On Wednesday, the Interchain Foundation, a Swiss non-profit serving as a steward of the Cosmos (ATOM) ecosystem, announced the launch of Gravity Bridge as built by decentralized internet service provider Althea. Gravity Bridge enables the transfer of ERC-20 tokens between Ethereum (ETH) and Cosmos blockchains. During its initial stages, Gravity Bridge will operate as a standalone chain before migrating to Cosmos Hub early next year. Key technical features include interchangeable token issuance across both chains and the support of Ethereum to Cosmos oracles.
Simpier issued the following statement regarding the launch:
In this interoperable ecosystem, Gravity Bridge’s place is a foundational piece of infrastructure, available to all Cosmos chains openly, purpose-built to update and iterate quickly, and facilitate the bridge needs of the chains that interact with it. Open markets and frictionless trading unlock liquidity for all. This is the future that uplifts all in the Cosmos network and supports the ATOM value and ecosystem for the Internet of Blockchains.
Gravity Bridge is live!
Mainnet was achieved via a pioneering decentralized launch. Our thanks to the teams, validators and community members now supporting the chain and deploying the front end, wallet integration and other tools to take GB to the next level pic.twitter.com/iaQplXMTgu
— Gravity Bridge (@gravity_bridge) December 14, 2021
In March, the Inter-Blockchain Communication, or IBC, protocol launched on the Cosmos network, allowing for the communication and transfer of digital assets across different blockchains. Since then, there are now over 20 blockchains supporting IBC. Peng Zhong, CEO of Tendermint, the core developer of the Cosmos network, said in an interview with Cointelegraph that he expects to see “about 200 chains connected through Cosmos’ IBC next year.”
Billy Rennekamp, Cosmos Hub lead at the Interchain Foundation, added:
The Stargate upgrade and release of IBC was the dawn of interoperability, now the Gravity Bridge and our collaboration to ensure bridge safety with Interchain Security cement Cosmos Hub as the bedrock for the Internet of Blockchains.
Ever since the launch of the inter-blockchain communications, or IBC, protocol in March, which enabled the communication and transfer of digital assets across different blockchains, development activity seems to have picked up pace on the Cosmos (ATOM) network.
Transaction volumes, the creation of decentralized applications, and the number of chains connected via IBC have all been trending upwards in recent months. Speakers at the Cosmoverse Conference, which took place last week, presented many of the latest technologies under development on the blockchain. Its biggest-ever hackathon will also take place in Lisbon tomorrow.
#HackAtomVI is trending in the dev community!
1000+ Developers Have Already Registered to the Biggest HackAtom in Cosmos History!
Don’t miss your chance to win $1M+ in Prize Pool and start your journey in the Internet of Blockchains with a Bang!https://t.co/TqAedC16jn pic.twitter.com/w1hasCxyQo
— Cosmos – Internet of Blockchains ⚛️ (@cosmos) November 9, 2021
Tendermint is the core developer behind the Cosmos blockchain and serves as its gateway to the ecosystem. On Wednesday morning, Peng Zhong, the company’s CEO, joined Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview to discuss the future of the Cosmos network.
Cointelegraph: What are some of the development highlights surrounding the Cosmos blockchain in terms of the decentralized finance, or DeFi, ecosystem?
Peng Zhong: I think the biggest highlight was early this year when IBC [Inter-Blockchain Communications] launched on the Cosmos hub for the first time. Not much happened after that. People were like, okay, IBC is live, now what do I do? But now, we are seeing 22 blockchains that support IBC. They have all been able to connect to various DEXs [Decentralized exchanges] available in the Cosmos ecosystem, such as Osmosis, Gravity DEX. So there’s been a lot of cross-chain activity, much more than anyone expected. And we are seeing a very positive growth cycle with IBC enabled.
Total transaction volume on the Cosmos blockchain in the past 30 days. | Source: ATOMSc
CT: Interesting, so where do you see the IBC ecosystem heading, say, five years from now?
PZ: That’s very far in the future. I was going to present tomorrow that we are seeing 22 chains today, and next, we’ll see about 200 chains connected through IBC next year. I haven’t thought about five years out, but my long-term vision running Tendermint and with our focus on bringing more users to Cosmos and a better development experience to the Cosmos Stack. We’ll see a million blockchains in the future. Five years from now, I would expect that number to be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of chains linked through IBC. And that’ll be absolutely spectacular, but we have a lot of work to do on the infrastructure side to handle all that encrypted data.
