Analysis of the main organizations in the Cosmos ecosystem: Agoric, Regen, Lunie, and Chorus One

Author: interchain Foundation

Translation: SHOU

Source: Satoshi Shinmoto

Editor's note: Originally titled "Main Organizations in the Cosmos Ecosystem"

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The ICF funds various organizations in the Cosmos ecosystem to help realize its vision. Although All in Bits is the top pillar of Cosmos, the largest recipient of funds, many entities have assumed important leadership roles and responsibilities in different areas, including technology and community, during 2019. Now that All in Bits is reorganizing, it is necessary to make everyone aware of the diversity and resilience of the Cosmos ecosystem.

For some entities, the ICF is currently the most important source of funding, and we are pleased to see them take steps to seek long-term sustainable development and funding sources beyond the ICF. For other entities, the ICF accounts for only a small portion of their funding sources, but they still play an important leadership role in the community. In both cases, we want to see these entities achieve long-term financial sustainability, whether through traditional technology companies, new PoS public chains with self-sustaining economies, or other innovative forms of business structures.

In this article, we highlight some of the independent leaders in the Cosmos community, how they work, and where they get their funding.

Agoric

For nearly a decade, the Agoric team has been at the forefront of secure computing models for distributed systems. Their chief scientist, Mark Miller, was an early pioneer of object functions and smart contracts. Their CEO, Dean Tribble, has a proven track record of building financial infrastructure and secure operating systems, including serving as chief architect at Microsoft. Their engineering lead, Brian Warner, has created many popular open source projects, including BuildBot, magic-wormhole and Tahoe-LAFS, and was one of the original reviewers of the Ethereum mainnet version. Through work on the Javascript Standards Committee over the past decade, Mark and later Dean have played an important role in supporting the features necessary for Javascript security.

Recently, the team formed the Agoric System Operations Company, whose vision is to enable individuals to safely execute transactions, establish new markets, and design new exchange models without central control. They are currently building the Agoric platform, which is a secure, distributed, object-based Javascript smart contract runtime that guarantees secure interoperability across multiple hosts, from mobile phones to the blockchain. At the core of their design are increasingly strict subsets of Javascript, including SecureEcmascript (the largest secure subset that supports object functionality) and Jessie (the subset of Javascript used to write secure smart contracts).

Of course, the Agoric and Cosmos visions have a lot in common, including a focus on object-based security capabilities and interoperability between heterogeneous and autonomous hosts. When deciding on which blockchain infrastructure to build the application platform, the Agoric team chose Cosmos. The current version of their platform is built using the Cosmos-SDK, in which they have integrated their smart contract environment into a module. Although they plan to promote their platform on blockchain and other devices, their current goal is to publish through the Cosmos technology stack.

Agoric was founded in 2018 with initial funding from Electric Coin Company, Polychain and Naval Ravikant. In 2019, Agoric raised a larger round of funding from some major investors, and the ICF was involved. These funds are used to develop the Agoric platform, which will be launched as a public blockchain network. Although the details of the Agoric token economics are still being worked out, the company hopes that after its platform is launched, it will build a sustainable business on the basis of creating new economic opportunities.

In addition to investment, ICF has also provided service contracts for Agoric to help design and implement the IBC protocol to be universal enough to meet Cosmos and Agoric use cases. The design of IBC has benefited a lot from their expertise and decades of experience with similar protocols, and eventually formed a protocol on which we can jointly build the blockchain Internet, just like the Internet itself was built on TCP. Same as above. We look forward to seeing Agoric continue to lead the Cosmos community in 2020 and beyond!

Regen

Regen Network has been the first to use public blockchain technologies such as Cosmos to address global ecological regeneration challenges. Corrupt financial incentives have damaged ecosystems around the world and seriously undermined global sustainability. Regen focuses on using smart contract technology to adjust incentives for protecting and regenerating ecological resources; for example, creating credit and other financial instruments to assess the value of public goods such as forests or healthy soils absorbing carbon. This is a fast-growing market that requires transparency and multi-stakeholder consent, which makes public smart contract networks an ideal solution. By combining the progress of ecological monitoring with the low overhead and economic interaction brought by smart contracts, Regen intends to build an economy around ecological regeneration and sustainable management of the earth. First, the world's first carbon and carbon Ecosystem services credit registration mechanism.

