos Hub development.

Currently, we have a stable network with a strong set of Cosmos Hub validators. We have a functioning governance system with strong participation, and we have used our community pool to fund two projects. However, the Hub is still independent from the rest of the Cosmos ecosystem, and the Hub was designed to connect the Cosmos ecosystem together.

The next step is the Stargate upgrade, coming later this year. Stargate will improve the Cosmos ecosystem in a few major ways. Perhaps one of the most well-known benefits being delivered in Stargate is the ability to connect Cosmos-based chains together using Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), and the Cosmos Hub will be leading the way for the Stargate upgrade.

If you’ve been following the Cosmos ecosystem lately, you have likely seen an explosion of ecosystem activity in preparation for the launch of the much-anticipated IBC protocol. Stargate will usher in more than just IBC.

Stargate Overview

The Cosmos ecosystem will look to Cosmos Hub governance to vote on the features of the largest Cosmos upgrade yet. Here are the primary features:

1. Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)
   The ability to exchange transactions of value and data across compatible chains
2. Protobuf Migration
   Accelerates front-end development and 10x to 100x better blockchain performance
3. A new node can synchronize 200x faster, participating in consensus in minutes rather than days
4. Chain Upgrade Module
   Enables validators to upgrade the chain software asynchronously in minutes rather than an hour or more

In essence, this launch will complete the roadmap laid out in the Cosmos whitepaper, as discussed by Zaki Manian ( Iqlusion). Here’s a recent Q&A:

Cross-Chain Connections via IBC

Cosmos’ flagship, the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, is set to launch with the Stargate update. IBC will mark the emergence of a much-anticipated interoperable Cosmos network: the ability to securely and trustlessly exchange data and token value across sovereign chains that support IBC. That means that 1) tokens and 2) data will be exchanged across different blockchains, and we anticipate that the Cosmos Hub will be the first to secure those cross-chain exchanges.

New to IBC? Here’s a simple explainer. Want to dive deeper? IBC is being addressed in a number of spots, and here are a few places to start:

IBC is what will take siloed, Cosmos-based blockchains and bring them together to make an ecosystem called the Cosmos Network.

If you plan to support tokens beyond the Cosmos Hub’s ATOM with your wallet, exchange, block explorer or other application/service, check out the IBC security model (demonstrated extensively during Phase 3 of Game of Zones) in order to effectively balance novelty and safety for your users.

The Cosmos Hub will strive to be the most secure and reliable hub that links them all together, with its battle-tested validator set and with the economic power of the ATOM. A truly decentralized Interchain should have no single point of failure, and hubs like the IRIS Network will also route interchain transactions.

Accelerating Performance & User Interface Development via Protobuf

It could be that IBC has stolen all of the attention, or perhaps the name “Protobuf Migration” is not nearly exciting enough, but the Protobuf Migration will do a number of key things for Cosmos blockchains. Beginning with the Cosmos Hub, we’ll see significant improvements to performance, compatibility, interoperability, operability and developer ease-of-use. What does that mean?

A better Cosmos future with Protobuf

Applications will be way faster, gas costs will be much lower, and there will be more transactions included in each block. Applications will be more reliable and easier to create, supporting a lengthy list of programming languages. Protobuf is expected to clear the biggest bottleneck in Cosmos-one that touches every layer. Clearing this bottleneck will enable the teams working on Cosmos to see what else can be improved going forward.

A performance increase of one or two orders of magnitude

We expect transaction throughput of the Cosmos Hub (and others that upgrade) to increase by 10x to 100x. This will be very important for the Cosmos Hub to handle an ever-increasing volume of cross-chain transactions. It also makes it easier on the nodes that run the network. Around 50% of CPU time when running `gaiad` is currently spent in the encoding and decoding logic, and that’s about to change, thanks to the migration to Protobuf. And there’s more.

Reliability, composability, and better UIs

Protobuf will introduce a standard for composability. That means easier development of reliable front-end user interfaces (UIs) that work together with other UIs. Current UIs need an intermediate process to read/write blockchain data, which makes things slow and unreliable. Not only will web apps (in Javascript) be able to communicate directly with a Cosmos node, applications using any of the many Protobuf-supported languages will do this as well. Protobuf will be critical to attracting user interface developers who want to make great new Cosmos apps.

New nodes up and running in minutes via State Sync

At 6 or 7 seconds per block, Tendermint makes new blocks very quickly. That’s great for blockchain performance, but challenging for participants that need to synchronize a new node, which can take days. This is a big problem for a validator operator that needs to replace a failed validator. The current workaround is downloading a public snapshot, which makes syncing much faster, but it’s a security risk for the validator and the network. State Sync will enable a Cosmos node to be up and running securely within minutes, not days.

Full-Featured Light Clients

According to Zaki (Iqlusion), Tendermint’s light client security model allows full nodes to bootstrap themselves securely without waiting days to sync all past state. “As an ecosystem, we need to figure out a way to distribute light client trust roots in less than 21 day unbonding time to full nodes.” Expect more details from the Interchain GmbH team’s deep dive on the Tendermint 0.34 plan.

Chain Upgrade Module

The initial versions of the Cosmos Hub used a flexible but painful chain halt to upgrade the blockchain. When we upgraded to cosmoshub-2 and cosmoshub-3, we stopped the Cosmos Hub for over an hour-a disruption we can’t afford as the Cosmos Network relies more and more upon the Cosmos Hub. This method of upgrade is challenging for validator operators and introduces an additional layer of risk for their operations, as well as to their delegators, who may be slashed. Thanks to the Regen Network team, this new upgrade module will automate the upgrade process to reduce the coordination complexity, potential for human error, and the demands on the validator operators to all upgrade at the same time.

Stargate will enable the ability for a governance proposal to specify either an upgrade block height or time, safely shut down block production on the legacy chain, and then enable validators to opt into running the management process that seamlessly deploys the new software, migrates the state, and starts the new chain.

The Regen Network has been running this upgrade process for nearly a year on their testnets and their validator community has already built up considerable experience with it. We’re anticipating a future of Cosmos Hub upgrades that are much less eventful, something we are all looking forward to.

Next Steps

Block explorers, wallets, exchanges, we are asking you to schedule time in August for integration testing against the Stargate network.

Validators, we are hoping that nearly all validators in the Cosmos Hub will participate in the Stargate testnet as a simulated upgrade. We are anticipating the first testnet to be July 27.

Join us for the Stargate testnet to get used to this process. The Stargate team intends to run testnets and upgrades (using the Cosmos Hub genesis file) to broaden the pool of experience.

Follow along on Twitter via @cosmos to ensure you don’t miss updates, and join our Discord #stargate channel to ask questions or to lend a hand, and join the Cosmos Stargate announcements channel!

Get the word out on Twitter, translate and/or repost this article and others, or help us by syndicating it onto your own blog or channels. This is a major leap for the Cosmos Network and we want everyone on board 🚀

Special thanks to Jack ( Akash) for hours spent with me getting this article detailed. A big thank-you to Zaki (Iqlusion) for substantial contributions and information. Thanks to Billy (ICF) and the rest of the Stargate team for helping to get this article right.

Hopefully you found this useful. Feedback is always welcome! I’m on Twitter.

Cosmos Stargate Upgrade Overview was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Often people would ask me, “why are you, out of the hundreds of blockchains in crypto, so particularly passionate about Cosmos Network?”

While the reasons are countless, there are two main reasons that come to mind:

First, the Cosmos ecosystem has always pioneered in the conception and implementation of cutting-edge ideas and technologies.

The success of Game of Stakes, the first proof-of-stake adversarial testnet in the crypto space, quickly taught hundreds of new Cosmonauts how to use the tools available in the Cosmos ecosystem. This led to a successful and seamless launch of the Cosmos Hub in March of the same year.

