We’re thrilled to support Skip as they step into a unified leadership role for the Cosmos Hub and align the interchain ecosystem portfolio of products to support and benefit the Hub. This is an important and exciting milestone in the Hub’s evolution and a pivotal moment for the broader interchain ecosystem.

Over the past three years, Informal has played a key role in supporting the Cosmos Hub. When we began, the Hub faced significant technical debt, lacked a clear product vision, and was far from its potential. Today, it stands as the reference chain of the Interchain stack, with a strong engineering culture and pioneering products like Forge and Hydro.

Discover the latest Cosmos Hub updates: Gaia v19.2 emergency upgrade, Gaia v20 testnet completion, and Permissionless ICS progress. Key milestones driving blockchain innovation.

Gaia v20 makes it easier for new Consumer Chains and validators to join the Cosmos Hub. This release brings three powerful new features that lower the barriers for chains and validators.

Stay updated with Cosmos Hub’s August 2024 highlights: v19 upgrade, Permissionless ICS implementation, Gaia v20 testnet, Forge progress, and Hydro platform developments.

The Cosmos Hub has successfully upgraded to Gaia v19, making Hub the reference chain for the Interchain Stack's latest and greatest innovations. It enhances the efficiency, security, and functionality of the Cosmos Hub, making it better equipped to handle the demands of the rapidly growing interchain ecosystem.

Stay updated with the latest developments on the Cosmos Hub for July 2024. Highlights include major upgrades, new features, and significant progress towards the Hydro launch. Read more!

What is better than one ecosystem of ambitious teams, talented individuals, and bleeding-edge technology? Two such ecosystems. In this post, we provide the story of collaboration across the Starknet and interchain ecosystems that has been flourishing for a few months, covering work on a decentralized sequencer (Tendermint in Rust) and IBC.

We describe the current spam mitigation controls existing in CometBFT, and future plans on this front. We also recommend that application developers and node operators use these mitigations for making their networks more resilient to spam and traffic surges. Beside mitigations, we also encourage developers to transition to CometBFT v0.38 and to v1. The CometBFT team is available to actively contribute and support all users on both of these matters.

Catch up on Cosmos Hub's June 2024 updates. Key highlights include the Gaia v17 upgrade, ICS 2.0 integration, and progress on Hydro, enhancing security and liquidity in the ecosystem.

It’s time for the usual update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team. Here are some of the highlights:

• Coordinated the Cosmos Hub v16 upgrade.

• Completed the integration, testnet, and governance phases for Gaia v17.

• Started the integration phase for Gaia v18

• Started the signaling phase for ICS with Inactive Hub Validators.

• Completed the implementation phase for ATOM Wars / Hydro.

• Working on the implementation phase of Security Aggregation.

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.

It's time for the usual update from the Informal Systems' Cosmos Hub team. Here are some of the highlights:

• Had our quarterly meeting with the oversight committee.

• Coordinated the Cosmos Hub upgrade to Gaia v15.2.0.

• Completed the testnet phase and started the governance phase for Gaia v16.

• Started the integration phase for CosmWasm.

• Completed the implementation phase of ICS 2.0.

• Completed the signaling phase of ATOM Wars.

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.

This post provides a curated list of use-cases that ABCI v2 (codename ABCI++) unlocks for application builders.

It’s time for the usual update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team. Here are some of the highlights:

• Coordinated the Cosmos Hub emergency upgrade to Gaia v14.2.0.

• Coordinated the Cosmos Hub v15 upgrade.

• Continue working on the integration phase for Gaia v16.

• Completed the work on adding Model-Based Testing to ICS.

• Completed the implementation of ICS Epochs.

• Completed the first draft of the ICS 2.0 implementation.

• Completed the spike phase of Megablocks.

Note that we use CHIPs to track the progress of our work. Hence, throughout this update, we make several references to different phases of the CHIPs framework.

It’s time for the usual update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team. Here are some of the highlights:

• We completed the testnet phase of Gaia v15.

