Cøsmos Network: Stargate & IBC ready, Proposals 34 & 35 are in the voting period, Tendermint Core…

Biweekly update on Cosmos ecosystem vol. 39, 29th December — 14th January

Welcome all Space Cowboys and Astronaut Girls to our first biweekly report in 2021! Another two weeks are in the books so it’s time for the summary of all things from the Cosmos ecosystem!
First and foremost, we are Stargate and IBC ready! Cosmos SDK, Tendermint Core and Gaia releases from Cosmos engineering teams, complete the vision of the Internet of Blockchains!
These weeks, the Tendermint team released v0.34.1, which includes bug fixes and other small improvements for the 0.34 release series. Read how the new state sync from Tendermint Core 0.34, allows a new node to join a network by fetching a snapshot of the app state at a recent height instead of fetching and replaying all historical blocks in their blog. Musselnet-2, the first Stargate final test by CosmWasm has been released and the era of cross-chain smart contracts has begun. Furthermore, the CosmWasm team released CosmJS 0.24.0-alpha.14 that has a final Stargate support. What does CosmWasm’s path to IBC look like? Join the team’s workshop on January 20th to find out.
What’s more, Chainapsis finalizes the implementation of the InterchainAccount, ICA (ICS27), which is now Stargate-ready.
Sifchain, a cryptocurrency exchange protocol built on Cosmos SDK, has successfully deployed a Peggy (Cosmos <> Ethereum bridge) on its testnet.
The InterNFT Working Group was drafting a set of Interchain standards for Non-fungible Tokens with the mission to make NFTs interoperable across multiple blockchain and to enable ownership, control and rights management of NFT metadata. Find the progress report below. Also, ‘Cosmos DeFi and SDK Demo Day’ by Unifi DAO was a blast! In case you’ve missed out on some of the talks, check out the recording in our report.
As for the Cosmos ecosystem updates: Phase-1 of IRISnet’s DeFi & Interchain Testnet Bifrost has successfully ended on January 6th. You can now lock your ETH and ERC-20s on the Secret Ethereum Bridge and mine for your share of 500,000 SCRT. Kava 2021 Roadmap was published. Terra’s ‘December 2020 Community Update’ is out. CoinGecko formalized a new partnership with Band Protocol. Injective is launching the world’s first ever Tesla stock futures trading on their Solstice Pro Testnet. Shyft Network to build opt-in compliance primitives on the Oasis Network. Cyber’s year in review is here. Oracle’s popular APEX low-code application development tool is now available as a standalone OCI service. 5 days until the e-Money Public Sale. The Sentinel dVPN iOS Testflight Beta is live, enabling users to connect to community hosted IKEv2 nodes. $50,000 worth of XPRT will be distributed to MATIC stakers during the Matic StakeDrop, beginning January 18th. Regen’s last incentivized testnet before the mainnet launch Aplikiĝo is coming up in February. And more!
Cosmonauts, don’t forget to vote for Proposals #35 ‘Cosmos Stargate Hub Upgrade Proposal 2: Time to Upgrade’, and #34 ‘Luna Mission — Funding ATOM’. That’s all for today! IBC here we come!

Github metrics:

CosmWasm:

Opening the Stargate: Musselnet-2, the first Stargate final test by CosmWasm has been released.

Moreover, the team released CosmJS 0.24.0-alpha.14 that has a final Stargate support. What does CosmWasm’s path to IBC look like? Join the team’s workshop on January 20th to find out.

Sifchain announced that it has successfully deployed a Peggy (Cosmos <> Ethereum bridge) on its Merry-Go-Round testnet. Sifchain is a cryptocurrency exchange protocol built on Cosmos SDK and will target 20–25 blockchains (such as Ethereum and Stellar) for cross-chain integration. It will also simplify the process of blockchain integration, lowering the development process for the Cosmos community so that additional cross-chain integrations will be cost minimized in terms of money and developer resources.

Sifchain’s goal is for new blockchains to consider cross-chain integration as essential as a wallet or block explorer. Liquidity from all cryptocurrencies can then be accessed on-chain, allowing the coordinated deployment of capital from all cryptocurrencies by DAOs.

