Highlights of Cosmoverse Conference 2022
Missed your chance to attend the Cosmoverse 2022 event, held in Medellin, Colombia? If so, then don’t get disheartened, as you can still catch the live stream of the whole event on YouTube. The full three-day show, of eight to nine hours each, is available on the YouTube channel “Cryptocito”. For those of you who wish to get valuable highlights of who said what at the Cosmoverse 2022 event, check out this article covering some important news bites by key speakers.
Juan Sebastian – Cosmoverse 2022
- Speaker: Juan Sebastián González Flórez, Secretary for Digital Innovation at the City of Medellín
- Agenda: Medellin the Software Valley
Juan introduced the presentation with a brief history of Medellin and explained how, in the 21st century, the government and residents of the city looked towards innovation to leave behind the horrors the city had faced in the 1980s and 90s.
The city was built block by block, with metro and cable cars giving access to a better public transportation system, becoming the first symbol of social inclusivity, and later the Urbanism project and Ruta N, a business and innovation centre in Medellin, led its economic evolution.
He then explained how, since 2020, the government has been focusing on turning the city into a Silicon Valley hub of Latin America, providing infrastructure like high quality internet connections, while at the same time offering incentives for businesses to locate their headquarters in the city.
He then shed light on Valley’s software center, a space for citizens in each neighbourhood to access industry 4.0 tech. At these software centers, children are exposed to upcoming technologies like blockchain, metaverse, robotics, data science, and AI, to build a tech-savvy resource pool.
“Medellín is transforming from being a manufacturing economy to an ICT knowledge-based economy”
Juan Sebastian – Cosmoverse 2022
Ethan Buchman – Cosmoverse 2022
- Speaker: Ethan Buchman, Co-Founder of Cosmos
- Agenda: Initiation, Integration, Illumination: The Three Phases of Cosmos
Ethan started his presentation by acknowledging the hard work put forward by the organizers and then appreciating the crowd turnout before diving deep into the Cosmos Project’s current standing and future vision.
He explained that at the moment, the project is transitioning from the initiation phase to the integration phase. During the initiation phase, Cosmos has fulfilled all its original 2016 whitepaper promises. They have built “Tendermint“, a gold standard for blockchain consensus; “Cosmos SDK“, which is used by dozens of high-value projects; and launched “IBC,” a gold standard for blockchain interoperability.
He then explained how Cosmos had changed the whole game, ushering in the dawn of the computer community revolution.
“The Cosmos Hub proved a new model for building and deploying decentralized blockchain application. We have one of the most decentralized development teams, and we brought interchain into reality. “
Ethan Buchman Cosmoverse 2022
Buchman described how Cosmos is not competing with other blockchains, which are battling for adoption, but actually competing against the legacy institutions of political and economic expression.
With the cosmos project now entering the next integration phase, Buchman highlighted the challenges and tasks ahead to be tackled by the cosmos community, which include: better social coordination for public goods and institutional building; a strong Cosmos hub; and finally, preparing for the final phase of Illumination.
Sunny Aggarwal – Cosmoverse 2022
- Speaker: Sunny Aggarwal, Co-Founder of Osmosis
- Agenda: Mesh Security
Sunny started the Mesh Security agenda by posing a question: how do we actually want to design the Interchain? He then quoted internet pioneer David Clark and explained how Clark’s ethos of rough consensus has become a widely used methodology in SDLC. The stand-alone consensus protocol, however, suffers from scalability issues, he said. That’s where IBCs were invented, so that multiple consensus subsystems could communicate with each other.
Sunny announced that the meta-topology of these interconnected subsystems will be a mesh system in Cosmos. He also added that since the “voting” based methods to communicate between subsystems can’t scale to the internet and interchain levels, the Mesh System built by Cosmos actually tackled the communication scalability issue very efficiently.
Sunny then addressed the Interchain security topic in the Cosmos Mesh network. In interchain security V1, as block size increases, the same validators (from, let’s say, Cosmos Hub) are validating more sovereign blockchains. Then in Interchain Security V2, a subset of “COSMOS HUB” validators can validate a new chain, but still this version doesn’t materialise the sovereignty.