The success of Game of Stakes was fully recreated in Game of Zones, an incentivized testnet intended to test the limits of IBC and discover its strengths and weaknesses ahead of launching it into production. Cosmonauts from all over the world participated in the three-phase challenge, bringing results that few expected.

Which brings us to the second point: the people involved.

Let’s be honest, when this much prize is at stake, many would have done things at any cost to have an edge over their competitors. But in Game of Zones, 150 teams not only gave their best in terms of energy and commitment, but also in helping, collaborating, supporting, and celebrating each other to excel.

This is Cosmos: an international ecosystem of some of the best-in-class operators of proof-of-stake blockchains that day after day made their knowledge available to all of us Cosmonauts.

So whenever somebody asks me what I love about Cosmos network, I’m always ready to answer: the genius, the courage, and the humanity of those who are part of it.

And amongst the many teams that participated, one particularly stood out to perfectly embody the Cosmos spirit. That team is IRISnet.

Pre-Game of Zones

Even before the start of Game of Zones was announced, the IRISnet team spent time to thoroughly analyze the IBC module and the Relayer in order to prepare for the competition that would soon follow.

In doing so, not only did the team discover an inaccuracy in the Relayer implementation, but also discovered three major bugs which were documented and submitted as useful material for the Game of Zones Bug Bounty.

Here is a summary of the anomalies detected by the IRISnet team:

• Consensus bug This bug caused the loss of memory data after a Gaia daemon restart, causing a consensus failure. It should be noted that the bug was found near end of Phase 1a. To which the team alerted the organizers. This led to the decision to repeat Phase 1 (named Phase 1b) after the problem was finally solved.
  You can read more about this in Tess Rinearson|Interchain GmbH’s blogpost.
• ICS-20 Event bug When multiple messages were contained in a single transaction, the event data would be abnormal. Specifically, the events in subsequent messages would include those of the previous messages, leading to the data being excessively large and causing a number of problems such as the relayer not being able to pick up the proper data packet via query.
• Unordered channel bug ICS20 packets sent through an irregular channel can be retransmitted repeatedly, causing more tokens minted on the counterparty chain than are available on the source chain.

In addition, although it was not required, the IRISnet team proposed a draft of an interchain incentive mechanism, which they considered extremely important for the development of the IBC ecosystem.

Beyond discovering critical bugs that existed in the codebase, the team also provided the community with concrete tools to let the Cosmonauts experience what the future of Cosmos Network post-IBC has in store for them such as the IBC implementation of Rainbow Wallet and the GoZ State Visualizer.

Well, we can say the boys didn’t sit on their hands!

Phase 1a

After carefully studying the competition rules set by Cosmos Devs, the IRISnet team has effectively developed automatic tools and monitoring procedures, mostly following these points:

• They started their own private transmission node instead of using a public one.
• The automatic program would then try again independently in case of a failed transaction.
• At the same time, the real-time monitoring system also included a series of alarms, so that devs could intervene manually and in a prompt manner in case of need.

Despite the fact that in Phase 1a, as mentioned above, a consensus bug led to significant instability of the Game of Zones Hub, the team was able to effectively deal with the problems occurred.

IRISnet ranked third in Phase 1a of Game of Zones, winning the Challenge Reward.

Phase 1b

With the resolution of the Consensus Bug, Phase 1b of the GoZ seemed to start with the best of premises.

It wasn’t long before the IRISnet team, driven by what happened in Phase 1a, decided to go even deeper into the ICS-20 Event Bug.

This led to the core developers discovering an even more critical bug than the consensus failure bug that plagued Phase 1a. The bug was likely to be able to affect the results of the GoZ Hub. Going above and beyond, the team found other issues with memory overflow, node stop, and query timeout.

This could have resulted in a malicious hacker to successfully conduct an attack on the various channels at any stage of the competition.

After having pointed out to the organizers that the bug was still present on the Hub, IRISnet wanted to give a concrete demonstration of it using it for an attack on the public nodes after Phase 1b ended, effectively shutting down the Game of Zones hub.

Confirming the excellent results maintained by the team during both Phases 1a and 1b, IRISnet won the GoZ Liveness Reward.

Phase 2

The main focus of the second phase of Game of Zones was throughput.

Essentially, this meant that the team that was able to relay the most amount of packets with their relayer key on the GoZ Hub and the Game of Zones network wins this round.

To achieve this, developers worked to improve and optimize the relayer, mostly focusing on the following aspects:

• Implement automated batch sending of cross-chain transactions
• Implement automated batch relaying packets
• Improve query efficiency by using multi-GoRoutine in relaying packets
• Add handling of exception such as timeout and transaction failure
• Fix the issue that made impossible to get the proof of the packets created in the latest block

While the official ranking of Phase 2 has not yet been released, according to the unofficial P2P Validator Leaderboard, the IRISnet team ranked fourth out of a total of 150 teams.

Phase 3

The main objective for Phase 3 was to stress test the security model of IBC, and the winner will be the team that executed the best confusion or deception attacks against other zones.

During this phase, the team implemented a deceptive relay between the GOZ Hub and Iris Hub and simulated a series of abnormal scenarios that illustrate the consequences and effects.

A demonstration of the procedures carried out to achieve this result can be found here.

The IRISnet team contributed substantially to the improvement of the Cosmos SDK and the Relayer by identifying key inconsistencies. They submitted two pull requests that address the issues (1 & 2)

For phase three, as for phase two, the official ranking is not yet available, but I am pleased to announce that the IRISnet team has won the “Most Innovative/Deceptive State Machine” award!
Really deserved, congratulations guys!

The complete list of winners can be found in the replay of the Game of Zones Closing Ceremony hosted by Jessy Irwin, Jack Zampolin and Zaki Manian.

Final considerations by the IRISnet team

To bring this summary to a close, I wanted to conduct a small interview with the IRISnet team to see what this competition meant to them.

Daniela: The team submitted constant code revisions, pull requests, updates of the Visualizer and even an IBC version of the Rainbow wallet. How did the team manage to simultaneously work on so many things during Game of Zones?

IRISnet Devs: In order to work effectively in each of these fields you mentioned, our team was split into 3 teams (Adversarial competition, Rainbow-GoZ Wallet, and GoZ Network State Visualizer). Thanks to this, each of us has been able to focus on our work and put all of ourselves into the task without interruption and in a completely autonomous way.

Daniela: Game of Zones, like the Game of Stake a year ago, is designed to test not only the code but also the teams participating in the competition. It seems obvious that this competition led to impressive technical improvements in a very short time, many creative use cases and incubated teams that are now familiar with using the IBC module and running the relayer.

What are your thoughts on this? Which things did you find the most challenging and what was the most exciting thing about the competition?

IRISnet Devs: Game of Zones is a global game that lasts for 3 weeks. Participants come from different time zones and there may be various temporary situations happening in this game, so it requires us to highly focus our attention, to keep thinking. It’s definitely a huge challenge.

Because the amount of data and the load carried by each node of GoZ Hub is very large, ensuring that our program can run stably was a huge challenge.

At the same time, in order to compete with various excellent teams, we needed to find ways to optimize our tools to obtain a better ranking. This was a very exciting challenge for us. If you want to see in-depth the tools we used during the competition, we have made open source our command-line tool!

Daniela: All the work and time invested have only one ambitious final goal: the advent of IBC. What are your final thoughts about Game of Zones and what do you think is the next step forward?

IRISnet Devs: Game of Zones was a very good opportunity to participate in learning to use the IBC protocol and the relayer. In the competition, we competed with many excellent teams. We saw many excellent strategies and ideas and learned a lot.

We do hope Game of Zones will build a solid foundation for the establishment and improvement of the whole Cosmos ecosystem.

Conclusion

Thanks to the IRISnet Team, who kindly summarized the key events, the history, and the work behind their participation in the Game of Zones.