CT: Regarding the recent Cosmosverse, an intriguing development that came up was the concept of liquid staking. Would you mind providing more information on that?
PZ: I believe there are at least three different implementations of liquid staking as presented at Cosmoverse. It was a fantastic conference; I met many people who’ve been working in this space during the pandemic and never got a chance to see them face to face until now. And then people working at Cosmos for over five years and are still around — and it speaks to the strength of the ecosystem. So liquid staking at a high level is the ability to allow users to double-dip with their assets. Most commonly, in PoS [Proof-of-stake] protocols, you need to stake your tokens to secure the network as a user. And by staking your tokens, you earn yields. For the Cosmos Hub, it’s generally between 7% to 20% APY. But then you look at some DeFi protocols, for example, Osmosis or other DEXs built on Cosmos, and you can see that during the launch of these DEXs, they [the developers] want to increase liquidity.
So APYs can be at thousands of percent within a few weeks or hundreds of percent for a few months. And they are much much higher than staking yield. So there is this constant battle, or tug of war, between the incentives for staking, which is to secure the network and is good for everyone, but you earn minimal yield. This is compared to incentives provided by DEXs for acting as liquidity providers, which is very tantalizing. So liquid staking is the ability to allow you as a staker to stake your assets, but at the same time, you get a token that represents your staked position.
So if you stake 100 ATOM, instead of receiving nothing in return other than a steady stream of staking rewards, you would receive [both] staking rewards in ATOM, and you would receive a staked version of your ATOM, let’s say sATOM. And that is only IBC-enabled, which means you get to permissionlessly transfer it to DEXs and use that to provide liquidity in pools. That’s the general idea of liquid staking; it’s a big feature that’s coming to multiple blockchains at once.
The version that’s coming to the Cosmos hub is more standard, it’s where you stake the assets, and you get a token that you can use interchain. The version proposed by Osmosis is called Superfluid staking, which is the ability to provide liquidity in a DEX while being issued liquidity provider tokens (LPs) back, which you can use to stake on the blockchain. So whether you LP first or stake first, you always get the representation you can use across IBC, which is a lot of flexibility and freedom.
However, it adds a lot of added risk because this is now like a second-level derivative of your original token. So if anything breaks down along the way, you might be in trouble. But for those of you who have a big appetite for risk, liquid staking offers more than what you can get off traditional yields.
CT: Is this technology theoretically applicable to all kinds of pools? For example, can I receive a lending token to back deposit into a staking pool to earn yields if I lend out my crypto?
PZ: Exactly, you’re on the right track. And there can be many levels of this, and each level gives added risk to your portfolio, so it’s a matter of figuring out how much risk you are willing to take. A lot of this [liquid staking] has happened in Ethereum due to the power of ERC-20 tokens, but it’s only started to be developed in the Cosmos ecosystem. And of course, in Cosmos, there is an added layer of complexity on top due to the differences in the level of security. So part of the proposed benefit of liquid staking is the ability to share security between multiple chains at once. Which is sort of a looser version of Ethereum where everything is secured by the token.
CT: Another recent development discussed at Cosmoverse is ABCI++ and how it can help improve cross-chain functionality and oracles. Would you mind elaborating more on that?
So the Tendermint Core protocol hasn’t been updated in quite a long time in terms of new features. And ABCI++ is a very big new feature. What it does is that it increase the features that Tendermint Core can support. So right now, a function can be run at the end of every single block, which is what all Cosmos blockchains use to do their business logic. At the end of every single block, which on Cosmos, is usually six to seven seconds, some activity can happen. But the Tendermint Core Consensus, while it does create consensus around new blocks, it’s not a single-step process; it’s, in fact, a five-step process of block consensus creation.
There’s, in fact, a built-in block explorer in the past, which hasn’t been updated much, but actually shows every step of Tendermint block consensus. What ABCI++ is, is that it allows a developer to tap into each one of these five steps. You can imagine them; instead of just admitting one event for every block that’s complete, it admits now five events, and now you can pick and choose which step you want to admit to a consensus that you want to run for that function. And that introduces a lot of potential for more efficient calculations.