The shortcoming, however, is tackled by the Interchain security V3, where a chain (let’s say Osmosis) can have its own sovereign validator set but its security gets augmented by the security it gets from the “COSMOS HUB”. This version, however, is still a centralized hub one rather than a mesh one.
In Mesh security, the concept of Interchain security V3 is adopted in a bidirectional fashion. Here, the “OSMOSIS” chain could be a consumer chain getting security from the “COSMOS HUB”, but it could also be a provider chain that lends security to the “COSMOS HUB” at the same time.
So, in Mesh security, all the sovereign Cosmos chains will act as both consumers and providers. He then tackled the issues like soft shared security, cross staking, validator centralization, and capped validator powers.
“Validator overlapping results in very high overlap of communities and stakeholder sets of all Cosmos chains. It’s a good thing for the community and we should take advantage of it. “
ATOM 2.0 Panel – Cosmoverse 2022
- Moderator: Cryptocito
- Speakers: Zaki Manian (Co-Founder Sommelier) Ethan Buchman (Co-Founder Cosmos), Tyler Schmidt (Strangelove Ventures), Sam Hart (Interchain), and Jelena Djuric (Marketing Informal Systems)
Cryptocito: How do you look at the journey of COSMOS from its inception to its ATOM 2.0 whitepaper today?
Zaki Manian: Cosmos has always been an underdog. It pioneered a lot of ideas we currently see today, and with this conference today, we hope more people learn about it and join the community. Within COSMOS, we never attempted to build a traditional marketing organization, instead focusing on community-driven marketing, in which the community feels ownership over the messaging. And looking back at the journey, it worked for us.
Ethan Buchman: From the start, we weren’t competing with other blockchains but instead wanted to evolve the internet forward. And looking back, what we built here is really unprecedented. Many talk about achieving what we have here, but COSMOS actually lived the philosophy, welcoming communities of chain and building towards ATOM 2.0.
Tyler Schmidt: I started as a humble validator with Jack Zampolin, running a validator node on the COSMOS Ecosystem. And then, for a while, I played the role of business manager for him, helping him in the back end. But as we made a number of good investments and scaled the project, we weren’t just validators or capital investors, but also a service provider. And currently, we have built a wonderful lab, working in the background, developing key features for many applications for the ecosystem. And now with this new whitepaper, we are excited to build much more for the future.
Cryptocito: The first whitepaper covered the COSMOS Ecosystem, while the ATOM 2.0 deals specifically with the COSMOS HUB. So, why do we need a whitepaper/roadmap for the COSMOS HUB? And what are some of your favourite parts about it?
Sam Hart: During last winter, I decided to focus completely on the COSMOS HUB and compiled all the community’s suggestions and ideas about what they think the COSMOS HUB should be. The overwhelming response I get from the community re-affirms why COSMOS HUB is the core piece of the ecosystem.
It was just a theoretical concept in the original whitepaper. So, we worked towards building a robust COSMOS HUB, efficiently interacting with other chains in the ecosystem. We have built a fantastic relationship with all the chains in the ecosystem and are driving towards their success as well for synergic growth.
“COSMOS HUB hasn’t been cool for a little while. But hell yeah it is now!!”
Sam Hart – Cosmoverse 2022
Cryptocito: How is interchain security at the heart of this new roadmap?
Jelena Djuric: The Informal system, the Cosmos research and development shop, has been working on this feature for the past few months. Interchain security allows the COSMOS HUB Validator set to secure new app chains. The key thing to know is that the staking token will be the ATOM Token.
There will be two types of consumer chains we’ll see coming on-board: a custom consumer chain, i.e., Cosmos SDK Chain, where you have a lot of control over the consensus and application they build; The second ones are contract consumer chains for smart contract development.
We have been working with Circle’s USDC team to figure out the best way for them to launch in COSMOS, leveraging interchain security.
COSMOVERSE AWARDS 2022 WINNERS
- Most Active Community: COSMOS HUB
- Most Promising Launch: PROJECT X (INJECTIVE)
- Most Decentralized Chain: STARGAZE
- Best Developer: SUNNY AGGARWAL (Co-Founder Osmosis Labs)