• We started the preparatory work for Gaia v16.

• We started upgrading the LSM to SDK v0.50 (a prerequisite for upgrading Gaia to SDK v0.50).

• We started the implementation phase for both ICS Epochs and Partial Set Security.

• We collected, reviewed and implemented community & customers feedback on AtomWars.

• We started the discussion on the Babylon integration with the Cosmos Hub.

Last year we published a comprehensive overview of Informal’s work and funding over the first 3 years of its life as a Cosmos public goods R&D organization primarily funded by the ICF. 2023 marked a major transition year for Informal and we’d like to give you an update! 

In this article we discuss the responsiveness property of consensus algorithms. We first explain what this property is and why it is important. Then, we explain why Tendermint is (optimistically) responsive.

ABCI v2 (colloquially known as ABCI++) is the flagship feature of CometBFT. This was released as part of v0.38 in September 2023. In this post we describe the power of ABCI v2 and compare it with its predecessor.

CometBFT is set to introduce a significant upgrade in the upcoming v1 release that promises to enhance the performance of blockchain operations through Proposer-Based Timestamps (PBTS).

It's time for the usual update from the Informal Systems' Cosmos Hub team. Here are some of the highlights:

• We had our kickoff meeting with the oversight committee.

• We are almost done with the integration phase of Gaia v15.

• We released ICS v4.0.0.

• We created an ADR for Partial Set Security.

• We started the discussion on ATOM Wars.

Note that we use CHIPs to track the progress of our work. Hence, throughout this update, we make several references to different phases of the CHIPs framework.

Welcome to the January 2024 update from the CometBFT team at Informal Systems. We'll share our team's latest developments and progress in this update.

During January 2024, our team continued to focus on completing tasks required for the upcoming CometBFT v1 release.

We also continued our efforts to optimize storage and worked on issues to reduce technical debt and fix some bugs.

For almost a year, Replicated Security has been successfully replicating the multi-billion dollar economic security of Cosmos Hub to the Neutron and Stride chains. A potential hindrance, known as unbonding pausing, of Replicated Security is that, in exceptional cases, the unbonding of tokens on Cosmos Hub could be delayed by more than the expected unbonding period of 21 days. Those potential unbonding delays concern delegators because they might not be able to retrieve their tokens on time.

Interchain security is a cornerstone protocol of the Cosmos Hub. We want to iterate on this protocol, to add features and make it more useful, cheaper, and fit changing requirements. However, it is critical that we do not compromise quality or robustness when we iterate, as the protocol is already in active use. 

In the Hub team at Informal Systems, we are utilizing Model-Based Testing (MBT for short) to ensure this development is safe. MBT has  successfully been used by other teams at Informal Systems before, for example in the context of Tendermint and IBC, as part of audits, and in the Atomkraft tool. Of course, the ideas themselves are even older.

Welcome to the December update from the CometBFT team at Informal Systems. In this update, we'll be sharing our team's latest developments and progress.

Welcome to the December update from the IBC unit in Informal Systems. The IBC unit comprises the Hermes IBC relayer team and the IBC-rs team. This update will cover the latest engineering developments.

2023 has been a big year for the Informal Systems' Hub team and the Cosmos Hub. As we reflect on the communities' achievements, it's evident that our collective efforts have significantly advanced the Cosmos ecosystem. Here's a look at the key milestones and developments that marked this year.

It’s time for the usual update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team. As the  last update was for September, we decided to do a Q4 update including the months of October, November and December. Here are some of the highlights: We released the cryptographic equivocation verification function, which is currently running on the Cosmos Hub since the v14 upgrade. We are close to wrapping up the Gaia upgrade to SDK v0.47, which is targeted for the v15 upgrade planned for January. We upgraded ICS to SDK v0.50. We enabled a first iteration of Model Based Testing (MBT) on Replicated Security. We finalized the design of Partial Set Security, which we plan to implement starting from next quarter. 

The year 2023 has been an unforgettable year for the CometBFT team, and as the year ends, we would like to reflect on the most important events that took place during this year. 