The New [v0.35] #TendermintCore Release:
• Prioritized Mempool
• Peer-to-peer Network Makeover
• StateSync Improvements
• Go API Internalization and Stability
…and additional Great Features to discover https://t.co/zXP4t6EBiF pic.twitter.com/zQtV6paZgm
— Tendermint (@tendermintHQ) November 5, 2021
CT: Is Tendermint taking any steps to introduce Cosmos into the Metaverse?
PZ: Yeah, so I think the Metaverse is quite undefined right now. It’s everyone building things as Web 3.0. Of course, Facebook can take a claim that they’re building the Metaverse, but it’s only going to be Facebook’s wall garden Metaverse. There’s going to be Google’s wall garden Metaverse and Apple’s version of that. I would assume Steam and Epic Games have their own version. But the version that most of us want today is open-ended and permissionless.
CT: What are some of the highlights of the upcoming hackathon?
PZ: So it’s the biggest Cosmos hackathon. And I think Cosmos is the second largest crypto ecosystem in the world, with over $170 billion [of assets] built on the Cosmos infrastructure. It’s a very significant event for the world at large. Zooming out a little bit and looking at what happened last year, which was on a much smaller scale. That was when this proof of concept DEX project called Osmosis won the biggest prize. And today, Osmosis is a live blockchain with over $700 million in TVL [Total value locked]. Maybe it’s a fluke, but I’m hoping to see projects of this caliber this year. This time around, we have far more prize categories; I believe it’s seven, each with over $200,000 worth of prizes. This wide array of prizes is our way of making sure people are solving a diverse set of problems. There’s so much unbuilt infrastructure, and it doesn’t make sense to award only one prize.
Growth of TVL on the Osmosis DEX. | Source: DeFi Llama
CT: Would you like to share any other comments or visions regarding Tendermint and the Cosmos blockchain?
PZ: Yes, I believe that Cosmos is the only ecosystem that tries to democratize access to finance, more so than any other ecosystem. Because in Cosmos, you don’t need to buy a token to get involved in the ecosystem. When you build on Cosmos, you don’t have to buy anything; you don’t have to pay for gas, and that I believe is something very valuable in economies where you can’t really afford expensive transactions, and when you don’t really have the capital to really experiment with these hybrid ecosystems, like Polkadot or Avalanche or Polkadot or Ethereum, and appealing to people with time. Young people with time but no capital are out of Web 1.0 today, and Cosmos will win Web 3.0. And that’s really the core mission of Tendermint, to bring newcomers, make it as easy as possible to build things, and we welcome everyone.
The Cosmos cross-chain network has been growing steadily along with the projects that run on top of it and it’s just reached a milestone in terms of activity.
The Inter Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC), which is the backbone of the Cosmos ecosystem, has seen a surge in activity over the past month with more thanone million transfers logged.
Cosmos launched the IBC in March to enable cross-chain decentralized finance and interoperable nonfungible token transfers. Over the past six months, it has grown substantially, onboarding new projects and blockchains into the ecosystem.
Other notable projects operating on the protocol include Terra, Band, Kava, and THORchain’s Chaosnet.
— Documenting Cosmos ⚛ (@DocumentingATOM) October 3, 2021
The Mapofzones Cosmos ecosystem explorer shows that there have been 1,071,132 transfers over the past 30 days and 45,738 transfers on IBC over the past 24 hours.
The Osmosis automated market maker is responsible for the lion’s share of those IBC protocol transfers with 44% of the total, with the Cosmos chains recording 307,855 transfers, or 29% of the IBC total, over the past 30 days.
The IBC standard provides a secure method of exchanging data between independent blockchains while scaling through sharding and sidechains for various applications. Cosmos is just one network of many operating on the IBC protocol.
The digital asset payments and wallet provider Crypto.com also runs on the Cosmos network. In late September it launched its own NFT platform and marketplace which has driven further momentum.
Related:Cosmos-Based Interoperable DeFi Project Launches on Mainnet With BNB Collateral
In June, the Kava DeFi platform launched on Cosmos enabling Binance Coin deposits to collateralized loans in its USDX stablecoin.
