The DOG (Dynamic Optimal Graph) protocol is a powerful upgrade now available for CometBFT-based applications. DOG reduces mempool bandwidth consumption significantly, with experiments showing a 2.5x reduction in traffic generated. This can lead to more stable block production, up to ~2.7 times less missed blocks, and up to 15% lower transactions confirmation latency.

If you are building high performance applications on CometBFT, reach out to the Informal team and we would be thrilled to support you!

Informal Systems audited Neutron’s liquidity pool migration which dealt with ~23 million USD in users’ liquidity, exchanging Astroport’s XYK liquidity pools for the PCL pools. Migration edge cases were thoroughly inspected to ensure the highest degree of confidence in the protocol.

We performed model-based testing using Quint, our in-house specification language—this enabled us to automatically create tests that explored many different scenarios for the migration protocol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Hermes team has just released Hermes v1.6!

Compared to the previous v1.5 release, this one is certainly smaller. The main feature included in this release is the addition of a “pull” mode alternative to the pre-existing “push” mode for fetching chain events. This feature allows Hermes to natively support WASM relaying, something that it has been unable to do until now. We’ll go into more detail on what these two modes mean, how they differ, and what their use-cases are.

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

Check out the latest news from CometBFT! Discover the new cometbft release candidate, insights from our QA process, Q3 priorities, bug fixes, community updates, upcoming events, and more. Stay connected with the CometBFT community and be part of the exciting developments in the world of Cosmos!

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.

The newest major version of the Hermes relayer has been released! 🎉

Improving Hermes’ relaying performance was one of the main goals of this release. To that end, the Hermes team did a spectacular job triaging, profiling, ideating, implementing, and testing a number of different ways of improving Hermes’ performance.

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!

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

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.

This write-up aims to investigate the Hyperspace relayer architecture, give a snapshot of where it stands now, and discuss how it relates to the Hermes relayer. In light of that, we first present an overview of Hyperspace’s architecture. We’ll then discuss the commonalities and differences that exist between Hyperspace and Hermes. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some of our takeaways regarding Rust-based relayer design, along with some ideas on how we might move beyond the current state-of-the-art towards supporting non-Cosmos chains.

Informal Systems launched v1 of the Hermes relayer this summer. This blog post covers the high-level architecture of the v1 relayer for those who are interested in delving under the hood of Hermes.

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.

Informal is a new kind of company: we are built on co-operative principles and we are determined to simplify and democratize tooling for organizational management. To this end we built themis-contract, a tool for drafting, modifying, signing, and compiling legal contracts in plaintext, using a mix of markdown templates and configuration files. While we've recently deprioritized feature development in order to intensify the focus on our other projects, we have been using the tool internally for our legal documents. This post details some of the highlights of our current process and explains a bit of the motivation behind our efforts in this direction.

Large parts of the work of Informal Systems in the Cosmos ecosystem is on protocol design, specification, and correctness. For reliable distributed systems, not all the truth lies in the code. Capturing the distributed aspects of the protocols requires a rigorous understanding of the interactions between the code run on the different machines in a system, in particular if machines may act in an adversarial way. We capture these interactions in English specifications, and formalize them in TLA+. We put much effort in this work, as particular protocol bugs are hard to find on the code level. At the same time these bugs can be expensive in the context of adversarial environments with economic incentives.

One of the critical issues when developing blockchain infrastructure is how to perform testing of complicated scenarios, involving multiple distributed nodes, possibly connected to several heterogeneous blockchains. While traditional tests are good and necessary at the level of unit testing, it becomes prohibitively expensive for developers to create (and maintain!) multi-node, multi-blockchain tests.

TLA+ is a tried and tested and widely adopted language for specifying systems. However, formal verification research has made huge leaps forward since the tooling for TLA+ was devised in the late 90s. Our research team has been actively working to fill this gap between state-of-the-art formal verification and the tooling for TLA+. We have been developing Apalache, a symbolic model checker for TLA+. Apalache leverages the power of SMT solvers to reason about states and transitions in terms of a logic of constraints, rather than in terms of individual states and transitions.

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.