Despite being very reserved and humble about their achievements, I must acknowledge their willingness to put in the extra effort and strive for excellence even in situations that may be unexpected.

Congratulations to IRISnet and all the teams who participated in the Game of Zones, bringing talent, innovation and squad spirit!
In this competition the real victory, the one given by the commitment to a common goal, belongs to all of us!

IRISnet Official Channels

•Email
•Website
•Forum
•English Telegram
•Chinese Telegram
•Korean Telegram
•Italian Telegram
•France Telegram
•Twitter
•Medium
•Youtube
•WeChat subscription: irisnetwork
•WeChat group: irisnetwork2018

A tale of Game of Zones: IRISnet was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Cross-Chain Hackathon, hosted by Gitcoin, started as a way to involve developers from around the world and give them ample time to work on their projects. After months of planning and almost one month of hacking, we’re excited to say we received over 20 total submissions! Let’s go over the winners.

Cosmos Challenge Winners ($15,000 total in ATOMs)

With the Cosmos challenge, we wanted to see what developers can build with the Cosmos toolkit. This includes the Cosmos SDK, IBC, Ethermint, Peggy, and CosmWasm. Here are the winners:

1st place — MeiChain ($6000 in ATOMs)

1. MeiChain is the MEI stablecoin system with a collateral debt position (CDP). There’s three blockchains working together. The Cosmos Hub users hold their ATOMs and use them as collateral for minting MEI. Next, Meichain is used to store the CDP and the MEI token itself. Lastly there’s Bandchain, which serves the ATOM/USD price feed from several exchanges to Meichain. All chains communicate to MeiChain by sending packets across the chain using IBC relayers. (view Github)

2nd place — LikeCoin ISCN ($5000 in ATOMs)

1. LikeCoin is a public blockchain for content monetization, attribution, and distribution. For this hackathon, they provided two components. 1) A Cosmos SDK module for users to record content metadata according to the ISCN specification and 2) IPFS plugins for querying and parsing this content metadata from the chain. (view Github)

3rd place — Qonico ($4000 in ATOMs)

1. Qonico is a Cosmos blockchain implementation for small IOT devices. It includes a guide, a cross-chain client using RaspberryPi, a web client and a js client. (view Github)

Agoric Winners

Agoric’s winners made good use of its platform for building reusable smart contracts. They were:

Grand Prize ($1000 in ATOMs)

1. KryhaDapp — addressed the problem of plastics recyclers not knowing what kind of plastic was used to make bottles and if it was recyclable. Their solution provides a single shared source of truth for tracking product lifecycles. To do this, they used multiple reusable and cooperating contracts (five in all), with a useful UI. (View Github)

Winners ($500 each in ATOMs)

1. Time Release — a contract that transfers funds, but only after a specified amount of time has passed. It was notable for being a useful and interesting reusable component with test automation. (View Github)
2. Bonsai Exchange — a fun sales application where users buy bonsais and plant them. It reused an existing component, wired it into a new UI, and interacted with Agoric’s wallet implementation. (View Github)

Honorable Mention ($250 each in ATOMs)

1. Goodwill — a merger of a modified Agoric encouragement dapp with the ultimatum game, a standard economics experiment to measure trust. One person makes an offer on how to divide assets, and another accepts or rejects. Acceptance means the assets are divided per the offer, rejection means both parties get nothing. This project was a start at making re-usable components for quickly building experiments. (View Github)
2. Ice Cave — while incomplete, it made good progress towards integrating Agoric smart contracts with the Phaser gaming framework. The result is a decentralized game with non-fungible loot boxes on top of the Agoric blockchain. (View Github)

Band Protocol Winners

Several teams provided submissions for Band’s DeFi category for the Cross-Chain Hackathon. Here are the winners:

Winners (2000 BAND each)

1. MeiChain — The MEI stablecoin system with a collateral debt position (CDP). Uses the Cosmos Hub, MeiChain, and Band’s price oracles. (View Github)
2. CoinPriceBet — A prediction market built on the Cosmos SDK which has a frontend demo and sources crypto prices from Band’s oracles using IBC. (View Github)

Honorable Mentions (500 BAND each)

1. StakeSafe — an interface for staking any supported liquidity pools safely, with pool information coming from Band’s price oracles. (View Github)
2. SEMA — allows users to buy second-hand items with the ATOM token by posting items, accepting the transaction, sending tokens, and exchanging tokens. (View Github)

Notable Teams

For the Cosmos challenge, several exceptional teams that provided submissions that we didn’t cover above. Each of these teams is eligible for a Cosmos T-shirt. These include:

1. Map of Zones — a visualizer that displays a galaxy of the interconnected networks built on the Cosmos SDK with the IBC module. (View Github)
2. AstroCanvas — a game and radical experimentation in stake decentralization. Inspired by the 2017 Reddit April Fools project r/Place, AstroCanvas takes this one step further and applies it to solving staking centralization of proof-of-stake blockchains. Delegators are given specific colorToken that represents the right to change one pixel in the canvas when they delegate their staking token to a Hub validator. The catch? Not all colorToken are the same. Delegators can earn colorToken of a specific color (white, black, red, etc) depending on the voting power of the delegated validator. So for example, validator with #1 to #10 rank in voting power gives delegators colorTokenWhite which only allows you to place a white pixel on the canvas. If you want to place a blue pixel, you need colorTokenBlue which you may only receive when you delegate to a validator with voting power ranging from #80 to #90. (View Github)
3. OpenMarket — provides a decentralized marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFT) trading over IBC. It’s part of the Сosmos ecosystem and can be used to trade the non-fungible asset of any blockchain in it. This is done using the IBC protocol which, among other things, allows cryptocurrency and NFTs to be transferred between blockchains. (View Github)
4. Real Estate Exchange — a real estate trade application built on Cosmos SDK. Users have tokens and they can exchange real estate as securities. Each issuer pays dividends as another blockchain’s token to the security owners. The trade is empowered by the Cross framework, which supports a cross-chain atomic swap between blockchains connected via IBC. (View Github)
5. CoinPriceBet — A prediction market built on the Cosmos SDK which has a frontend demo and sources crypto prices from Band’s oracles using IBC. (View Github)
6. SEMA — allows users to buy second-hand items with the ATOM token by posting items, accepting the transaction, sending tokens, and exchanging tokens. (View Github)
7. Cross Chain Crawler — uses Web of Trust and Google NL APIs to rate as many sites and services on various blockchains. (View Github)

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone from Gitcoin, Agoric, Band, Interchain GmbH, Tendermint Inc, and the Interchain Foundation for helping to make this virtual hackathon a reality. We’ll be reaching out to the winners of the Cross-Chain Hackathon soon regarding KYC and tax documents along with those eligble for t-shirts. Again, thank you to all who participated!

Join the Cosmos Community Discord to stay connected.

The views and details expressed in this blog post are those of All In Bits Inc (dba Tendermint Inc), and do not necessarily represent the opinions or actions of the Interchain Foundation.

Announcing the Cross-Chain Hackathon Winners was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are several goals of Game of Zones: to educate the public about IBC; to stress test the system in an adversarial and competitive setting; and to shine a light on any potential vulnerabilities in the IBC protocol and implementation. Earlier this week, participants in Game of Zones successfully helped us identify a problem. It wasn’t exactly a bug in IBC, but it was a problem nonetheless. We’re excited to fix it.

I’ll share more on that in a moment, but first, some context:

On Monday, the Iqlusion team, which sometimes also goes by “Cosmos Devs,” posted an update to the Game of Zones challenge. In short, the timeline has been adjusted to accommodate the aforementioned problem, which popped up at the end of Phase 1. (For more details on Game of Zones logistics, please see Iqlusion’s post.)

