Last year, we published a comprehensive overview of Informal’s work and funding over the first three years of our life as a Cosmos public goods R&D organization primarily funded by the ICF.
In 2023, we continued to ship critical developments in Cosmos, like Interchain Security and ABCI++, both of which have unlocked powerful new capabilities for the ecosystem. See our 2023 recap for the Cosmos Hub, for CometBFT, and more on our blog.
But 2023 also marked a significant transition year for us in growing our business and reducing ICF funding. In particular, we:
Raised our first round, $5.3M from a wonderful group of investors
Audited top projects like Celestia, dYdX, Neutron, Anoma, Polymer, Skip and more
Co-led (with Hypha) a groundbreaking $5.7M governance proposal for the Cosmos Hub
Worked with leading rollup projects to bring Cosmos tech into the modular era (more details coming soon!)
Grew our amazing delegator community and our relaying services
Launched Insights, an IBC monitor
Began product development on Cycles, the future of payments and credit
While we remain a core contributor to Cosmos R&D, we're evolving as a business in exciting directions.
Informal spun out from the ICF in 2020 with a convertible note and two years of funding for R&D on Formal Methods and Cosmos in Rust (see more on our origins). With this bootstrap, Informal intended to build a sustainable business advancing Cosmos in Rust and Formal Methods. However, due to organizational challenges at the ICF and across Cosmos, we put a lot on hold in 2021 and 2022 to better support the ICF with core Cosmos development. This primarily took the form of building new Go development teams at Informal for both the Cosmos Hub and Tendermint (now forked as CometBFT). Ultimately, this culminated in Informal taking over stewardship for both products from the ICF’s internal development teams.
In 2023, there were significant simplifications and improvements in the formalization of stewardship over core Cosmos components. Essentially, the ICF team was reduced to stewardship of IBC, the Binary Builders team spun out of the ICF to become steward for the Cosmos-SDK, and Informal became the steward for Comet and the Cosmos Hub. Informal also took steps to reduce its formal methods work for the ICF going into 2023 (with funding for this work ending altogether in Q2 2023).
Overall, Informal’s ICF revenue in 2023 was reduced by over 15% from 2022, and in 2024, Informal reduced its ICF funding by another 60% down to a maximum of $5.5M, which covers stewardship of Comet, Hermes, and ibc-rs. The Hub team at Informal is now funded directly by prop839.
While Informal has significantly reduced funding from the ICF, we are working closely with other partners in and around the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems, continuing to advance the interchain.
Throughout the years, Informal has grown and diversified its activities, advancing the state of the art in diverse disciplines, from the infrastructure of the interchain to distributed systems, formal methods, and monetary theory. At our core, we remain a multidimensional company, unified by a common goal—fostering trust in software and money.
Going into 2024, we think of Informal as composed of 5 ventures, falling into three categories of businesses:
Interchain: Core development services across the interchain and lead developer for CometBFT, Hermes, and ibc-rs
Cosmos Hub: Core contributor to the Cosmos Hub blockchain, per prop839
Informal Security: Security services for Cosmos and beyond: audits, specification, and testing
Informal Staking: Secure and reliable interchain operations: PoS validator, IBC relayer, network operator
Cycles: Graph-based payments and credit platform. The future of DeFi
Of these, only the Interchain team is still funded (but not entirely) by the ICF, while the Hub team is funded by the community pool via prop839, and the others are funded by our customers and our investors.
This revenue diversification doesn’t mean we’re reducing our commitment and focus in Cosmos, but rather, we are actively looking for ways to make Cosmos funding more sustainable and to develop and build high-leverage businesses that serve Cosmos and beyond. If you’re interested in working with us through any of our ventures or exploring new ways we could work together, please get in touch by email (hello@informal.systems) or on Twitter (@informalinc)!
2024 is a year of focus and acceleration for Informal. Our Interchain team is focused on bringing Comet and IBC everywhere, with the best performance and capabilities on the market. Our Cosmos Hub team is focused on scaling the Hub’s Interchain Security offering, making it the best place to launch a chain and to access interchain security and interchain capital. Informal Security continues to serve our partners and clients while bringing Quint, our powerful specification language, to market with automated testing and bug finding. Informal Staking is scaling our network offerings and monitoring products across the interchain, and launching our Ethereum staking service. And last but not least, Cycles is gearing up to transform the landscape of payments and credits and provide new ways to connect crypto to the real world for the benefit of all.
Here’s to a great 2024! Stay in touch by subscribing to our blog, following us on Twitter @informalinc, and following the projects @cyclesmoney, @cometbft, and @cosmoshub.
If you’d like to work with us, reach out at hello@informal.systems or specifically:
Looking for a security audit? audits@informal.systems
Discuss options to work with our staking team? validator@informal.systems
Interested in joining our team? See our open positions
Cheers 🥂