Q4 Grants Deadline Updated to October 31st; Akash IBC Relayer Service Agreement; Ape Unit Eventivize Zone Deployer; Chainapsis Interchain Accounts on BigBang Testnet; AlphaBond, IXO’s Bonding Curve Module; Second InterNFT Working Group Meeting; ChainSafe and Ethermint Updates; Relevant Kick-Off Call; Nomic and Their RustSDK, Orga; Atlas, The Cosmos SDK Module Registry; Cosmos Hiring; Diversity and Inclusion Training
Welcome to the third edition of our bi-weekly update! We’ll be using this space to highlight some of the exciting activities that took place at the Interchain Foundation over the last two weeks. This will include some check-in meetings that occurred with various funding recipients, as well as goings-on that members of the Interchain ecosystem might find interesting and informative.
If any of the updates are especially relevant to what you are working on feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].
If you missed the last update, check it out at ICF Update — Sept 22.
Based on the new quarterly cadence of the ICF funding program you should have expected the deadline for Q4 to be at the end of November. However, since the last two weeks of December are typically spent on holidays, and to improve the review process by adding two weeks, we’ve decided to move the deadline for Q4 applications up to October 31st. This will allow a total of six weeks to fulfill the review process and leaves the last two weeks of the year open for everyone to spend on holidays ⛄️
Take a look at apply.interchain.io to make your application soon!
Akash Network has begun work on extending features of the Golang implementation of the IBC Relayer as part of a new service agreement with the Interchain Foundation. This work began when Jack Zampolin, VP of Product at Akash, was working with Zaki Manian at Iqlusion earlier this year during Game of Zones. Since Jack’s move to Akash, he’s been building up capacity within their team to support this core piece of infrastructure for the ecosystem. This will ensure there is a production-ready relayer available to transport IBC packets between IBC connected blockchains, like the Cosmos Hub using the Stargate release of the Cosmos SDK.
Ape Unit recently completed the second milestone of their service agreement around a product called Eventivize that makes it easy to build and deploy blockchains for live events. They are working with CTM Music Festival as well as Nyege Nyege Festival to provide Cosmos SDK applications that will be used during the events to give attendees greater access to artists. The milestone includes a tool called LanchControlD that configures and deploys new blockchains to a number of different service providers, like AWS, Digital Ocean or Hetzner, using Docker Machine. This brings us one step closer to a single click deploy sequence that will make launching blockchains much easier.
Chainapsis, the authors of ICS-27 Interchain Accounts and the browser wallet Keplr, are planning to include a Stargate compatible version of the standard in the upcoming BigBang Testnet for users to try out the awesome capabilities of Interchain Accounts. This will be a great opportunity to try out one of the more exciting flavors of staking derivatives, experimental wallet security and cross-chain VM execution. Keep an eye out for more announcements on the testnet and how to interact with it.
IXO recently completed work on AlphaBond, the general purpose Bonding Curve module for use in the Cosmos SDK and on IXO’s upcoming impact bonds blockchain. This module makes it possible to deploy Uniswap-esque Automatic Market Makers as well as Constant Slope Formula Bonding Curves. What’s really cool is that it’s possible to combine these capabilities with this module. Their work also includes the advanced implementation of Augmented Bonding Curves as developed by BlockScience and Commons Stack from Giveth. On top of everything it comes with batched transactions to prevent front-running!
IXO will be leading a Code With Us workshop on November 3rd at 17:00 CET. Be sure to sign up here if you’d like to get some hands on experience using the new module.
September 25th was the second InterNFT Working Group meeting organized by Persistence One and IXO. It included the launch of the new internft.org website that incorporates details from previous meetings as well as updates on all of the work happening within the working group. The website is generated automatically from the GitHub repository, so feel free to open issues and PRs to contribute directly to the site. The meeting also revealed the launch of a new forum where conversations about the evolving spec can be discussed before being converted into ARD/RFCs on the actual Cosmos SDK repository.
This meeting also contained presentations from the Substrate and Ethereum-based NFT project Centrifuge by engineer Charly Fei, and Cosmos SDK nameservice Starname (previously IOV) by Antoine Herzog, as well as updates from Bruno Škvorc of Kusama/Polkadot on rmrk.app, a clever way to include NFTs into Kusama before native NFTs are implemented.
Chainsafe recently completed another milestone of their service agreement to shepherd the Ethermint code base to production quality and deploy a persistent Ethermint zone. This one was around full implementation of the Eth Personal API. They are currently working on updating Ethermint to be Stargate compatible. Previously they completed benchmarks that showed a 2x improvement on transaction throughput, but once they complete the update to Stargate, they will be publishing new benchmarks that should demonstrate an even greater performance increase.
As part of the Q2 funding program, Slava Balasanov, founder of Relevant, received a service agreement to implement an off-chain worker tool that should allow Cosmos SDK nodes to provide the results of off-chain computation in an oracle-like method. The plan is to utilize Peggy as the basis for this module as it shares much of the same logic, and allow CosmWasm to act as a computation environment. This will allow future updates to submit off-chain computations back on-chain should there be debate about the validity of the results. This work is part of the ongoing efforts for Relevant to migrate from a purely Ethereum-based solution of their incentivized news platform to the Cosmos SDK.
The team of long time Cosmos contributors and builders of the Bitcoin sidechain, Nomic, have begun work on their third milestone as part of an ICF service agreement. This leg of their work includes improving capabilities of the rust-based SDK they’re developing called Orga. Orga is a minimalist state machine framework that allows performant deterministic state machines to be built in rust. Improvements include staking, governance, querying and tendermint lightclient capabilities for javascript environments. They’ve also been in talks with Informal about the integration of their IBC handlers into Orga to enable trustless IBC Bitcoin.
Two weeks ago we announced that work had begun on Atlas, the Cosmos SDK Module Registry, and we’ve already seen tons of activity on the codebase. Bez recently completed the initial version of the registry’s database schemas and implemented the first version of the project’s APIs. This makes it possible to create, read, update and delete module registries after authenticating via GitHub’s API. Once this work is complete, developers will have a site like crates.io or npmjs.com to browse the various modules available for integration into Cosmos SDK applications.
There are a number of open roles within the Cosmos Ecosystem. We’ve been interviewing candidates for two positions at Interchain GmbH and would love to see more candidates, particularly from underrepresented communities. Also take a look at several openings for Informal Systems.
The ICF has made a long-term commitment to working against structural inequality and discrimination, which starts with educating ourselves about these issues. Last week, the ICF began a pilot diversity and inclusion training program with Interchain GmbH and Informal. The two teams discussed several readings together, asked questions, and initiated a conversation about biases in our community. This is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue about the structural transformation that’s needed within our own organisations, the Cosmos ecosystem, and across the wider blockchain industry.
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Thanks for catching up on our third of many regular updates. We’ll be working on the format to keep it brief but informative. If there are things you’d like to hear more about feel free to reach out to [email protected] or ping us on Twitter at @interchain_io.
See you in 2 weeks!
Source: https://blog.cosmos.network/icf-update-oct-6th-d6b40e4b07ff?source=rss—-6c5d35b77e13—4