Today, I’m following up on that issue on behalf of the Interchain GmbH team, which includes the core development team for IBC. (We’re helping Iqlusion out as they administer Game of Zones.) I’ll share a deeper analysis of the bug and root cause, as well as the cross-entity next steps that we’ll be taking together, to ensure a smooth conclusion to Game of Zones, and, more importantly, a robust Cosmos Network.

The Bug

At the conclusion of Phase 1 of Game of Zones, participants were asked to upgrade their software to a new commit of Gaia and the Cosmos SDK, and restart their nodes. After doing so, a number of participants reported that their chains were halting, and other participants reported seeing “invalid port” errors.

The Berlin-based Interchain GmbH team started investigating on Monday morning CEST, and was able to identify the problem that afternoon and merge a patch. The team then worked with community members to verify the fix across several nodes. That night, the Iqlusion team updated the Game of Zones timeline.

Root Cause

The bug came from the way that the capabilities module was being initialized inside Gaia. It was erroneously being initialized with a cached context, which meant that the changes made during application initialization were not correctly persisted to the store.

We were able to identify this problem quickly, because it was, in fact, a known bug. It had actually been fixed in a patch for the Cosmos SDK, a week beforehand!

So how did this bug persist in Gaia, even after it was identified and patched in the Cosmos SDK?

Root-er Cause

We were able to pinpoint the buggy code, but we’ve also been able to find the bigger problem: As core development teams have decentralized across the Cosmos ecosystem, responsibility for maintaining Gaia hasn’t been clear. Although Gaia plays a key role as the daemon that runs the Cosmos Hub, it has a different software lifecycle from the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Core. More concretely: Gaia is not updated as frequently, and changes to its dependencies may not get incorporated immediately.

In this case, this mismatch created trouble.

Next Steps

In the immediate term, Iqlusion will be responsible for porting SDK updates to Gaia. This arrangement will ensure that key fixes will be applied to Gaia, and that Gaia will be proactively maintained moving forward; not just during Game of Zones, but beyond, too. The Interchain GmbH team will help out here, too, by reviewing all Gaia releases and providing a second pair of eyes on this very important piece of software.

The Interchain GmbH team will also start helping out with relayer development, testing, and support during Game of Zones. The truth is that Game of Zones has ended up being much more popular than any of us expected! Our hands-on community is overwhelmingly a blessing, but y’all have made Game of Zones a bigger project than what one team can handle alone.

As I wrote in the beginning of this post: Game of Zones is an opportunity to unearth vulnerabilities in the IBC protocol and software; today we also found a gap in our ecosystem-wide organizational coverage and communication. And we’re patching these things, just as we’d patch our code. These changes will eventually help us continue Game of Zones in a robust and intentional manner, and it will ultimately help us launch IBC in a secure and stable way on the Cosmos Hub.

The Interchain GmbH team wants to thank everyone for their ongoing participation, and especially for their feedback, during this process. We’re looking forward to the next phase — not only of Game of Zones, but of the Cosmos Ecosystem. Thanks for working with us to make it as ✨celestial✨ as possible.

Technical Game of Zones Update from Interchain GmbH was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

China’s Blockchain-based Service Network BSN officially kicked off in Beijing on April 25, 2020. The BSN initiative, a joint effort led by the State Information Center of China, China Mobile, China UnionPay, and Red Date Technology, is a standardized, nationwide public infrastructure network across different regions and business sectors to support faster and cheaper blockchain development and deployment.

The announcement of the BSN launch saw coverage from the top media outlets within the country including People’s Daily Online, Sina Finance, and Tencent News. , the President of People’s Daily Online, outlined at the conference that BSN is emblematic of leveraging blockchain technology to conduct national strategies, address key issues, and create real value.

The launch of BSN also captured widespread attention from overseas. Coindesk, for example, has provided consistent media coverage on the development of BSN since its initiation, most notably an in-depth interview with Yifan He, CEO of Red Date Technology. Red Date Technology is one of the founding members of BSN, responsible for architecting and operating the infrastructure. Mr. He briefly touched on the vision of BSN in the said interview: “One of our primary goals is to include as many blockchain frameworks as possible and make them accessible under one uniform standard on the BSN platform. In that way, we can save users’ overhead costs to build a blockchain while being able to offer more custom services.” A partnership between BSN and Cosmos was also mentioned by He. The partnership will be through IRITA, an enterprise-focused solution branching off of the Shanghai-based IRISnet project.

How Does IRITA Support BSN?

BSN introduces three network participant roles: 1)Cloud service providers; 2)Blockchain framework providers (particularly Consortium Blockchain); 3)Application developers. IRITA falls into the second category and the Shanghai based IRISnet dev team Bianjie has closely followed BSN’s design to get IRITA on board. The end goal is to provide the application developers to be able to build applications using IRITA on BSN.

Since the beginning of 2020, Bianjie has been actively collaborating with Red Date Technology to adapt IRITA aligns with BSN’s adaptation standards. A prime example would be the encryption module Bianjie developed according to the specifications of China’s National Encryption Algorithm. Following a plug-and-play design approach, IRITA offers native support for different cryptographic algorithms according to customers’ specific needs, and the version of IRITA on BSN will use China’s National Encryption Algorithm. In January this year, Bianjie submitted various technical documentation on developing and deploying IRITA to the staff at BSN with the intention to help developers easily and quickly deploy their own IRITA runtime. We look forward to supporting more and more developers building on IRITA and grateful for the amazing feedback we have received from BSN so far.

Currently, BSN supports top consortium blockchain frameworks including Hyperledger Fabric by IBM and FISCO BCOS by Tencent WeBank. It is our goal to see IRITA join the prestigious group and collaborate with other players in the space on driving the world towards a better future.

What Value Does IRITA Bring to BSN?

Powered by Tendermint and the IRIS SDK, IRITA (Inter-Realm Industry Trust Alliance)is the first enterprise-focused consortium blockchain coming out of the Cosmos ecosystem. Leveraging their extensive experience in providing technology solutions, Bianjie was able to deliver a slew of exciting features in IRITA including 1) privacy-preserving data sharing; 2) high-performance consensus engine; 3) advanced inter-chain communication; 4) highly practical on/off-chain interoperability; 5) and flexible digital asset modeling/exchange. IRITA carries the potential of being widely applied in finance, health care, supply chain, and other applicable business scenarios.

Inspired by the Inter-Blockchain Communication IBC protocol by Cosmos, IRITA takes it one step further with its innovative service layer (a.k.a IRIS Services) in connecting blockchains with conventional enterprise applications, supporting data exchange between heterogeneous computing systems (e.g. public chains, consortium chains, and legacy systems). Particularly in the case of information exchange between public chains and consortium chains, IRITA in conjunction with the IRISnet service hub brings extraordinary value to the existing ecosystem and the future that has yet to come.

The Bianjie team recently open-sourced implementation of integrating Chainlink as a trusted oracle into iService. The synergy between IRISnet and Chainlink has been a long time coming. During the BSN interview with Coindesk, Mr. He also mentioned besides Cosmos that BSN would also like to support Chainlink for oracle service, and we can expect IRITA and IRISnet to provide a very convenient integration path when bridging the Chainlink’s services for consortium blockchain applications on BSN.

About Cosmos & IRISnet

Cosmos is one of the most prominent blockchain projects focused on inter-chain communication. Founded in 2016 by the core team behind Tendermint, the Cosmos project aims to bring inter-chain communication to an ecosystem of independent parallel blockchains.

IRISnet (a.k.a IRIS Hub) is the world’s first self-evolving, BPoS (Bonded Proof-of-Stake) blockchain designed to be the foundation for next-generation distributed applications. Built with the Cosmos-SDK, the IRIS Hub enables cross-chain interoperability through a unified service model, while providing a variety of modules to support DeFi applications. IRITA is an enterprise blockchain product from the IRISnet development team.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments.