Cosmos is also working on rollup scaling technology to allow developers to build Cosmos-based blockchains as rollups which can be deployed as clusters within the IBC zones. In a tweet on Oct. 6, it explained that the scaling tech called Optimint would be a “drop-in replacement” for the current Tendermint framework that it is built on.
Cosmos has its own native token called ATOM which has fallen 5.1% over the past 24 hours to trade at $35.39 according to CoinGecko. The token has made a solid 37% gain over the past month, however, and is just 19% down from its Sept. 20 all-time high of $44.42.
The head of the cryptocurrency outlet Coin Bureau says that Cosmos Network (ATOM) could be the most important digital asset on the market.
The pseudonymous analyst, who goes by the name Guy, tells his 1.3 million YouTube subscribers that the crypto network is invaluable because it allows different blockchains to communicate in a decentralized fashion.
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Cosmos Network finalized its inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol in March, which allows different cryptocurrency platforms to trade and transfer tokens with each other.
Guy says that this function makes ATOM a game-changer for the industry.
“Cosmos is probably one of the most, if not the most, important cryptocurrency projects out there. This is simply because, without widespread interoperability, cryptocurrency is doomed to fail.
With the completion of the IBC, Cosmos has cemented itself as the leader in a niche that almost no other cryptocurrencies are competing in.”
Guy says the altcoin is also in line to see a 200% surge in price.
“In terms of how high ATOM could go, I’ll start by saying that I will be very surprised if it doesn’t hit at least $100.
This is simply because Cosmos’s fundamentals continue to hit all-time highs, with additional blockchains connecting to its hub almost every other week.
This has not yet been fully reflected in ATOM’s price, nor its market cap which is [still] minuscule.”
[embedded content]
ATOM is trading at $34.61 at time of writing, according to CoinGecko.
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IBC Group announced to terminate their crypto mining operation and facilities across China in response to the recent clampdown from the Chinese authorities.
The company has conducted massive Ethereum and Bitcoin mining operations across China and has employed over 1500 people in over 40 cities across the nation.
Meanwhile, the group with investments in more than 4000 different blockchain projects in China has responded to the recent ongoing crackdown on crypto mining.
However, the company has decided to shut down all its Bitcoin and Ethereum mining plants. It now plans to move its operations and its employees to multiple new locations globally, including Iceland, Kazakhstan, the United States, UAE, Canada, and various South American nations.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Khurram Shroff, the prominent ‘Arab Whale’ and the chairman of the IBC Group, said that: “We believe that while the Chinese crackdown is a temporary inconvenience, the diversified location of mining facilities is great news for the rest of the world.”
Khurram stated that the IBC Group is perfectly positioned to take advantage of such changes. He further revealed that the firm headquartered in Toronto is the fastest-growing tech hub in North America.
He stated that a shift of crypto operations out of China would be a significant opportunity for Canada. He also disclosed that the move by the Toronto Stock Exchange to recently listing the world’s first Bitcoin ETF is evidence that the country is already ahead of the curve in terms of mainstreaming crypto tokens.
Meanwhile, Peter Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Blockchain.com and Michaël Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy software company, also had a conversation with Yahoo Finance.
Smith stated that he believes that China’s crackdown on crypto mining is a good thing because the action would help diversify mining operations across the globe and accelerate the construction of huge mines in Europe, the United States, and other various locations.
On the other hand, Saylor said that he believes China is making a big mistake as it is set to lose a trillion-dollar revenue. It is supposed to benefit from hosting various cryptocurrency mining operations in the country.
China Wiping Off Billions Dollar Market
On May 19, China announced an institutional crackdown on crypto mining when the central bank (the People’s Bank of China – PBOC) informed all local banks that they could not engage in any crypto-related activity. China’s authorities clarified their decisions to close down crypto mining and trading, citing the need to control financial risks.
Recently, the central bank also made a statement against speculative trading of cryptocurrencies, thus further intensifying the crackdown. Data reveals that more than 90% of Bitcoin mining in the country has been shut down. The impact is so huge as the country, which once contributed a major share of the processing power used by Bitcoin mining, is set to lose billions of dollars’ market.
China’s regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrencies continues to alienate major miners. Dubai-based investment company IBC Group reportedly plans to end Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) mining operations in China following ban announcements from the different provinces across the country.
