"It is never the enemy who defeats an entrepreneur, but himself."
On February 4th, the star cross-chain project Cosmos split. The founder Jae left the team. Another core member, Zaki, accused Jae of unequal distribution of development resources, which led to a large number of outstanding engineers leaving the team, which affected the cross-chain protocol IBC. development progress.
Zaki Manian, director of distributed system software development company Tendermint Labs, suddenly posted a post on social media, bombarding his boss, Jae Kwon, the founder of Tendermint, saying that his resignation as CEO was "evasion of responsibility."
The price of the Cosmos main network token Atom thus started a turbulent road. From the opening price of US$4.35 at 0:00 on February 4, it fell all the way to the lowest price of US$4.01 at 16:00 on the same day, with a maximum drop of more than 8% throughout the day.
The news of Jae’s resignation first came out on January 29th from Twitter netizens’ revelations. However, Jae himself stood up and responded at the time, saying that he will not leave now, “and the current Cosmos team is basically working without my participation. Yes.” Jae’s statement temporarily dispelled the market’s worries. After a few days of silence, Zaki Manian’s public accusation brought the matter back to the public’s attention again.
Zaki listed Jae's several crimes, and it comes down to the fact that Jae has devoted his energy to his Virgo project in the past six months. At the same time, due to the uneven distribution of development resources, a large number of outstanding engineers have left. Tendermint Inc. Finally, Zaki expressed that he would lead the Cosmos community to get rid of the adverse effects brought by Jae, continue to develop Cosmos and ensure the development progress of IBC.
The protagonist of the incident, Jae Kwon, basically confirmed the news of his resignation, and revealed three pieces of information:
One is that according to him, Cosmos is undergoing internal reforms-removing the role of CEO to disperse Tendermint's rights and "achieve internal checks and balances". Even without a CEO, the project can run independently; the other is that he will wait for the Cosmos network After everything is stable, he will leave completely, and will continue to serve as a member of the ICF Council and participate in affairs;
The third is that he will be in charge of a project called Virgo in the future - this project also belongs to the Cosmos ecology.
As a driver of this zeitgeist, Jae 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.
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 subscribes to Kopimism and voluntaryism (the institutional idea of letting people choose) against the faux-religion of intellectual monopoly.
“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.”
Before this resignation incident, Jae Kwon was the co-founder and CEO of Tendermint, and also the head of ICF. No matter what aspect, he can be regarded as a pivotal core figure for Cosmos.
In 2008, the financial crisis swept the world, so Jae Kwon learned about Bitcoin. In 2013, he was determined to enter the blockchain industry. In 2014, he studied how to apply the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) concept in the academic field to practical applications based on Proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain, and then jointly established All in Bits Company (AiB), focusing on research and development.
It is known as the "Internet of Blockchains" and is also considered to be version 3.0 of the Blockchain. Cosmos aims to solve the problems of blockchain interoperability and scalability. Its inter-blockchain communication protocol can realize the interconnection of blockchains and support the transfer of assets between different blockchains.
Blockchains on Cosmos are called "zones". Some of these partitions are also called "hubs".", and different partitions can communicate and interoperate with each other through the shared hub. The first partition on the Cosmos network is the Cosmos Hub. It is a multi-asset proof-of-stake cryptocurrency network and a public blockchain. The Cosmos hub can also be expanded by connecting to other spaces. All token transfers in the space will go through the Cosmos hub, which will record the total amount of tokens held by each space.
Cosmos consists of two parts: Hub (hub) and Zone (partition). The partition adopts the Tendermint consensus and supports multiple blockchains. At the same time, the number of partitions can be expanded; the partitions follow the IBC (inter-blockchain communication protocol, cross-chain communication) through the hub. Agreement) for transactions, and defines blockchain registration, data packet format, transaction type, and data packet delivery confirmation process, etc.
About a year later, in April 2017, under the background of noisy financing, Cosmos quickly gathered a large number of fans. Even though the project party released a large number of documents, warning participants that they could not guarantee the receipt of tokens as scheduled, the swarming investment The project team managed to raise more than 16 million US dollars in just half an hour. Less than two weeks later, the project team established a Chinese community.