Resources

https://medium.com/irisnet-blog/team-behind-irisnet-open-sourced-its-enterprise-blockchain-product-irita-fe6da7295987

https://medium.com/irisnet-blog/irisnet-core-dev-team-bianjie-won-the-first- developer-competition-award-of-china-blockchain-449a6cee8391

https://www.coindesk.com/meet-red-date-the-little-known-tech-firm-behind-chinas-big-blockchain-vision

https://www.coindesk.com/chinas-national-blockchain-will-change-the-world

IRISnet Enterprise IRITA has been chosen by BSN to support Cosmos Ecosystem was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Live online workshops by Cosmos

The world is shifting rapidly and life as we know it is subject to change. But these tumultuous times are also a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves and use this time to improve.

As we continue the work of providing the developer community with information and resources, we are stepping up our efforts in securing personal guidance in onboarding a new wave of builders to the Cosmos ecosystem.

While online events foster information sharing, new ideas and technology, hands-on teaching and training are equally as important. Teaching and educational resources can be overlooked, often requiring significant time, preparation and consideration. We want to support and create a space that promotes educators, quality resources and workshops that the whole ecosystem can benefit from — especially newcomers.

To address this need, we are launching “Code with us,” a live, interactive workshop program designed to educate and provide real-time practice to developers in the community.

The Cosmos “Code with us” program brings workshops from our home offices to yours. There couldn’t be a better time to invest in online learning, especially with so many people working from home.

This program aims to provide everyone with access to the information and resources they need to become familiar with the Cosmos stack. These seminars are small workshops led by expert mentors from Tendermint Inc, Interchain GmbH, Agoric, Band Protocol and others that will use their expertise to guide the community of developers from deploying a simple “Hello World” blockchain, to getting familiar with the Cosmos SDK architecture, running an IBC relayer, and much more.

Participants have the opportunity to access hands-on live lessons to code together in real-time with some of the community’s most respected contributors. Most of the workshops are structured in two-hour sessions with associated online materials or tutorials, and will take place roughly every two weeks. If you are looking for a quick and fun introduction to Cosmos’ tech, this is the perfect way to get started. To get started, make sure you sign up for “Code with us” workshops.

We have put together a list of future workshops designed to educate, guide and inspire the next generation of innovators. Bear in mind that this list is subject to change as more community members express their enthusiasm to participate in the program.

New to Cosmos? No worries! Come and join the workshops and pick up a new skill in just 2 hours! With so many interesting themes to choose from, you can pick your favorites and you’re all set to begin your journey into the vast universe of the Cosmos ecosystem

Sign up for the “Code with us” workshop program. We’ll send you a link to add the calendar, email reminders of the upcoming workshops and a list of documentation for each session.

What we expect participants to get out of this program:

• Get your hands dirty with Cosmos tech, and have fun while coding
• Master the basics of programming your own blockchain application and get answers to your questions in real-time
• Understand the common, high-level concepts of Cosmos SDK technology
• Develop basic skills in the Go programming language

Requirements:

• Participants of this course need to have basic programming skills as this is a course aimed at developers
• To complete the interactive challenges of the course, you’ll need a desktop or laptop computer with an internet connection
• Before the course, you’ll need to install Go onto your computer. You can download it here
• Please make sure to have google calendar so that you can log in and confirm your participation for the workshop
• The workshops will be held in English and will be based on the existing @cosmos resources and documentation.

The first workshop in this program is “Scavenger Hunt Tutorial” held by Billy Rennekamp scheduled for 11th May. (Billy is currently Interchain Foundation’s Grant Manager, Developer Relations at Interchain Gmbh and Founder of Clovers Network.)

In this workshop, you will learn to build a working game with its own internal economy using the Cosmos SDK, a framework to build scalable and interoperable application-specific blockchains in Go. The workshop will use the ‘scavenger hunt’ tutorial led and designed by Billy Rennekamp. If you’d like to get a head start and check out what you’ll be getting into, take a look at https://tutorials.cosmos.network/ (Scavenge).

If you’d like to participate in the first workshop from this program, please sign up for “Code with us” and we will send you a calendar invite. No registration fee is required.

Future workshops will be announced two weeks in advance and we will onboard future participants through the same registration process to make sure your virtual seat is covered.

The world is indeed changing, but let’s use this opportunity to develop the skills you’ve always wanted to sharpen!

See you all in Cosmos!

Introducing “Code with us” was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In light of recent events, while people are distancing themselves physically, the need for social connection has never been more pronounced. Despite capital markets and crypto markets alike having more than halved in value across the board on any given asset, we’ve been compelled to work smarter and more creatively than ever.

Using creative treasury management, we’ve already started several ecosystem-bolstering initiatives aimed directly at supporting Cosmos Network’s most prolific contributors. Recent initiatives that were publicly announced were that of the Community Contributor Grants program and the Tendermint Inc ATOM Rebonding.

Other ways we are continuing to grow the Cosmos community is by rolling out a series of online events in order to get you access to the same quality of workshops and content you’ve been accustomed to when you hear the name ‘Cosmos’. The first such online event will be launched in May.

As May approaches, this not only means springtime, warmer weather, and hope, but in the cryptoverse, it means New York Blockchain Week. And with NYBW comes the annual CoinDesk Consensus:Distributed conference, the biggest token holder conference of the year that attracts crypto enthusiasts from over the world. Cosmos has been a mainstay at Consensus. In fact, it was in New York, this time two years ago, where one of the most memorable moments and viral memes in the history of the Cosmos-Ethereum friendship was birthed.

🔔 👏 Do the words “Vitalik clapping” ring a bell? 👏 🔔

If you’re bored and staying at home, you can watch the full-length boat party video here 👇

This year, with no boat 😿 and no physical conference, the show must go on. We’re hosting an hour to hour and a half long video conference event at Consensus:Distributed this year in its “Foundations” segment on May 12th, the second day of the online conference.

If you aren’t registered, you can register here, entirely for free, which is a steal compared to past conferences:

https://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-2020

The Cosmos portion of the conference will have a (tentative) agenda broken down below over a 1–1.5 hour long period:

If you haven’t registered, do it here 👇

Website: https://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-2020

Registration Link: https://next.brella.io/events/consensusdistributed

See you there, Cosmonauts!

The relentless pursuit to an Internet of Blockchains can not be contained by a pandemic. If your drive is to expand the Cosmos universe, then the fuel to take you there is your passion and curiosity.

Your Friendly Fellow Cosmonaut

The views and details expressed in this blog post are those of All In Bits Inc (dba Tendermint Inc), and do not necessarily represent the opinions or actions of the Interchain Foundation.

Cosmos Network is Coming to Consensus: Distributed was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article has been authored in collaboration with Jack Zampolin (ex-Tendermint, Director of Product) & Peter Haymond (Tendermint Partnerships)

Decentralized finance has exploded from a niche market to an over $1 billion industry earlier this year with new use-cases and verticals such as stablecoins, crypto-collateralized lending, trustless margin trading, and decentralized exchanges. However, without cross-chain liquidity and a secure oracle solution, the global liquidity of the DeFi is limited to Ethereum. A DeFi protocol is only as secure as its oracle design which we have seen being exploited in multiple cases with bZx, Synthetix, and MakerDAO recently.

Smart contracts inherently cannot access data outside of their own blockchain network without oracles, a middleware service that allows smart contracts to connect to external data and APIs to dictate and control the behavior of the application. Thus, solving the cross-chain and oracle problem will enable exponential growth for this new emerging industry.

On a mission to connect decentralized and distributed applications, Cosmos developed the Inter-Blockchain Protocol (IBC), which proposes a standard for data and token exchanges between blockchains. With IBC, developers and enterprises can unlock high-value data exchanges between native chains and bring interoperability to private or consortium decentralized applications.

