On April 2, the Cosmos & IRISNetwork mainnet launch meetup jointly hosted by Odaily and Blockbeats was held in Beijing as scheduled.
At the meeting, Jin Kwon, the person in charge of Cosmos developer relations, delivered a speech titled "Cosmos: Reconstructing the Blockchain Ecosystem". In this sharing, Jin focused on sharing the module functions of Cosmos and many cases developed based on the functions of Cosmos modules.
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This paper summarizes the key points of his speech as follows:
1. As a blockchain 3.0, Cosmos was born to deal with the performance and scalability problems of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum is not friendly to customized development, and can only complete limited development in smart contracts. In this regard, Cosmos uses a modular structure to support developers' customization of functions, governance, penalties, rewards, etc.
2. The advantages of the Cosmos SDK are: golang language development, which is more versatile and friendly than solidity; it has been completely open source on github since 2017; modules are pluggable, and new modules can also be built by themselves to share in the Cosmos ecosystem .
3. The most important module of Comos is the Tendermint consensus module. When there is a solution at the bottom layer, developers can focus more on solving the needs of the application layer. 1 block finality (block finality) is a very good feature in its consensus module.
4. A large-scale test network — game of stake — was launched before the mainnet went live. There were nearly 300 verifier nodes participating in the network. This is also the largest Byzantine network in history.
5. One of the Cosmos modules - staking, supports token economics, including punishment for doing evil, and currency holders make their own rights and interests a part of the company through entrustment. In Cosmos' bonded POS, not only validators, but also users need to participate more in the network through delegation.
6. Cosmos module 2 - online governance (governance), in this module, governance is carried out on the chain: support text update, automatic parameter change, software update, in Cosmos, as an ordinary user, you can entrust validators to participate in voting decision, andVote yourself, this vote will have a higher priority.
7. The third module of Cosmos - income & expenses. This module supports multiple currencies. In the Cosmos ecosystem, developers can define the tokens supported by their blockchains, and Atom is not mandatory. This openness brings better user experience and stronger liquidity.
In addition, when participating in network certification as a delegator, the action of obtaining inflation benefits is automatically carried out on the chain, which is a great advantage compared to Tezos.
8. The fourth Cosmos module - the cross-chain communication protocol IBC, which improves the foundation of scalability and supports the transfer of assets and data in different chains, which is equivalent to the TCP/IP protocol in the Internet.
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Q&A session
In the Q&A session, JIN introduced the current development status of IBC. What IBC wants to solve is the cross-chain call of assets and data, which is difficult to develop. Comsos has made a very simple prototype last year. In order to make IBC more perfect and have more reliable security, IBC is still designing and The re-implementation process will take some time.
Differences between Cosmos and Polkadot, Jin said that the hub of Cosmos is similar to the relay chain role of Polkadot, but Cosmos has set up multiple hubs at the beginning of research and development to support its own infinite extension; in contrast, the security consensus verification of the chain in Polkadot only relies on Polkadot Provided by a Relay Chain. In addition, Cosmos has been intensively developed for four years, and many projects are proving the efficiency and security of the Tendermint consensus engine.
In addition, Harriet, the founder of IRISNetwork, added the reason why IRISNetwork chose Cosmos. She said that IRISNetwork has been developed since the end of 2016. Compared with Polkadot, Cosmos has more mature and complete code. Polkadot provides more centralized security governance politics, which improves user experience to a certain extent, but has some limitations on scalability. In fact, it also returns to the smart contract system.
Kamie, the founder of Wetez Wallet, also starts from his own understanding and believes that there are two differences: the first is in terms of power distribution. On Cosmos, you can freely assign your own verifiers and choose the system freely, but on Polkadot, The choice is limited to the relay chain,"To put it more extreme, Cosmos is more decentralized, and Polkadot is more centralized."
The second point is the main threshold. Polkadot’s entry threshold is firstly mortgage dots. Secondly, under certain circumstances, existing validators may decide whether a chain has value, which is very subjective.
But he also said that these two differences are not enough to cause competition between Cosmos and Polkadot. The current blockchain scale is too small, and the two can maintain a good cooperative relationship and create their own value.
Regarding how to balance centralization and decentralization, Jin said that Cosmos is also facing the problem of transformation at present. It can be seen that the discussion in the community is very heated. Later, the community will spontaneously structure its ideas and form proposals on the chain, and then People in the community vote by voting, which ensures a sufficiently open discussion. As for the assumption that the currency price is too low, Jin believes that if someone is interested in buying the bottom, this is also a potential factor for price increase; in addition, in the POS mechanism, the currency holder has a stake in the network security and has no motive for doing evil.