Since then, ICF has started to fund a series of cross-chain development projects, such as Agoric Systems Operating Company (investing in it in the form of traditional equity) and Tendermint, hoping to promote the rapid development of IBC in this way. Through the continuous efforts of developers, in March 2019, the Cosmos main network was successfully launched, and the token ATOM was launched on the trading platform one after another.
One of the cores of Cosmos is the consensus mechanism model it adopts - Tendermint.
As the first team to propose the concept of cross-chain, in 2016, Ethan Buchman, chief technology officer of Tendermint, described for the first time the relationship between Tendermint and other blockchain projects in a paper "Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Blockchain Era". relation. In June, the Cosmos project launched to solve cross-chain issues released the first white paper. For most investors who pay attention to the development of blockchain technology, Cosmos, as a representative of cross-chain technology, is called "cross-chain duo" together with the Polkadot project.
The basic idea of Tendermint is to allow a large number of distributed nodes to agree on consensus without the PoW mining that Nakamoto consensus relies on.
The Tendermint consensus algorithm is the first algorithm that introduces staking equity pledge, verification, and leadership rotation election. A group of validators (Validator) replace the role of miners (Miner), and take turns to produce blocks according to the ratio of mortgaged equity to improve Satoshi Nakamoto. Limitations of consensus.
Another feature is the finality of its consensus: Once the consensus is reached, it is really reached, unlike the consensus of Bitcoin or Ethereum, which is a probabilistic certainty, and may expire at some point in the future. Therefore, basically there will be no blockchain forks in Tendermint.
The immediate impact of this incident was a 10% drop in the price of Atom coins and the unlocking of nearly 2 million Atom tokens through staking. But after two days of brief declines, prices are now back to where they were before the event. As Polkadot team member Jack said on Twitter, the price of the currency fell by 10% after this incident, either indicating that the entire currency market is very inefficient, or that the Cosmos project is currently very decentralized hardened and firm.
After the incident, there are still several good news. First, the fund depository institution supported Atom, and then Coinbase made an Atom node. It is estimated that the official announcement will be made after the node is tested. There is also the Atom50 times contract launched by Binance yesterday. And BitMax will soon announce to be an Atom node.
Judging from the current market performance of Cosmos, it can be shown that Cosmos is anti-fragile, that is, the ability of the project itself to face the black swan event. As for how strong this anti-fragility is, we need to continue to follow up.
But the universe has a lot of first-mover advantages
The first is professional node resources
The Game Of Stake test incentive network initiated by Cosmos has set a model for the cold start of subsequent PoS network projects. The difference between the PoS project and the PoW project is that before the project starts, it is necessary to recruit professional node service providers. The way to attract them to become nodes is to launch a testnet competition with incentives. In the competition, nodes need to meet some conditions listed by the project party.
The node service providers of mainstream PoS projects are basically the same, and these nodes are all Cosmos nodes and have a strong sense of participation in the Cosmos network, with a large bargaining chip and a strong voice.
The second is the node support of the exchange
Mainstream exchanges such as Binance, Huobi, Coinbase, and Ok have all established Cosmos nodes, and the DEX bottom layers of these exchanges all use the Cosmos-SDK development framework. This lays a direct or indirect foundation for the mutual communication between chains after the development of the IBC cross-chain communication protocol is completed.
The third is the brand and mind occupation of PoS projects
Now when you talk about PoS projects, there are only two most typical and representative ones: Cosmos and Tezos. Plus an upcoming Polkadot. At the same time, about 40% of the projects use the underlying consensus engine of Tendermint PoS.
The fourth is a strong ecological network effect
At present, the four ecological projects of Cosmos: Atom/Iris/Kava/Terra have all been listed on mainstream exchanges. This is very rare. In the future, more Cosmos ecological projects will be launched on the mainnet and exchanges. The ecology of Cosmos is clearly getting stronger and stronger.
For investors, the rational decision is to continue to follow up on the team's subsequent power transfer, benefit distribution, and IBC development progress.
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Disclaimer: The information published in this article does not represent any investment suggestion of the company, nor does it constitute any investment advice. The picture is from the Internet. If there is any infringement, please contact to delete it. Please note the source for reprinting.
