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.
To achieve its full potential, the Cosmos Hub needs to take the next step in order to continue building on this foundation that integrates technical development with product strategy, marketing, and community engagement. Skip’s stewardship promises to deliver the unified vision and execution the Hub requires to thrive.
What’s next for Informal Systems?
Following the announcement, the development of the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos stack will be consolidated at the ICF and led by Skip. As part of these changes, funding from the ICF for Informal will come to an end. For more on Informal’s history of funding from the ICF, see our previous post.
Late last year, Infomal sought funding directly from the Cosmos Hub for stewardship and R&D. That funding concludes at the end of this year. Informal will provide transitional support as the ICF and Skip teams pick up stewardship of the Cosmos Hub, reuniting it with the Cosmos stack and a unified vision for the Cosmos ecosystem.
While Informal’s direct role is shifting, our dedication to empowering the broader ecosystem through open-source infrastructure, engineering excellence, and collaboration remains stronger than ever. Informal will continue to contribute to, develop, and maintain critical open-source projects while deepening collaborations with teams across the Cosmos, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana ecosystems through our security, engineering, and validator offerings. While we have much more to share, here’s a short overview of what’s next for some of our projects:
Comet: Informal has stewarded Comet since launch on behalf of the ICF. Our stewardship mandate comes to an end this year as Skip steps into the stewardship role. Informal will continue basic maintenance and security response coverage as we assist Skip’s transition and onboard them for long term support and development. Although no longer stewarding, Informal will also continue to contribute to Comet and work directly with projects and partners on Comet related development and support.
Hermes & ibc-rs: Informal remains dedicated to maintaining critical open-source infrastructure which serve the broader interchain ecosystem like Hermes and ibc-rs. Hermes is the primary relayer for the Cosmos ecosystem, relaying the vast majority of IBC traffic today. We’re eager to see the Rust-based ecosystem continue to grow, and work with partners old and new on exciting developments in that direction.
Malachite: Malachite is a BFT consensus kernel based on the Tendermint algorithm and implemented in Rust. Funded and developed in collaboration with the Starknet team, it’s the result of our multi-year research and engineering experience developing consensus systems. We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Farcaster using Malachite in their new data layer. More to come on Malachite in the following weeks, so stay tuned.
Cycles: Cycles is a Cosmos based open clearing protocol designed to clear the most debt for the most people with the least money. Cycles introduces a new privacy model to the Cosmos ecosystem with the recently released Quartz, a privacy-preserving TEE-sidecar for CosmWasm. To learn more, check out the recently published Cycles whitepaper, and follow Cycles on X. And remember, respect the graph.
Hydro: Hydro was developed by Informal as the first decentralized market-maker for the Cosmos Hub. Hydro’s first pilot round hit its cap in 24 hours, and the second pilot round, launched yesterday, hit its cap in 4 minutes. Hydro improves access to liquidity across Cosmos and further cements ATOM’s role as Interchain Capital. The Hydro team will spin out of informal and work closely with Skip to focus exclusively on Hydro product development and bringing it to market.
We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished and look forward to building even more resilient, innovative systems in 2025 and beyond.
Onward, The Informal Systems Team
Disclaimer: Informal Systems made an investment into Skip in 2022. Ahead of the acquisition, Skip repurchased this investment at cost. Informal made no profit from this investment.