Cosmos ended 2019 on a strong note, bucking the trend as the broader market slumped. Just ask anyone in your circle if he knows about Cosmos. He will definitely answer you know: the cross-chain star project is as famous as Polkadot, and the income of private equity investors is nearly 40 times. But do you know who the founder of Cosmos is. I bet you don't know. This article will lead you to understand the man behind Cosmos: Jae Kwon.
A self-proclaimed "problem child," Jae Kwon grew up to be the co-founder of Tendermint, the development team behind one of the world's hottest blockchain projects, Cosmos.
It's almost not what it is now. Even though Jae Kwon loves technical challenges, in 2013 he was ready to abandon his goal of building an alternative to Bitcoin's energy-intensive PoW consensus mechanism and started working on a cryptocurrency exchange. But then an accidental discovery changed the situation for many people.
Kwon is nowTendermintCEO and co-founder of the company that was the first to introduce Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithms into the blockchain space. During a recent call in New York, he told Decrypt that the accidental discovery of about 100 largely forgotten documents hidden behind a paywall changed everything.
These academic papers date back to 1988, deal with the study of classical BFT, and describe all the components needed to build an alternative to PoW, namely a PoS system.
After five years of hard work, the system is now one of the largest and most promising projects in cryptoCosmosAt its core, Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains.
"You can think of Tendermint as an operating system similar to Windows or Apple OS X," Kwon said, describing the consensus algorithm the company created. Cosmos, by contrast, is more like the Web, but for interconnecting blockchains. “Cosmos aims to create a network of distributed computers or blockchains, and make them communicate with each other, thereby laying the foundation for a scalable token economy.”
Launched in March, the network is very low-key. Some people belittle it, but the leading exchanges Binance and DEX are already built on Cosmos. Other participants in the ecology include those who are building e-commerce platforms and stable coinsTerra , and the decentralized version of YouTubeLino 。
secondary title
Cosmos vision
“Cosmos’ vision is to enable people to create their own digital decentralized communities based on their own blockchain,” Kwon said.
Strictly speaking, Cosmos is not one blockchain, but many parallel chains. A scalable foundation and unified token protocol that works across all chains.
Cosmos andPolkadot(The cross-chain project most often compared) The difference is that Cosm focuses on blockchains that retain their individual sovereignty, which the Tendermint team believes is more secure than a single-sovereign security model like Polkadot.
“It is inevitable to have many sovereign blockchains, each with their own rules, their own governance policies, and their own vision. And they have to be connected together,” Kwon said.
To achieve this ambitious goal, the Cornell alumnus, who majored in computer science, teamed up with renowned BFT researcher Zarko Milosevic and Tendermint co-founder Ethan Buchman.
The trio have been working together on Cosmos since 2014 and raised their funding goal to $17 million in the first 29 minutes of the 2017 token sale. Kwon recalls: It was a real surprise. " but,ICONot their first choice, but the result of traditional VC rejection. “It taught me that with a more fluid financial and investment system, we can really accelerate the innovation of solutions.”
secondary title
Game of Stakes
On March 13, ICF announced the successful launch of the Cosmos network. It conducts extensive testing, including the so-called "Game of Stakes," which verifies that block validators (the nodes that keep the network secure) can ensure that everything works under the testnet's various forms of attack.
governancegovernance" and"Staking”, using tokens as collateral to make the network more secure in exchange for token rewards.
In the next few months, Kwon and his team plan to gradually release the final phase of their project: the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, which will allow any blockchain using the Cosmos SDK to develop its own blockchain. App - Easily connect to Cosmos Hub. (Kwon points out that you can also do this in other frameworks such asLotion) on the build. )
secondary title
Safety and "liveness"
threatenthreaten，Ethereum is the largest blockchain project in the world, with thousands of DAPPs and millions of smart contracts.
virtual machinevirtual machine. “Instead, you can deploy your own blockchain, then connect that blockchain to the Cosmos hub, and within your blockchain (which can be written in any language), you can deploy your own application logic or a virtual machine. ""
Cosmos is the first project that promises to really help us move towards a multi-chain interconnected world.
questionquestionThe efficacy of the Cosmos hub as a so-called "base trust layer". He believes that Cosmos has a strong team of technicians, but because they decided to favor security or consistency over availability and liveness, if there is a severe traffic congestion, the entire network will stop functioning, "freezing every system." So he relegated it to a so-called "second-layer solution" that links to an underlying trust layer if necessary.
Kwon disagreed, noting that “we have a fundamental difference in our views on what should be a viable base layer.” He insisted that a BFT-based PoS approach “can definitely be a viable base layer for blockchains or cryptocurrencies” and also provided the team Security-wise design decisions explained:
“For financial applications that involve a lot of transactions, this is a fundamentally necessary part of building a new token economy.” He added that the team would rather the network stall until a solution is found, and that there are a number of ways to ensure transactions can continue.
thinkthinksecondary title
problem children
As a driver of this zeitgeist, Kwon's example is exemplary. His interest in cryptocurrencies was due to his "love for complex emerging phenomena - especially distributed systems", coupled with first-hand experience of the aftermath of the sharp housing market downturn in 2008 (his family is in the real estate business). It was Snowden's revelations that first introduced him to the field of cryptography.
Born in South Korea, he was raised primarily with an emphasis on educational performance and a rigorous program of extracurricular activities known as "hagwon” After earning his degree, Mr. Kwon worked in Silicon Valley as a programmer and engineer, "working on various projects and spending some time trading stocks and options in the financial markets."
He said that he now appreciates the importance his parents put on his education, but at the time, he was under heavy professional and academic pressure, which often caused students to cram for exams in the middle of the night: "I used to feel that I was a talented person. Problem child. Then I let go of a lot. Also, coming to America, I learned about freedom, individualism, and sovereignty. So, all of that combined makes me who I am."
After earning his degree, Mr. Kwon worked in Silicon Valley as a programmer and engineer, "working on various projects and spending some time trading stocks and options in the financial markets."
For a while he joined the liberal movement, but now he says he does not support any ideology. That said, he's still interested in exploring them, and endorses man-made religions against intellectual monopoliesKopimism andvoluntarism“What excites me about crypto and the open source movement is that we can create better systems through creative destruction. So, in that sense, I guess I’m almost a cypherpunk or a cryptoanarchist.”
“What excites me about crypto and the open source movement is that we can create better systems through creative destruction. So, in that sense, I guess I’m almost a cypherpunk or a cryptoanarchist.”
Maybe problem children won't be a problem anymore, except for competition.
