Prioritizing the Interchain Stack: development clarity, scoped funding, security responsiveness
The Interchain Foundation is an organization that exists to support and promote free, decentralized and open-source software. Our focus is and always has been the promotion and development of the interchain: a network of interoperable blockchains that hoists sovereignty and freedom of choice as its banner.
To this end, we’ve funded core pieces of the Interchain Stack such as
- IBC, which has safely facilitated more than 2 billion cross-chain transactions since its inception
- CometBFT: the battle-tested consensus engine and home to ABCI++ which enables builders to interface with every step of consensus
- Cosmos SDK: the world’s most popular and customizable framework for building secure and highly performant application-specific blockchains, used by well over 100 blockchains today
- CosmWasm: The most secure and performant smart contract platform natively built for multi-chain environments, used by 30+ blockchains and hundreds of dApps in the interchain and beyond
However, despite some initial successes — many challenges lie ahead. To make a meaningful impact, we need to achieve widespread and global adoption of the Interchain Stack, fund public goods in a sustainable manner, and reach world-class standards for the further development and maintenance of the software.
As a rallying cry to address these challenges, we share a reflection of 2023 — where we are and where we’re going.
Our priority: the most relevant tech stack
The interchain ecosystem today has a uniquely decentralized makeup — a consequence of its philosophy, values, and history. To support the interchain’s dynamic and exponential growth, we’ve redefined our organizational strategy.
In late 2022, the ICF shifted toward a distributed-development funding model. Rather than bringing development in-house, we chose to allocate resources to other entities that maintain and develop specific pieces of the stack. For example, Binary Builders is funded to work on the Cosmos SDK, Informal Systems for CometBFT.
The other big change in late 2022 is that Informal Systems and Hypha Worker Co-operative dedicated themselves to developing and maintaining the Cosmos Hub.
All of these changes have orbited around a singular goal: ensuring the right product is built, meets world-class DevX standards, and is put in the hands of the right builders.
A renewed focus on coordination
A distributed development environment enables bottom-up development and more agility. However, it also requires better coordination. In 2023, we’ve been working toward this by 1) improving development clarity, 2) narrowing our funding scope, and 3) increasing security responsiveness.
Development clarity: roadmaps and integrated feedback
Our goal is to fund the best possible functionality for the Interchain Stack to best serve the needs of the interchain communities.
To this end, the teams that we collaborate with have prepared their roadmaps for the Interchain Stack and are inviting key stakeholders to provide feedback before any funding or execution occurs. Ultimately, these roadmaps will be representative of community needs.
With this effort we hope to improve the impact of the stack and ensure better allocation of our funding. We expect that this will help us more effectively solve the most pressing current and future needs of builders so that they can build the best products for their own communities.
Strategic funding scope: focusing on the core stack
With the above initiative, the ICF is moving the elements of its funding strategy and priorities closer to the community. In other words, we are increasing stakeholder involvement earlier in processes, so that anyone that is impacted by the work has an opportunity to shape the direction of that work. The goal of this is to materially increase our own alignment and that of the Interchain Stack with the interchain communities.
In regards to the Cosmos Hub — we believe that now, more than ever, the Cosmos Hub is equipped to empower its development teams with funding. Funding requires accountability, and the Cosmos Hub is ready to hold its builders accountable for executing against the funding they receive. A thriving and vibrant community is the only entity equipped to direct a thriving and vibrant Hub.
Over the past year, we’ve collaborated with Informal Systems and Hypha Worker Co-operative to support the development and testing of the Gaia repo and Interchain Security. These teams brought ICS to market and irreversibly shaped the Cosmos Hub by ushering it into a new era. The community rallied around Replicated Security as a schelling point for coherent governance and product direction.
In late 2022 and 2023, stakeholders of the Cosmos Hub raised the amount of funding available for the community pool, implemented Replicated Security, added Neutron and Stride as consumer chains, arranged security audits, phased out old code, and added new functionality to Gaia.
Each of these decisions arose out of a melting pot of diverse perspectives, and resulted in a coherent and strategic product vision. This is a huge achievement for the community, which indicates the willpower, willingness, and ability to drive the Cosmos Hub forward.
Funding that comes directly from the Cosmos Hub community drastically increases the development teams’ alignment with the community’s expressed needs, and strengthens the community’s ability to oversee their work. This direct alignment results in a more sovereign Cosmos Hub.
This has the massive impact of enabling the ICF to focus on ensuring that the Interchain Stack is highly relevant and used by value-aligned builders. That’s not to say the ICF won’t continue to support the Hub in the long-term — it will, but via other means or strategies. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Better security: revamping incident response and coordination
The interchain is vast and growing rapidly. It consists of over 100 chains building with the Interchain Stack.
In 2022, the interchain communities successfully mobilized in response to the Dragonberry and Elderflower security incidents raised by Dev Ojha of the Osmosis team, and Alex Peters of Confio respectively. It was the goodwill and unity of the community that carried us through this scare. But, these incidents and the subsequent response pointed to the need for better security coordination across the interchain.
To this end, we have engaged Amulet to strengthen security across the interchain, streamlining incident response, and revamping the vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty program.
This year, our growing interchain is better prepared to raise and respond to security incidents.
A call to action
The market and the world are dynamic and our industry is nascent. It is in this context that we’ve been building a technology stack that can be used by anyone, anywhere to reclaim agency over the economic and political forces that affect them.
We aim to dedicate our resources to the critical areas of the stack that power the interchain — CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, CosmWasm and IBC — in order to empower an ecosystem of builders to build the best products for their communities.
It is in this vein that we call for, and have taken steps toward, standardized development roadmaps and security processes for the Interchain Stack. It is in this vein that we call for the Cosmos Hub community to align funding, accountability, and product strategy by supporting the core teams that build the stack.
It is our unity as a community that has diversity as its beating heart that will drive us forward. As the interchain grows, the needs of interchain communities will grow beyond the ability of the ICF to fund. This is a mark of success for the core thesis — sovereignty is critical — that brought us here.
Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads in which we can walk together toward a cohesive, world-class stack or turn toward dispersion characterized by an inability to coordinate. We choose the former, and we call on you to join us.