Jae, Ethan, and other early members of the Cosmos community met Regen's chief regeneration officer, Gregory Landua, at the DevCon conference in Cancun in 2017. Gregory has extensive experience in renewable agriculture and has discovered the huge potential of blockchain technology to stimulate regeneration. The vision of the Regen and Cosmos teams is clearly aligned, and Regen has been a strong Cosmos supporter and community member since then. Recently, Gregory started the "Planet Rebirth" podcast, where he interviewed many prominent Cosmos community members.

Most of Regen's funding comes from grants and ecological regeneration pilot projects. Since the end of 2019, the Regen team has been using SAFT to raise funds for its staking tokens, which will become the basis of its ecological regeneration platform economy, just like Atoms currently serves as the basis of the Cosmos Hub. ICF participates in the SAFT project with many other well-known Cosmos community members. The goal of the Regen team is to build a sustainable organization around the economic opportunities created by the launch of public platforms. More details about the economy can be found in their white paper.

In addition to investment, since the end of 2018, ICF has also signed a service agreement with Regen to develop and improve Cosmos-SDK modules. Although the initial focus was specifically on ecological regeneration use cases, its scope has expanded significantly over time, and the Regen team has now become a core contributor to the Cosmos-SDK. That is, they have been developing substantial improvements such as on-chain upgrade modules, account sub-key systems, and replacing Amino with Protobuf, and have played a leading role in the CosmWasm project, which introduces WASM-based smart contracts Cosmos SDK. These improvements greatly facilitate specific applications and the entire Cosmos. Much of the work is led by Aaron Craelius, CTO of Regen, who is familiar with Cosmos-SDK, and their lead developer, Ethan Frey, built the first prototype of Cosmos-SDK in All in Bits in 2017.

Regen's leadership in Cosmos-SDK has left a deep impression on us, and we look forward to working with them to consolidate the SDK's position as the world's leading blockchain application development platform. They have been running a highly active and powerful testnet with many Cosmos validators, and we look forward to their network launch (expected to be launched later this year) and hope that it will create opportunities for ecological reconstruction worldwide .

Lunie

Lunie started using the early Cosmos wallet developed by All in Bits in 2017, which was once called Voyager. Lunie's CEO Jordan Bibla and its CTO Fabian "Fabo" Weber joined All in Bits in October 2017, bringing the attention of the product and design-oriented teams to the Lunie team and products, as well as the company's other engineering technologies. After the Cosmos mainnet was launched in March 2019, Lunie separated from All in Bits and established his own company, Lunie International Software Systems, which provided Lunie as the main user interface of the Cosmos Hub.

Since then, ICF has signed a service contract with Lunie to improve the Lunie wallet experience, maintain it during the Cosmos Hub upgrade, and develop browser extensions and mobile applications to supplement web applications, all of which are now available achieve. They worked closely with Juan Leni and the Ledger team to improve the user experience of the Ledger Nano app and wrote tutorials on how to pledge and govern on the Cosmos Hub. Due to significant changes in the Cosmos Hub upgrade, a lot of time was also spent on maintenance fixes. I hope that with the help of new upgrade modules developed by Regen, this overhead can be reduced in the future.

At the same time, Lunie has been building her own business by providing integrated services for other PoS blockchains, starting with the Cosmos blockchain and expanding to a wider ecosystem. Application-specific blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem require both a UI to meet the needs of their specific applications, and the need to manage the underlying PoS economy, such as pledges, commissions, rewards, etc. Lunie can handle all the specific staking UIs, so blockchain projects can focus on building UIs for their actual applications. To date, Lunie has signed agreements with multiple Cosmos zones and other well-known PoS projects, and hopes to further expand and build a sustainable software business.

Figment

Figment Networks was launched in 2018 to support the widespread adoption, growth, and long-term success of PoS-based protocols. Figment co-founders Matt Harrop, Lorien Gabel, and Andrew Cronk have decades of experience in expanding Internet infrastructure companies and apply those experiences to the new world of PoS validator services.