The IBC team at Informal Systems comprises two sub-teams who work closely together: the Hermes team and the ibc-rs team. The Hermes team primarily supports relayer operators and those who work “off-chain”. The ibc-rs team, in contrast, primarily supports maintainers of “on-chain” applications who work to integrate IBC into their codebases, enabling those applications to communicate, transfer assets, and interface with other IBC-enabled chains.

While we’ve published a few posts on the goings-on of the Hermes relayer, the ibc-rs project has received much less time in the spotlight. However, with the release of ibc-rs v1 on the horizon (targeting the first half of 2024), it’s about time we remedy that.

We are thrilled to announce that we have just released the highly anticipated first v1 Alpha version (v1.0.0-alpha.1) of CometBFT. This release marks a milestone in the history of CometBFT and the Interchain Stack, and we are excited to share the details of the new features and changes included in this release.

Welcome to the October update from the CometBFT team at Informal Systems. In this update, we'll be sharing the latest developments and progress made by our team. 

During October, our team focused on completing tasks required for the upcoming CometBFT v1 Alpha release. 

We also continued our efforts to optimize bandwidth and prepared experimental releases. 

Additionally, we added new features that allow application developers to improve the application performance by increasing parallelism.

FAQ on the Informal and Hypha Cosmos Hub Funding Proposal 839

CometBFT is a state machine replication engine for the Interchain Stack. In February 2023, it was forked from Tendermint. You can read the initial announcement here. CometBFT is currently being stewarded by Informal Systems with support from many contributors across the interchain stack, including the Cosmos SDK and IBC teams.

V12 upgrade, V13 release cut, Gaia SDK 47 upgrade, and more!

It turns out that while a real consensus engine is great for running real blockchains, it’s not great for running local testnets - in these testnets, we control all the validators, so we don’t really need byzantine fault-tolerance.

Enter: CometMock

It’s time for the August update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team. This month, the community upgraded to Gaia v11 which removed the legacy Liquidity module. This set the stage for the Liquid Staking Module addition in Gaia v12, which we cut and put up for voting. We also made substantial progress on cryptographic slashing verification, a long awaited feature that is queued up for release in v13.

ibc-rs is a Rust library that implements the Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. Ibc-rs was designed from the ground up to be independent from the underlying consensus. Want to use CometBFT? Sure! Near? Of course! Solana? You got it. This is achievable because through our ValidationContext and ExecutionContext traits, we abstract away how transactions look like, the store, and basically every other detail that is not native to IBC.

Many new protocols that use the same basic techniques pioneered by Interchain Security are emerging. Some of these are Mesh Security, Eigenlayer, and Polygon 2.0. In all of these protocols, stake from one blockchain system can be used to secure another. Right now, they are different protocols, but over the long term, interoperability requires nothing more than a little bit of shim code.

On July 19th, the Hermes team noticed some chatter on Twitter mentioning Hermes being outpaced by Rly when relaying on Stride from several relayers such as IcyCRO, LavenderFive and GoldenStaking.

This intrigued us, because in the v1.5 release of Hermes, we made some major performance improvements that greatly improved relaying on virtually all channels. So we decided to take a closer look. Turns out things weren’t quite what they seemed.

There has recently been a lot of discussion about Cosmos Hub proposal #818. This was the first use of the equivocation slashing proposal type, which is intended to slash validators who double sign on consumer chains.

Unfortunately, a lot went wrong with proposal #818, and while no funds were ever at risk, it wasted a lot of time and energy. In this post we will go over what happened, what we should have done differently, and why this won’t happen again.

It’s time for the July update from the Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team! This month, the team helped ship the v11 release - upgrading Replicated Security and removing the legacy Liquidity module, to prepare for the upcoming Liquid Staking Module. We also supported Stride in launching as the Cosmos Hub’s second Consumer Chain - making history for being the first standalone appchain that migrated over to Interchain Security.

In June we finalized a lot of work that has been ongoing and cut several releases.

