The Cosmos blockchain solution has launched the Inter-Blockchain Communication update which allows one account to communicate across various blockchains. Interchain accounts will allow a blockchain ecosystem to perform any action native in another ecosystem.
Cosmos has announced its latest updates that expand the possibilities of what we can do in the decentralized world. Until now, traditional blockchains have worked in silos and have had difficulty communicating with each other. The open-source Cosmos community is planning for a future of cooperation and interoperability.
They announced that Interchain Accounts have landed. Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) will now be able to do a lot more than just connect and transfer tokens for low gas fees. Entire blockchains can now control accounts on separate chains and carry out any action native to that system.
In practice, this means that users will be able to execute transactions on one chain while their wallet is connected to a different one. So, if you want to stake, swap, vote using your tokens, you will not have to transfer them from one blockchain to another. You can do all of it from a Cosmos Hub account.
This move comes as Cosmos tries to keep up with the rapidly-expanding DeFi environment, in particular the Ethereum blockchain that has grown so quickly. At the moment, ‘applications have to relinquish their sovereignty and are subject to the constraints and governance of the layer-1 they are built on’. Instead of everyone building on one chain – which eventually comes perilously close to centralization – every application will, in theory, be able to build on their own blockchain which can then be plugged into the interconnected ecosystem.
What is Cosmos?
Cosmos is a blockchain ecosystem that bridges between different ecosystems, allowing users to move value and information smoothly between different blockchains. Developers Jaw Kwon and Ethan Buchman co-founded the Cosmos network in 2014. Their aim was to solve what they saw as the three primary problem in blockchain DeFi:
- Sovereignty – Traditional blockchains encourage all financial activity to take place on a single chain. This negates the decentralization mindset that was the whole purpose of setting up blockchain technology. Cosmos intends to empower developers and creators to make their own rules by controlling their own blockchains.
- Scalability – The original blockchain technology did not plan for the number of transactions that we currently see every day. Cosmos aims to improve blockchain speeds introducing horizontal scalability.
- Sustainability – The efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm that Cosmos uses reduces the carbon footprint of blockchains, in some cases by 99%.
Cosmos is an open-source community project. The team developing it has grown from one – Tendermint – to many.
For a deeper dive into the ideas behind Cosmos and what the team is trying to achieve, click here.
