Interchain Foundation Announces Mainnet Launch Of Cosmos Blockchain Hub

Announcements, Blockchain, News | March 18, 2019 By:

Swiss nonprofit Interchain Foundation has officially launched its decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable blockchains.

Interchain is non-profit foundation with a mission to support research and development for secure and scalable open-source software. It develops a network of distributed ledgers that solves the problems in the cryptocurrency and blockchain communities. In April 2017, it raised $17 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) for its blockchain network Cosmos, which was developed in partnership with California-based startup Tendermint.

In a blog post, the foundation announced the mainnet launch of the Cosmos Hub – the first hub among many hubs that will launch within the Cosmos Network of sovereign blockchains. The mainnet is set to be rolled out in three phases: network gains stability, transfers enabled, and Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) enabled.

“The vision of Cosmos is to make it easy for developers to build blockchains and break the barriers between blockchains by allowing them to transact with each other,” the foundation said. “The end goal is to create an Internet of Blockchains, a network of blockchains able to communicate with each other in a decentralized way. With Cosmos, blockchains can maintain sovereignty, process transactions quickly and communicate with other blockchains in the ecosystem, making it optimal for a variety of use cases.”

Jae Kwon, Founder and CEO of Tendermint, said that the ultimate goal of Cosmos is to overcome a number of limitations currently associated with blockchain technology such as scalability problems, lack of usability, governance and environmental issues, among others.

“The vision of Cosmos is to overcome these limitations and break down barriers to innovation, ultimately creating an Internet of Blockchains: a decentralized network of independent, scalable, and interoperable blockchains,” Kwon said.

The mainnet launch means that developers will now be able use the Cosmos Software Development Kit (SDK) to build applications on the Cosmos Network. Similar to how web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django brought about a Cambrian explosion of web applications, the Cosmos SDK was reportedly created to make blockchain development easy and catalyze the explosion of blockchain applications.

“The launch of the Cosmos Network is the first major milestone in the development of this network and represents the culmination of 40 years of computer science research, with a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism being deployed live for the first time,” Kwon said. “Now we’re encouraging developers to develop applications that take full advantage of the promises of this powerful ecosystem.”