The group has major mining operations in China and plans to distribute its operations to the United Arab Emirates, Canada, the United States, Kazakhstan, Iceland and various South American countries, according to sources. IBC Group recently relocated its headquarters to Toronto, Canada.
Commenting on the crackdown on crypto with a focus on mining activities, IBC Group chairman and iMining CEO Khurram Shroff said it’s a temporary inconvenience. He added that the diversified location of mining facilities is great news for the rest of the world:
“A shift of crypto mining operations out of China will be a huge opportunity for Canada. The Toronto Stock Exchange recently listed the world’s first Bitcoin ETF, so the nation is already ahead of the curve, in terms of mainstreaming cryptocurrencies.”
China turned its attention to the crypto mining industry’s energy consumption following the large-scale power outages in the Chinese mining hub of Xinjiang in mid-April. This was followed by stricter supervision by the government, sending a shockwave through the crypto markets.
Related: Expert details the state of crypto in Canada
However, experts from the industry have mostly agreed since then that, while the initial shakeup will be arduous and challenging, miners’ migration out of China will nurture the decentralization of crypto.
Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz saw “a big net positive” for the Bitcoin ecosystem over the long term, while former Gemini security engineer Brandon Arvanaghi stressed, “The crackdown means that Bitcoin is working, not that it’s failing.”
The Cosmos (ATOM) development team has finally activated the Inter-Blockchain Communication (LBC) protocol on the platform following a vote by members of the Cosmos ecosystem. The team says IBC fosters interoperability between Cosmos and other blockchains, while also solving scalability issues via sharding, according to a tweet on March 29, 2021.
IBC Live on Cosmos (ATOM)
Earlier in February 2021, the Cosmos (ATOM) development team successfully carried out the Stargateupgrade, in a bid to pave the way for the implementation of the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol – a parameter change that would enable the network to be interoperable with other distributed ledgers.
Fast forward to March 29 and the Cosmos teamsaysover 1500 validators and delegators in its ecosystem have signalled their support for IBC activation and IBC is now live on the platform, to make both fungible (cross-chain payments) and non-fungible token (NFT) transfers between various blockchains possible.
As stated on its Twitterthread, the activation of IBC opens up a whole new world of possibilities for blockchain applications, as blockchain networks that will integrate IBC will be able to leverage it for the execution of multi-chain smart contracts, “with logic split across blockchains,” and IBC will also usher in new security features to Cosmos.
IBC Important for Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
At a time when decentralized finance (DeFi) is gradually gaining traction, with the ecosystem now worth$43.34 billionin terms of total value locked (TVL), the Cosmos team has made it clear that IBC will enable Cosmos and other projects in the Hub to start playing an active role in DeFi.
Specifically, the Gravity DEX decentralized exchange, which the team says will initially function as an automated market maker (AMM) just like Uniswap (UNI) and others, will soon go-live on Cosmos, enabling users to trade IBC-supported tokens and provide liquidity for traders.
“These tokens would arrive on the Hub through IBC-enabled chains, IBC-wrapped BTC tokens, and as well as future blockchain ecosystems that implement the IBC protocol,” the team declared.
What’s more, the team has hinted that the Cosmos Hub has experienced exponential growth since its launch, with the ecosystem now comprised of over 200 blockchains, with a combined market cap of over $60 billion, and it’s actively working on multiple cross-chain bridges including Celo-Cosmos, Ethereum-Cosmos and more.
At press time, the price of Cosmos (ATOM) is up by 3.11 percent in the past 24-hours, trading at $20.16, with a market cap of $4.27 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.
The self-described “Internet of blockchains,” Cosmos, has launched its Inter-Blockchain Communication standard, or IBC, enabling crypto assets to be transferred easily between independent blockchains.
Comos’ IBC went live on March 29, enabling token transfers between Cosmos and other IBC-compatible blockchains.
The feature, which has been in development for five years, was voted in via community governance with 112 million votes supporting the activation and 75 million opposed.
Over a two-week period, a Cosmos proposal needs to secure at least 512 ATOM tokens deposited in support of it for voting to proceed. The number of tokens an individual or group holds determines how much influence their vote will have on the outcome of a proposal.
Cosmos asserted that IBC facilitates new applications by facilitating both fungible and non-fungible tokens between chains and paving the way for cross-chain exchanges and NFT marketplaces.