⏱ IBC in 200 Words

Cosmos Inter-blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) is a reliable and secure method for any Cosmos-SDK based blockchain to communicate. At a fundamental level, the IBC is responsible for relaying ‘packets’ from one blockchain to another while abstracting away from the complexity of maintaining the connection, data integrity and real-time communication from the application developer.

Recently, Cosmos has released the IBC spec, a relayer implementation and example code for building cross-chain applications.

While the IBC spec is full of technical concepts and jargon, you do not need to understand how the IBC is implemented on the protocol level — the Cosmos IBC implementation already abstracts away most of the complexity. In fact, application developers only need to understand two key components to work with IBC:

1. Packets
   A particular data structure with sequence-related metadata (defined by the IBC specification) and an opaque value field referred to as the packet data (with semantics defined by the application layer, e.g. token amount and denomination)
2. Relayer Process
   A relayer process is an off-chain process responsible for relaying IBC packet data & metadata between two or more machines by scanning their states & submitting transactions.

💹 Building DeFi on Cosmos Ecosystem

This guide aims to provide developers with a step-by-step walkthrough of the most recent development and releases on BandChain & IBC, enabling them to build a cross-chain compatible DeFi application with secure price oracles provided by Band Protocol.

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform built on the Cosmos-SDK that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts. Blockchain smart contract is great for immutable storage and deterministic, verifiable computations — however, they still cannot access data and APIs available outside the blockchain networks. Band Protocol enables smart contract applications to be built on-chain with full flexibility for developers to specify their data type, data sources, and aggregation method without relying on the single point of failure or a centralized oracle.

Here are some examples of DeFi applications that you can build using IBC & Band Protocol:

• Stablecoins
• Lending platforms
• Derivative tokens (mirror price of other assets)
• Margin trading
• Decentralized Exchanges
• Prediction markets

🏅 Example App: Synthetic Gold

To explore how the IBC actually works, let’s dive into building a simplified synthetic gold application — we named it GoldChain — that satisfies to following requirements:

Specs

1. The application supports the creation of a GOLD token, each representing 1 oz of gold.
2. It allows a user to transfer ATOM from Gaia to the GoldChain and put it as a collateral to mint new GOLD token.
3. When minting GOLD, the value of ATOM collateralized must be more than 125% of the GOLD minted.

For simplicity, we will not be implementing the CDP liquidation mechanism in this guide, but instead, focus primarily on demonstrating the IBC capability.

Application Architecture

The ecosystem of GoldChain comprises of 4 different components:

1. GoldChain — a Cosmos SDK based blockchain we are building.
2. Gaia (Cosmos Hub) — a blockchain hosting ATOM token. It provides underlying value for the GOLD tokens being minted on GoldChain.
3. BandChain — a blockchain for decentralized data oracle. It enables GoldChain to consume XAU (traded symbol for gold) and ATOM price feed from external sources.
4. Relayers — third-party software that relay packets between multiple blockchains. They allow multiple blockchains to interoperate in a secure and trustless manner.

Each part plays an important role in working together to create a secure, synthetic gold application, as you will see in the following sections.

UX Flow

From the user’s perspective, here is how the creation of CDP works in GoldChain.

1. A user transfers ATOM via IBC to the GoldChain.
2. The user creates a buy transaction on the GoldChain to put ATOM as collateral.
3. GoldChain requests spot price of ATOM and GOLD from BandChain, and mints the GOLD token for the user.

⛳ Building GoldChain: Step-by-Step Walkthrough

You can find the complete code in the GoldChain repository. This tutorial aims to provide a step-by-step guide on how you can start from a boilerplate repository and code your way up to the full GoldChain.

Step 1: Get the new GoldChain up and running

You can get started by cloning Cosmos Gaia, ibc-alpha branch as a starting point to develop your own blockchain with IBC support.

However, in this tutorial, we are going to use Band Protocol’s fork of Gaia that already has Band Protocol’s oracle module integrated as our boilerplate.

Let’s start by cloning the repository to our machine.

$ git clone https://github.com/bandprotocol/band-consumer

✅ Pro tip: you can also clone the https://github.com/bandprotocol/goldcdp and following this tutorial. This way you can run the full tutorial right away without having to write any Go code yourself.

Make sure you have Go 1.14+ installed and follow the installation guide.

Now, before we can get the blockchain up and running, we need to set a few parameters first. Let’s head into our freshly cloned repository and start it up.

To set up a new validator node, we begin by initializing a new genesis. Note this in this tutorial, we will use the name band-consumer and goldchain interchangeably as both refer to the chain that we are running locally.

$ bcd init validator --chain-id band-consumer

We will need 3 accounts in this tutorial.

1. validator: the primary account that validates blocks.
2. user: the account we will make user request to mint GOLD token.
3. faucet: the account we will use to top up the relayer’s balance.

$ bccli keys add validator --keyring-backend test
$ bccli keys add user --keyring-backend test
$ bccli keys add faucet --keyring-backend test

Now that we have the accounts set up, we’ll be adding balances to these accounts at the genesis.

$ bcd add-genesis-account \
  validator 10000000000000stake --keyring-backend test
$ bcd add-genesis-account \
  user 10000000000000stake --keyring-backend test
$ bcd add-genesis-account \
  faucet 1000000000000000stake --keyring-backend test

We then need to do a quick setup to make our CLI client easier to work with.

$ bccli config chain-id band-consumer
$ bccli config output json
$ bccli config indent true
$ bccli config trust-node true
$ bccli config keyring-backend test

Finally, create a genesis transaction and create the genesis file.

$ bcd gentx --name validator --keyring-backend test
$ bcd collect-gentxs

Here comes the moment of truth. Let run our local node for the first time!

$ bcd start --rpc.laddr=tcp://0.0.0.0:26657 --pruning=nothing

When you see the blocks being produced, congratulations! You have a blockchain up and running — ready to continue to the next stage.

🟢 Keep it running: so blocks continue to be created.

Step 2: Set up a relayer and establish a connection between Gaia and GoldChain

Now let’s get to the fun part. We will be using a Gaia testnet running on gaia-ibc-hackathon.node.bandchain.org to transfer ATOM to the GoldChain we just set up.

This is going to be our first cross-chain transfer from Cosmos Gaia to the GoldChain.

We will start out by setting up a relayer. Let’s grab the relayer code and install it. Note that it’s important to make sure GOBIN and GOPATH are set correctly, or otherwise the installation will fail.

$ git clone https://github.com/bandprotocol/relayer
$ cd relayer
$ make install

✅ Once it’s done: you will have the rly command for Cosmos IBC relayer ready to use in GOBIN.

Next step, we will need to add a few config files, so the relayer knows how to communicate with the testnet Gaia and the GoldChain. The easiest way to get the config files is to download them from GoldChain repository.

Once you create or download the goldchain.json and gaia.json, we can start initializing the relayer and add the two chains from the aforementioned config files.

$ rly config init

$ rly chains add -f goldchain.json #chain-id: band-consumer
$ rly chains add -f gaia.json      #chain-id: band-cosmoshub

Next, we need new accounts for the relayer, which we will be creating one for each chain. These accounts will be used to relay packets (send transactions) to their corresponding blockchains.

$ rly keys add band-consumer relayer-goldchain
$ rly keys add band-cosmoshub relayer-gaia

Now we’ll need to assign the accounts to the relayer.

$ rly ch edit band-consumer key relayer-goldchain
$ rly ch edit band-cosmoshub key relayer-gaia

⚠️ Important: we need to make sure that our relayer accounts have enough balances for sending transactions on both GoldChain and Gaia. Otherwise the relayer will not be able to send relay packets.

On the GoldChain we have already minted stake tokens at the genesis to our faucet account. Let’s go ahead and send it to our relayer-goldchain.

$ bccli tx send faucet $(rly keys show band-consumer) \
10000000000000stake

On the testnet Gaia, we’ll use the relayer testnet faucet feature.