This update will be a little shorter than usual because a lot of May was covered in our last update.

This update covers the last half of May, and things that were in progress but not finished when the update went out.

This is our living roadmap for ongoing work that Informal is doing on the Cosmos Hub. We’ll update this as we complete items, add new items, and remove items that may no longer be necessary. This is intended to give a general overview of our ongoing work and priorities.

What’s included:

• Work that is in the deployment, implementation, or later design phases

• Work that is being done by the Informal Systems Cosmos Hub team

What’s not included:

• Work that has already been completed

• Ideas that are in the early design phase

• Work on the Cosmos Hub being done by teams outside of Informal

It’s time for an engineering update from Informal Systems’ Cosmos Hub team! 

Utilizing Replicated Security for the first time, Neutron officially launched as a consumer chain on May 11th. This update covers the engineering update for the period Apr-May’23 - which included the Neutron launch!

Wednesday, May 10th marked the launch of , the first replicated security consumer chain that is secured by the Cosmos Hub’s entire set of validators. This milestone is the culmination of approximately two years of work on the Interchain Security protocol by many teams collaborating toward the shared goal of making the Cosmos Hub more sustainable.

The QA process for CometBFT's v0.34 release plays a crucial role in ensuring the integrity of the Blockchain network. The testing strategy includes unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing to ensure the system functions correctly, and that no performance regressions occur. Various QA tools such as Golints, Dependbot, and GitHub actions are used to ensure code quality, detect vulnerabilities, and monitor system performance.

QA is essential for each CometBFT to release to maintain correctness, compatibility, and bug fixing while improving performance, stability, and fault tolerance. The migration to CometBFT posed some challenges, including compatibility testing and comparing CometBFT with Tendermint v0.34. However, the team overcame them and released a stable version of CometBFT.

The QA process identified several vital learnings, including testing close to real-world problems, comprehensive testing, involving customers in the testing process, testing with different block sizes, learning from customer tests, and simulating the app in Comet. The future of CometBFT's QA process will involve a more significant emphasis on comprehensive testing, automation tools, pre-release quality, and graphical representations of test results to ensure high-quality software delivery.

The continuous evolution of the testing processes will ensure that CometBFT delivers high-quality software as the platform grows and evolves.

Informal was born with a dual mandate to focus on formal methods and expanding Cosmos to Rust. Over time it has expanded its scope to better support Cosmos development and the growth of the interchain. In this post, we highlight the different areas of Informal's work, add context for each, and outline our plans for 2023. We also present the funding we've received from the ICF for our work over the years.

Key takeaways:

• In Q2, team Comet will focus on five streams of work. Each stream aims to nibble away at a major problem from our backlog.

• The five problems we’re prioritizing in Q2 have a broader scope than this quarter. Therefore we expect to continue focusing on these issues throughout the rest of the year.

• The five problems are, in order of priority:

  • CometBFT provides poor protocol design support to application developers

  • There is currently no alternative to network-based state sync

  • The JSON/RPC that CometBFT nodes expose is flaky

  • Storage and bandwidth consumption are expensive for operators running CometBFT nodes

• V9 Upgrade went live!

• Neutron’s proposal and soft opt out

• Documentation

• Liquid Staking Module

• Initial design of Opt-In Security

• Sovereign to Consumer chain transition

• Equivocation Verification

• Downtime verification

The origin of Informal Systems lies in a vision for a new kind of company. A better kind of company. A company owned by its employees. A company focused resolutely on improving the promises made to us by our software systems and our organizations. A company less likely to move fast and break things; a company that might move slow and fix things. This is the story of Informal's origins, as it spun out from the ICF on a mission to expand Cosmos and transform computing.

Recently, spammers have been targeting the governance system of the Cosmos Hub, as well as other Cosmos chains. They create governance proposals containing malicious links in the hopes that someone will click on them.

It’s time for the February update from the Informal Cosmos Hub team! Last month we were busy with the v8 and v9 upgrades, as well as longer term product planning, and dealing with some small issues.

