Cosmos, the Internet of blockchains

Jae Kwon was a programmer contributing to open-source projects when in 2013 he decided he wanted to explore blockchain and proof-of-stake systems. Kwon happened to stumble upon a 1988 academic paper written by two MIT professors called “Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony” which described the concept of synchronism for distributed systems.

Inspired by this paper, Kwon started working on a protocol that provides a consensus solution to blockchains without the need for Proof-of-Work. Kwon dubbed this protocol TenderMint (the “M” was made lowercase soon after) and published a whitepaper in 2014 detailing how it worked. In the same year, Kwon also founded All in Bits, Inc (a.k.a. Tendermint, Inc) a for-profit company exploring the commercialization of the Tendermint.