$ rly testnets request band-cosmoshub relayer-gaia

If we check balances on both chains, we should see some balances.

$ rly q bal band-consumer
$ rly q bal band-cosmoshub

Now we’re ready to initialize the lite clients.

$ rly lite init band-consumer -f
$ rly lite init band-cosmoshub -f

Next, we generate an identifier of a new path from GoldChain’s transfer and Gaia’s transfer and name it transfer path.

$ rly pth gen \
band-consumer transfer \
band-cosmoshub transfer \
transfer

We can create then clients, a connection, and a channel between the two chains configured for the transfer path.

$ rly tx link transfer

This will take a few seconds as the relayer register itself on both GoldChain and Gaia. Once it’s done, the last line should be showing a line like this. 👇

⚠️ Important: look out for the channel id, which in this case:
<goldchain_transfer_channel> = pwlpjyneba
<gaia_transfer_channel> = zijixuhhrf

Note this down as we’ll need it in the next step.

Lastly, we can start the relayer on the transfer path.

$ rly st transfer

🟢 Keep it running: otherwise, now IBC packets will be sent across chains.

Step 3: Transfer $ATOM from Gaia into GoldChain

Let’s test if our relayer works by sending some token over from the Gaia to GoldChain. We’ll start by creating a new account named user-gaia and top it up with the faucet.

$ bccli keys add user-gaia

# Faucet request to our new address
$ curl --location --request \
POST 'http://gaia-ibc-hackathon.node.bandchain.org:8000' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/javascript' \
--data-raw '{
 "address": "'"$(bccli keys show -a user-gaia)"'",
 "chain-id": "band-cosmoshub"
}'

# Check balance: you should see 10000000000uatom
$ bccli query bank balances $(bccli keys show -a user-gaia) \
--node http://gaia-ibc-hackathon.node.bandchain.org:26657 \
--chain-id=band-cosmoshub

Now let’s create our first ATOM transfer from the Gaia to GoldChain. We will be sending 5000000000uatom (5,000 ATOM) to the account user with the <gaia_transfer_channel> established previously.

$ bccli tx transfer transfer \
transfer <gaia_transfer_channel> \
10000000 $(bccli keys show -a user) \
5000000000transfer/<goldchain_transfer_channel>/uatom \
--from user-gaia \
--node http://gaia-ibc-hackathon.node.bandchain.org:26657 \
--chain-id band-cosmoshub

Check the balance and you’ll find that we now have ATOM token on the GoldChain.

$ bccli query bank balances $(bccli keys show -a user)

# You should see something like this
# [
#   {
#     "denom": "stake",
#     "amount": "10000000000000"
#   },
#   {
#     "denom": "transfer/<goldchain_transfer_channel>/uatom",
#     "amount": "5000000000"
#   }
# ]

Step 4: Add CDP and wire up Band Protocol oracle

Next, we will be adding support for collateralized debt position (CDP), similarly to how MarkerDAO allows users to collateralized Ether and mint new DAI tokens.

The primary condition that upholds the GOLD token’s value is the value of ATOM locked up for every GOLD token minted. Band Protocol enables the GoldChain to have access to a price feed of both XAU and ATOM against USD.

To make this happen, here’s what we need:

• Setting up the relayer that connects GoldChain with Band Protocol through the IBC.
• Creating a handler for storing default Gaia and BandChain channels. This helps with the UX of the application.
• Creating a handler for buying GOLD, which sends a request to BandChain over the IBC for ATOM and XAU price, and stores the buy transaction in the storage — effectively halting the transaction and waiting for the price to revert back from BandChain.
• Creating another handler for receiving the result back from the BandChain, calculate the GOLD to be minted based on the price, and mint the GOLD for the user.

As it would be too long to put all the code in this post. We have documented how we patch the current code with the changes outlined above to the Github link below 👇

bandprotocol/goldcdp

Assuming that you’ve already added the code that implements CDP with Band Protocol (or you started out with the complete GoldChain code), let’s move forward to get the relayer up and running between the GoldChain and the BandChain so we can finally mint our first synthetic gold token.

This time around we will be going fast on initializing the relayer, as most of the steps will the same as the relayer between GoldChain <> Gaia we just setup.

First and foremost, let’s create a config file bandchain.json for the BandChain relayer.

Then get the relayer up and running for GoldChain <> BandChain.

$ rly chains add -f bandchain.json

$ rly keys add ibc-bandchain relayer-bandchain
$ rly ch edit ibc-bandchain key relayer-bandchain

# Get BAND from faucet
$ curl --location --request POST 'http://bandchain-ibc-hackathon.node.bandchain.org/faucet/request' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
	"address": "'"$(rly keys show ibc-bandchain)"'",
	"amount": 10000000
}'

$ rly lite init ibc-bandchain -f
$ rly pth gen band-consumer goldcdp ibc-bandchain oracle oracle
$ rly tx link oracle

$ rly st oracle

⚠️ Important: note down the channels to use in the next step
🟢 Keep the relayer running: otherwiser the oracle would not work

With the relayer up, now we will be setting the default channel for CDP creation with GOLD and ATOM using BandChain oracle.

$ bccli tx goldcdp \
set-channel bandchain goldcdp <goldchain_oracle_channel> \
--from validator

$ bccli tx goldcdp \
set-channel band-cosmoshub transfer <goldchain_transfer_channel> \
--from validator

Step 5: Mint GOLD token using the transferred ATOMs as collateral

Now we’ve set up all the required ingredients to make the CDP creation works. Let’s try it out! Given the XAU price at around $1,700 the exchange rate at the time of writing is approximately 800 ATOM per XAU. As we require 125% collateral ratio, every 1,000 ATOM collateral would yield 1 GOLD token.

Let’s try to buy GOLD with 2000000000uatom (2,000 ATOM) collateral.

$ bccli tx \
goldcdp buy 2000000000transfer/<goldchain_transfer_channel>/uatom \
--from user

We can now check that the user account now will have approximately 2 GOLD tokens.

$ bccli query bank balances $(bccli keys show -a user)

The GOLD token can be transferred to any DEX on the Cosmos ecosystem that supports IBC token transfer and traded further with guaranteed value.

What’s next?

In this walkthrough, we’ve covered just enough features to demonstrate the power of IBC. For the GoldChain to become production-ready, there are many other tasks left to be done:

• Add selling GOLD and return the collateralized ATOM
• Add liquidation mechanism
• Tighten the security

🎉 Congratulations!

There you have it! In this simple tutorial, we’ve explored how to send and receive tokens via IBC as well as using Band Protocol’s secure decentralized oracles to query the real-time prices of both a crypto-token and a commodity from the real-world market. This example can easily be extended to any other asset class such as stocks, bonds, and commodities to enable trustless global trading of such money instruments.

With this new-found knowledge on how to leverage IBC architecture with Band Protocol’s secure data points, you can now get started building your very first IBC applications!

The best way to do this is by participating in the upcoming Cross-Chain Hackathon alongside Agoric, Cosmos & the Band Protocol team who will be providing workshops, live streams, and technical support for all developers who will have the chance to win over $24K in total prizes!

Spend the Pandemic Inside: Join our Gitcoin Hackathon and win prizes

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions regarding the Cosmos IBC or Band Protocol integration, and we’ll be happy to help. Join the discussion on our Discord channel.

The hackathon will be running from April 20 — May 11, we look forward to all the applications you’ll build.

Happy Hacking!

Guide to Building DeFi using Band Protocol Oracle and Cosmos IBC was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all find ourselves in uncharted territory at the moment. Almost certainly you are, like us, at home for the duration of the current pandemic. As we had already begun planning to be part of a virtual, asynchronous blockchain hackathon even before the virus spread around the planet, the next Gitcoin Hackathon starting on April 20th turned out to be the perfect one. We can’t wait to see how the crypto and JavaScript communities will find some camaraderie, inspiration, and excitement when the contest will get going.

