Layer by Layer: Cosmos Hub Weighs its Future with Pivotal Cosmos 2.0 Vote Underway

The Cosmos vision of a network of blockchains has gradually materialized over the last several years, predicated on the release of core technologies and frameworks such as the Tendermint consensus protocol and the Cosmos SDK. This initial foundation allowed developers to create sovereign chains such as Terra and Kava in the early days of the Cosmos ecosystem, though these chains were mostly connected only to the extent that they shared the same basic consensus mechanism. The biggest leap forward for the ecosystem came as a result of a pivotal upgrade to the Cosmos Hub in February 2021 that included the first release of Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), a cross-chain communication protocol for the Cosmos ecosystem described in the original Cosmos whitepaper. 

IBC’s most noteworthy feature is the ability for fungible tokens built according to Interchain Standards specifications to be transferred securely and permissionlessly between IBC-enabled chains. Colloquially known as IBC transfers, this core feature was released about 1.5 months after the introduction of IBC 1.0 with the passage of Cosmos Hub proposal 41 in March 2021, setting the stage for the Cosmos ecosystem of application chains to become truly interconnected as originally envisioned. Throughout the rest of 2021, the progressive rollout of IBC transfer functionality among IBC chains accelerated the growth of users and developers in the ecosystem, enabling the flow of capital between chains and encouraging greater composability between DeFi protocols.