Figment is an active participant in the 2018 Cosmos Testnet project and is one of the "never make mistakes" in the Cosmos Game of Stakes. They also built the Cosmos Staking Browser Hubble. At the end of 2018, before the "Game of Stakes", ICF signed a service agreement with them to open the Hubble browser source code and added some features to ensure easy access to information during the "Game of Stakes".

Figment raised seed round funding from many investors in early 2019 to build secure and compliant staking services for large token holders. Since then, they have become leading validators of many PoS networks (including Cosmos, Tezos, Livepeer, etc.), including many other Cosmos blockchains.

Recently, the ICF worked with Figment to develop an open source revenue reporting tool to get rewards for the current and previous versions of Cosmos Hub so that everyone can get the necessary information to meet their reporting requirements.

Although only a small amount of funding comes from the ICF, they play an important leadership role in the Cosmos Hub community and governance process. They have published many articles about the Cosmos ecosystem and technology and are very active in the community and development. Their community analyst Gavin Birch has been a leading evangelist of the Cosmos governance process and has played a significant role in drafting governance proposals and supporting the Cosmos Hub upgrade. This work was done independently by Figment, establishing them as community leaders. It's amazing to see independent entities promoted to leadership roles to help advance the decentralized network.

In early 2020, Gavin's role in governance was officially recognized by the on-chain governance mechanism. With the latest Cosmos Hub 3 upgrade, governance proposals can be spent from the community pool. The network voted to pay Figment Networks for Gavin's work to form a governance working group that aims to lower the bar for high-quality governance recommendations, help organizations participate in the governance process, and develop resources and Best practice documentation. We are glad to see that such important work is self-funded by the local economy of the Cosmos Hub without any influence or funding from the Interchain Foundation. We look forward to Gavin and Figment continuing to lead and work to strengthen the Cosmos community.

Chorus One

Chorus One was founded in early 2018 and is responsible for operating the validator of the PoS network. Co-founder and CEO Brian Crain was previously COO of All in Bits and helped build the Full Node Blockchain Co-working Space in Berlin, which is home to the 2019 Interchain Conversations conference. Brian left All in Bits at the end of 2017 to co-found Chorus One with co-founder Meher Roy, who collaborated to run the popular Epicenter podcast.

Over the years, the Brian, Meher, and Chorus One teams have contributed significantly to the Cosmos ecosystem, with a focus on protocol analysis and community development. They provided important early feedback on the economic design of PoS and published many articles on the Cosmos protocol and community. Chorus One is currently undergoing verification on Cosmos-based networks and other PoS blockchains.

Chorus One has also been at the forefront of building high availability validators. In addition to building the first high availability validators for Cosmos Hub, they also built a high availability validator for Solana StrongGate with funding from the Solana team. In addition, Chorus One has been building Anthem, a web tool with pledge analysis and historical reward data, which is coming soon.

Chorus One is independently funded by its founder, but was recently hired by the ICF to begin research on authorization credentials, a mechanism that provides liquidity for pledged Atoms. As part of this work, they formed the Liquid Stake Working Group, which regularly holds public meetings to gather input from the wider community and design enhancements to the Cosmos PoS mechanism. The goal is to generate a design that can then be used to finance implementation. We look forward to the thought and community leadership of Chorus One to complete the authorization credential project and realize the desire to become a long-term sustainable PoS service company.

Other organizations

Of course, there are many more amazing independent organizations that have made significant contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem-too much content to go into detail in one post. Here we highlight some of the leading companies that have played a leading role in the current and future development of Cosmos Hub. In the future, we hope to introduce many more aspects to further demonstrate the true degree of decentralization and sustainable development in Cosmos. Including teams from IrisNet, BHarvest, Forbole, Binance, Commercio, Persistence, Certus One, Cosmostation, etc., they have made important contributions to Cosmos core software, protocols, tools and the community. In reviewing funding programs, some of these teams are explicitly mentioned in the ICF's official funding program database, but many others have never received funding from the ICF, but are still making significant contributions to the ecosystem.

We are also excited about developments related to the engineering teams of All in Bits and the Interchain Foundation, some of which have been in progress for months. More details coming soon!

We are grateful to everyone who helped build this amazing community and ecosystem, and look forward to working with everyone who helps build the future community and ecosystem to achieve longer-term value output and sustainable growth-a An independent, secure and sustainable ecosystem consisting of an open, decentralized network.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!