Cosmos

Today blockchains are relatively slow, lack flexibility, hard to build, and difficult to connect together. The speed problem is being tackled via sharding, different consensus mechanisms, numerous new blockchains and layer 2 solutions. The lack of flexibility is being addressed as projects seek to deliver execution environments that are optimized for use cases as with Fetch.ai, Kadena, Tezos, and Coda for example, or by moving to webassembly as with Ethereum 2.0, Dfinity, Polkadot, etc. Blockchains are still relatively challenging to build because developers are forced to build all three layers: networking, consensus, and application as well as a lack of SDKs. Finally, blockchains don’t currently have a standardized way to communicate and as blockchain usage grows we will suffer from the same walled garden problems as we faced in Web2.

Cosmos is an ambitious attempt at building an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Using Tendermint, the Cosmos SDK, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC), Cosmos offers developers a way to quickly build and deploy flexible blockchains that can be optimized for specific applications while benefiting from the security guarantees of a larger network. Ultimately, we think Cosmos has the opportunity to enable developers to just focus on solving customer problems rather than having to spend time and money on all of the underlying infrastructures.