In this post, we go through the work done by Informal to formally model the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system of Namada, a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy built on top of ABCI. We describe how we approached the process of modeling Namada’s PoS system in TLA+, and what invariants we decided to check and why. We also present a short tutorial on how to check Namada’s adherence to these invariants using Apalache, our model-checker.

Hi, I’m Jehan Tremback, and I’m the product manager for the Informal Systems Cosmos Hub team. The Informal Hub team has decided to start doing monthly updates for the Cosmos Hub community. This month we have been focused on:

• Getting the V8 and V9 releases of the Cosmos Hub out

• Addressing community feedback on replicated security

• Setting our team’s roadmap for 2023

We recently made a change to replicated security: if a validator commits an equivocation fault (colloquially known as “double signing”) on a consumer chain, they are no longer automatically slashed on the Cosmos Hub.

Today we announce the launch of CometBFT, a state machine replication engine for the interchain and beyond! CometBFT is a fork of, and a successor to, Tendermint Core, and will serve as the official replication engine powering the Interchain Stack. The long-term vision for CometBFT is to be the primary choice of replication engine for reliable, secure, large-scale, application-specific blockchains. Commit your blocks with CometBFT today!

Informal Systems has been building out Interchain Security v1, which we'll refer to here as "replicated security". There are also several other forms of Interchain Security- opt-in security, and layered (or "mesh") security. In this post we will explore the differences between these forms of Interchain Security. We'll look at the logical differences, and we've also built a mathematical model to explore the economic security of different approaches.

Informal Systems has begun work to build the Interchain Scheduler, in collaboration with a wide group of partners, including Sam Hart, Iqlusion, Skip, Mekatek, Fairblocks, Strangelove, and others. A preliminary specification will be done in January 2023 and shared with the Cosmos community. This post will give readers a look at the design challenges we are tackling and how we are approaching them.

Informal Systems is excited to announce the v0.1 pre-release of Interchain Security! Interchain Security is a feature which will allow the Cosmos Hub to share security with other blockchains. On a technical level, this means that the Cosmos Hub validator set will gain the ability to validate other blockchains alongside the Cosmos Hub. These blockchains are called “consumer chains”, and will be secured by the Cosmos Hub’s billions of dollars of staked ATOMs.

At the heart of Cosmos is the idea that sovereignty and interoperability are the keys to a sustainable civilization. Communities across the globe, of varying scales, should be sovereign over the infrastructure and applications that dominate their lives.

Cosmos has emerged as the leading platform to build blockchains devoted to a single application. Cosmos chains provide more scalability, configurability, and sovereignty than deploying a contract on a smart contract platform such as Ethereum.

Interchain security v1 is the first version of Interchain Security, which allows Cosmos blockchains to lease security to each other. Code for v1 is expected to be completed by the end of Q1 2022, and the feature should launch on the Cosmos Hub with a governance proposal in Q2 2022.

It's been almost half a year since our last technical update. We've been hard at work on IBC protocol security and Rust implementation stability for Cosmos, among other things. Notably, we now have a complete TLA+ specification of the IBC protocol (!), a Stargate-compatible IBC Relayer in Rust, and have completed an extensive audit of the IBC english specification and implementation in Go. Stargate and IBC launch look to be just around the corner.

Since our last technical update, Informal Systems has continued to play a major role in the Cosmos project, focusing primarily on protocol formalizations, TLA+ specifications, and implementations in Rust. In addition, we're developing general purpose tools for formal verification, and using them on the Cosmos protocols and software.

Since spinning out from the ICF at the start of the year, we've been hard at work on a number of projects aligned with our mission of verifiable distributed systems and organizations. Here we'll provide an update on each of them.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has sent markets in flux and pushed our global economies into distress. Governments are looking for solutions to stop the spread, businesses are doing whatever they can to keep employees safe while retaining profits margins, and central banks are working to stabilize markets by injecting new money into circulation. The world is collectively facing many challenges with the need to focus on our health, our families and our communities.