Today @Cosmos has enabled Inter-Blockchain Communication (#IBC) transfers on the Cosmos Hub, making it possible for sovereign blockchains to transfer digital assets (tokens) and data b/w one another.
The Interchain era has begunhttps://t.co/3vybbrLJ5G
Thread pic.twitter.com/7NRgqHiTBe
— Cosmos – Internet of Blockchains ⚛️ (@cosmos) March 29, 2021
Cosmos added that it is already working on a decentralized exchange supporting cross-chain functionality for IBC-compatible blockchains. The announcement stated:
“The Gravity DEX will act as a marketplace for trading tokens from any connected blockchain, including tokens from IBC-enabled blockchains, wrapped ETH and ERC20 tokens, wrapped BTC tokens, as well as from any future networks that implement IBC.”
IBC is a standard that provides a method of securely exchanging data between two independent blockchains. Inter-Blockchain Communication also provides scaling through sharding by utilizing sidechains for different applications.
The standard has been rolled out as part of a broader Cosmos ecosystem upgrade called Stargate, which also included new nodes that can synchronize 200x faster.
Cosmos’ native token, ATOM, has trended sideways despite the announcement. At the time of writing, ATOM last changed hands for roughly $20 and is down 23% from its Feb. 17 all-time high of $26.
After months of development, the Cosmos (ATOM) project has launched the Stargate update, which includes the highly anticipated Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, or IBC.
Announced on Thursday, the Stargate upgrade includes a series of improvements to the Cosmos protocol and its Software Development Kit.
The most important of Stargate’s features is IBC, the interoperability layer for Cosmos blockchains. The protocol is one of the key elements of the Cosmos vision, allowing for effortless interoperability between Cosmos SDK blockchains and other blockchain protocols. IBC allows bridging tokens and arbitrary data between all blockchains it supports, primarily those built with the Cosmos SDK. Other blockchains can also be supported, but they require case-by-case implementations.
There are a number of projects that have been built with the Cosmos SDK in the past, including Binance Chain, Kava, Terra and Secret. Before the introduction of IBC, the networks were siloed and the individual projects had to create their own bridges to connect to the wider blockchain ecosystem. Brian Kerr, CEO and co-founder of Kava, told Cointelegraph that the project spent “years of developer time and millions of dollars in investment to construct the custom bridges that exist today,” notably for the Binance ecosystem.
The launch of IBC would “accelerate the rate at which Kava can add bridges to other Cosmos-SDK chains, offer its services, and use their assets as collateral,” Kerr explained.
While IBC also supports interoperability with blockchains built on Substrate, the blockchain framework championed by Polkadot, other blockchains outside of these ecosystems will remain somewhat difficult to integrate within Cosmos.
Stargate also carries a host of other performance improvements. These include support for the Protobuf serialisation format, a more efficient mechanism for streaming data; State Sync, which allows nodes to synchronize with a Cosmos blockchain in less than 30 minutes; Automatic upgrades for the blockchains built on the SDK and improved light client security that improves IBC connection guarantees. Stargate has been in development for months, with Cosmos issuing a dedicated bug bounty to ensure its safety.
IBC is currently live on the Cosmos hub, home to its ATOM token. The hub is an important component of the Cosmos ecosystem, allowing its blockchains to communicate with each other without having to establish dedicated connections. The communication protocol is available on the Cosmos SDK, meaning that it is up to each team to roll the implementation out.
A number of DeFi applications within Cosmos would benefit from easier interoperability. With IBC, the blockchains can connect to most major DeFi ecosystems outside of Ethereum, which notably includes Binance Chain. Kerr said that “Kava is designed as an Apple store,” allowing only vetted projects to build on its platform. “While this makes Kava one of the most trusted platforms for enterprises seeking DeFi solutions, it does limit the rate at which developers can quickly deploy code and iterate on ideas,” Kerr noted. Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain provide an environment with less oversight, which makes both of them valid options for building DeFi, according to Kerr.
Other DeFi options on Cosmos include Secret Network, a privacy-centric blockchain for smart contracts, and Terra, a stablecoin-centric ecosystem. “There are hundreds of Cosmos-SDK chains that will be able to connect with IBC,” Kerr noted.