Do you want to participate and win some prizes?

👉 Registrations for the Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon are now open gitcoin.co.🎉 (More information is coming.)

Getting involved is as easy as ABC — that is, Agoric (agoric.com), Band Protocol (bandprotocol.com), and Cosmos (cosmos.network). We are all excited to announce we’ll be participating in the Gitcoin Cross-Chain Hackathon, which will run from Monday, April 20th through Monday, May 11th. For this hackathon, we’d like to see what real-world applications developers can build using the Cosmos SDK, Agoric’s SDK, and Band chain. We’d also love to see what you can do with IBC, the protocol used to connect all these blockchains together (more at cosmos.network/ibc).

⚒️ 🧰 Here Are the Tools

1. Cosmos SDK: The world’s most popular blockchain framework. It’s modular, uses Tendermint BFT consensus, has staking and slashing, is built for IBC, and maximizes security for your application.
2. Agoric’s SDK: A platform that supports the development of smart contracts and market institutions across many different scales, from large public blockchains to small two-party contracts.
3. Band Protocol: A data oracle platform to integrate off-chain information to your dApps using an open API.
4. IBC: The standard for blockchain interoperability. IBC is a reliable, ordered, and authenticated protocol for relaying arbitrary messages between independent distributed ledgers.

🏆🏆🏆 The Prizes

Over $24k in total prizes! (ATOMs & BANDs)

Cosmos — build fast, secure blockchains & connect them over IBC

1. Four challenges, $15k in total ATOMs

Agoric — secure smart contracts

1. Five challenges, $4k in total ATOMs

Band — trusted on-chain data for dApps

1. Five challenges, $4.5k in total $BAND + 3 Ledger Nano X’s as a joint prize

Note — challenges will appear on Gitcoin’s prize explorer, stay tuned!

The number of ATOMs rewarded is based on the closing price of ATOM listed on Coincap on May 18th.

Judging Criteria

The best submissions, as voted on by the judges at the end of the hackathon, will be chosen as the winners!

Judges

Experienced leaders from Cosmos, Agoric, and Band will be judging the participants for this hackathon.

👕 Earn Some Swag

There will be cash prizes (paid in Cosmos Atoms and BANDs) for the top projects, but everyone can win: If your team provides regular, weekly updates on your progress for three consecutive weeks, then each member (up to five per team) will be eligible to receive a Cosmos t-shirt, Agoric t-shirt, and Band t-shirt! These project updates must be provided on GitHub so we can see them in a sequential order. After the hackathon is over, we’ll review what teams provided consistent updates and then reach out to ship the t-shirts to those teams.

👀 What to Expect

If you’ve never participated in a virtual hackathon before, here’s what to expect. The sponsors will provide education, training, and support throughout, and you’ll get fun, possibly some money, and definitely new friends and connections. A virtual hackathon doesn’t necessarily have the 24-hour intensity of an in-person hackathon (though feel free to schedule some all-nighters, if you’d like), but over the extended period you can allot time, making progress on your projects with your team.

Join the Cosmos Community Discord

The conversation about this virtual hackathon will happen in the Cosmos Community Discord. Join using this link and then go to “General” -> “Virtual Hackathon” to get started. See you there!

📚 Resources

Cosmos

1. https://cosmos.network/
2. Cosmos SDK Docs
3. IBC Github

Agoric

1. https://agoric.com/
2. ERTP Guide
3. Zoe Guide

Band Protocol

1. https://bandprotocol.com/
2. Developer Doc (How to use Band oracle)
3. BandChain Github

This blog post will be updated later to include a live streaming session date and other changes. Thank you to Marc, Tatyana, the Gitcoin team and many others who helped make this possible.

The views and details expressed in this blog post are those of All In Bits Inc (dba Tendermint Inc), and do not necessarily represent the opinions or actions of the Interchain Foundation.

Spend the Pandemic Inside: Join our Gitcoin Hackathon and win prizes was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A year ago today was the world’s first decentralized launch of a proof-of-stake network, the Cosmos Hub. The memorable “go-live date” started on March 13th, 2019 at 23:00 UTC with validators and community members participating from all over the world. The Cosmos Hub mainnet launch was two years in the making and the first phase of a three-phase rollout of the Cosmos Network, aka the “Internet of Blockchains”.

The next two phases of the Cosmos Network were (2) enabling ATOM transfers — completed in April 2019 — and (3) a production-ready Inter-blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. IBC is the remaining element that we’re still working on. The IBC spec was determined in June 2019 by members of Agoric, All in Bits (dba Tendermint), and the Interchain Foundation teams. A demo and public IBC testnet will be coming soon — stay tuned.

The Cosmos Hub has had an incredibly busy year that includes:

• Three successful mainnet launches, culminating in Cosmos Hub-3
• Multiple millions of blocks validated over three mainnets
• A decentralized community of 125 mainnet validators
• An average of ~7s per validated block
• 15 on-chain governance proposals created and voted on
• 300,000+ ATOMs added a community pool

A grateful thank you to every Cosmonaut who played a part in building, promoting and launching the Cosmos Hub. The community’s dedication and continued support over the past year is unique to the Cosmos project. Let’s spread some cheer by remembering all the hard work and excitement leading up to launch and the celebrations we shared in the weeks following it.

Wishing Cosmos and everyone a happy anniversary, tweet your favorite memory of Cosmos and make a wish — #Cosmosturns1

Here’s a short walk down memory lane with some of the team’s memorable moments from mainnet launch.

In the weeks and days leading up to the Cosmos mainnet launch, the community was preparing and building momentum.

 — @7alisman

Remember all the testnets? The numerous Gaia testnets helped prepare the community for mainnet launch.

 — @iqlusioninc

 — @zmanian

Finally, the moment of launch was near. The team wanted to share the moment and celebrate with the community.

 — @MennoPP

Our live event was hosted by Chjango Armstrong and Jack the Gentlemen with many validators joining in the celebration. The ‘excitement was palpable’ when Cosmos Hub validators were validating blocks just five minutes after genesis.

In the words of Sunny Aggarwal “we have a public blockchain, this is insane.”

 — @BKBrianKelly

Many Cosmonauts will remember the suspenseful “Block 17.” Minutes after going live, the Cosmos Hub was stuck on block 17 when a validator went offline, halting the network because less than 66.67% of staked ATOM were left online. The uncertainty was over when, moments later, the community rallied to bring online some more voting power. However, “Block 17” lived on as the winning costume at the Berlin Cosmos Launch Party.

 — @awasunyin

Finally, there was a full crew on the call and even family members were joining in on the celebration. The live event concluded with a discussion on what people hoped to see happen in the Cosmos ecosystem.

O n March 14th, the Twittersphere was abuzz with excitement about the Cosmos launch.

 — @turingtestrun

 — @cz_binance

 — @jaesustein

 — @coindesk

 — @Asmodat

 — @adriana_kalpa

Then it was time for the global Cosmos community to party! We even had a throw your own party kit (TYOPK) to join in on the Cosmos launch experience.

 — @cosmos

 — @Ockam_io

 — @Sentinel_co

Jin Kwon was sent on a world tour across many time zones to celebrate at all the Cosmos launch parties happening around the globe.

 — @jinghiskwon

Thanks for all the memories and for sharing this journey with us! We could not have done it without you! Let’s make the Cosmos ecosystem even better in 2020!

“There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are each of us, a little universe.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

To the Cosmos and beyond!

Links from the launch:

• Epicenter Podcast “Cosmos Launch with Ethan Buchman and Sunny Aggarwal”
• Livestream from Cosmos mission control
• TechCrunch — Cosmos has launched
• Coindesk — Cosmos is officially live
• Unchained Podcast with Ethan Buchman and Jae Kwon on the Cosmos launch

Happy 1st Birthday, Cosmos Hub! was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.