Sifchain has deployed a persistent deployment of Peggy on a standing testnet, in parallel with Althea’s version of Peggy. Sifchain leverages the power of the Cosmos SDK to deploy a Peggy chain on mainnet. Sifchain uses Cosmos’ master branch Peggy with work created by a Swish Labs team under an Interchain Foundation grant. Like Althea Peggy, Sifchain’s approach to Peggy allows users of ETH and ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum to create pegged tokens on a Cosmos Network chain.

The team released v0.34.1, which includes bug fixes and other small improvements for the 0.34 release series. This blog post serves as a quick recap of the major features included in this release series, but for a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog, and for detailed notes on breaking changes, see the Upgrading Instructions.

Tendermint Core 0.34 introduces support for state sync. This allows a new node to join a network by fetching a snapshot of the application state at a recent height instead of fetching and replaying all historical blocks. Since the application state is generally much smaller than the blocks, and restoring it is much faster than replaying blocks, this can reduce the time to sync with the network from days to minutes.

This article provides a brief overview of the Tendermint state sync protocol for application developers. For more details, please refer to the ABCI application guide and the ABCI reference documentation.

Cosmos SDK 0.40 includes automatic support for state sync, so developers using it do not need to implement the state sync protocol described in this article themselves. A separate blog post will also be published describing how node operators can make use of state sync to sync new nodes with Cosmos SDK applications.

#35 Cosmos Stargate Hub Upgrade Proposal 2: Time to Upgrade

Proposal to complete the Stargate upgrade, halt `cosmoshub-3` at 06:00 UTC on Jan 28th, export the state and start `cosmoshub-4` based on gaia 3.0.

#34 Luna Mission — Funding $ATOM

The Cosmos Hub (ATOM) community is requesting a community pool spend amount of 129,208 ATOM in order to implement a comprehensive ATOM marketing plan that will be executed in collaboration with AiB (Tendermint). The marketing efforts will be initiated immediately upon passing of proposal #34.

The distribution of funds will be administered by 5 community members, that have been carefully selected by the community via the Cosmos governance working group to administer the marketing plan and release funds to either AiB that will act as a liaison between Cosmos Hub community and third parties or directly to parties that will be in charge of executing the marketing plan based on a majority multisignature approval. At least 3 members will have to approve each milestone-spend for it to be released to AiB based on the expected proposal scope & completion.

Information from Mintscan.io:

Top 10 validators:

Cosmos Markets

Information from Coinmarketcap.com:

Information from Coinlib.io:

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ICF bi-weekly updates

If you missed previous updates, check it out at ICF Update — Dec 15th ICF Update — Dec 1st ICF Update — Nov 17th ICF Update — Nov 3rd ICF Update — Oct 20th ICF Update — Oct 6th, ICF Update — Sept 7, ICF Update — Sept 22.

The InterNFT Working Group is drafting a set of Interchain standards that will advance the state of the art for Non-fungible Tokens and the Metadata associated with uniquely identified tokenised resources. Their mission is to make NFTs interoperable across blockchain networks and to enable ownership, control and rights management of NFT metadata and linked resources, regardless of where these are located.

This article provides a brief update on what we have achieved in the first phase of this work, since the working group started meeting in September. Looking ahead, we expect to formalise draft Interchain standards by the end of Q1 2021. These will have reference implementations in the Cosmos SDK.

Roadmap for the work of the InterNFT Working Group (Yellow = work currently underway)

AKT Token Now On Bithumb Global Exchange: With ~51% APR staking rewards and a record-setting ~90% bonding rate, AKT is now more accessible to people around the world with the 3rd Exchange listing.

Stargate Cosmos SDK v0.40 has been released by the Regen Network engineering team and ecosystem release committee into the wild
Regen‘s last incentivized testnet before the mainnet launch-Aplikiĝo- is coming up in February.

Secret Bridge Mining is LIVE: You can now lock your ETH and ERC-20s on the Secret Ethereum Bridge and mine for your share of 500,000 SCRT — part of 2M SCRT allocated towards the launch of Secret DeFi.

Total rewards: 200,000 XPRT ($50,000 based on the latest valuation)

Campaign duration: 45 days

Network Rewards Pool: 160,000 XPRT

AUDIT.one Rewards Pool: 40,000 XPRT

Cyber year in review: