The value of assets secured on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) increases at ever upward rates, particularly over recent months. However, pervasiveness in the general economy is still low for a number of reasons that include:

• Understanding the new technology
• Financial literacy in the general public
• Trust and public perception

Regular readers of the Tendermint blog will doubtless believe that DLT is indeed a tool of public good that can change finance for the better for millions of people. However, to make that transition, appropriate regulation is essential, especially as the technology matures.

To date, jurisdictions are adopting three contrasting approaches toward crypto-assets and crypto-related services, namely:

• Proactive approach, adopting regulations addressed to crypto-assets and related services;
• Neutral approach, seeking to promote case-by-case assessments on the relevant circumstances and eventually attempting to re-conduct such assets and activities to existing legislation and regulations (mostly within the payment and investment services spheres);
• Restrictive approach, seeking to introduce outright bans to crypto-assets and related activities.

With 450 million people and 22% of the global economy, the European Union, along with the US and China, is one of the most significant jurisdictions. To date, it has taken the neutral approach but has adopted a new strategy on digital finance for the EU financial sector. One of the most critical parts of this strategy is new legislation called “Regulation of The European Parliament And of The Council on Markets in Crypto-assets, and amending Directive (EU) 2019/1937”, more commonly known as “MiCA”.

What is Cosmos Cash?

Cosmos Cash, developed by Tendermint Engineering and funded by Interchain Foundation, is a research project into a Cosmos SDK based, regulatory compliant finance protocol that can host tokens backed by a fiat currency (or a digital representation thereof).

Tendermint, together with Amagis Capital and Martin Worner (Confio), have been looking at MiCA with a particular lens on what it means for tokens as a method of payment, particularly e-money tokens. The result of this research constitutes the foundation of the first proof-of-concept of Cosmos Cash that we have built on top of Cosmos SDK and is secured using a Proof Of Authority consensus algorithm. The goal of the application is to re-define how an electronic money institution works by leveraging both the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Consensus Algorithm.

You may want to read the report of the research and try out the proof-of-concept application. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Is Cosmos Cash a Stablecoin?

No, it is not.

Under MiCA regulations — and based on our legal partners’ considerations — a Cosmos Cash token would qualify as an E-Money token since it holds the following properties:

• It is a crypto asset.
• It is an electronic surrogate for coins and banknotes and is used for making payments.
• It maintains a stable value by referring to the value of one fiat currency (1:1 pegging).

So is Tendermint launching an E-Money token then?

No, we are not.

We are engineers. The aim of this project is to develop tools for licensed issuers to easily issue their own e-money tokens. The ultimate aim: bring the benefits of Cosmos SDK-powered technology to the general public.

What’s Next?

The immediate next steps are the technical implementation of the protocol.
By 2022, the time when the MiCA framework is expected to come into force, the Cosmos Cash Proof-of-Concept will be in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage that would be already adjusted to reflect the legislation set forth by the MiCA framework.

The project’s ultimate goal is to bring true liquidity to the Cosmos ecosystem through a reliable, regulatory-compliant protocol that guarantees the same guarantees as the traditional banking sector.

Unveiling Cosmos Cash: A regulatory compliant finance protocol based on the Cosmos SDK was originally published in Tendermint Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new stable release update has been released for the Cosmos SDK 0.39 Release Series, codenamed Launchpad.

In compliance with Launchpad’s release policy, v0.39.2 is a bugfix-only release, as such neither breaks backward compatibility with Launchpad’s previously released versions nor requires client app’s code changes.

What’s New in v0.39.2

During the last stable release development cycle, we’ve integrated a number of bugfixes and a couple of nice additions coming directly from the master branch.

Among the various bugfixes, it’s worth mentioning that the execution of theApproxRoot() method of the Dec type is now bounded by a fixed upper limit (thanks Miguel Dingli for that!), votes queries to the gov module sent through the RESTful endpoints have been fixed, BIP44Params‘s string representations now carry them/ prefix as mandated by the BIP44 specifications (credits to Federico Kunze), and the keys add command’s interactive mode now works as expected and no longer fails to generate a mnemonic.

The icing on the cake is the addition of support for denom client app’s custom validation (*nudge-nudge-wink-wink* Billy Rennekamp) and the inclusion of extended build time information such as the build dependencies to the version --long command’s output.

Last but not least - this stable release update comes equipped with Tendermint v0.33.9, which carries very juicy fixes and improvements — special thanks to Tess Rinearson and her team!

Release notes are available here. See the Cosmos SDK 0.39.2 milestone for details. Just type the following in a terminal at the root directory of your app’s source code to upgrade your application’s dependencies to v0.39.2:

$ go get github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk@v0.39.2 ; go mod tidy

Cosmos SDK v0.39.2 is out was originally published in Cosmos Community Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When anyone says that a software release contains “breaking changes” it often means that some behavior has changed without a full understanding of the changes. However, even if engineers conduct thorough testing, there’s always a risk that a bug is lurking deep beneath. Getting a handle on these types of bugs is the goal of the simulations test. Below we share a little bit of why we run simulations at Tendermint.

As blockchain protocols grow in complexity due to speed and interchain interaction requirements, we need to ship software that will break compatibility with prior features. Breaking changes are common in software development. However, when we speak of value transfer systems involving cryptocurrency, breaking changes are liable to have impacts unseen until a substantial amount of transactions complete. Since transaction volume increases over time, it’s very difficult to test for these hidden issues with simple integration testing procedures.

An informative simulation test of Stargate requires that we run a version of the protocol for several thousand blocks. Subtle errors that could exist in the decimal number implementation, fee calculation, or state machine transitions can be detected by generating and sending randomized messages. The goal of simulations is to detect failures that could halt a chain and provide as much detail as possible, such as log files and the application state at which a failure occurred.

Source: Cosmos Stargate server simulation logs

In the long term, this can reduce software breakage by running the Cosmos protocol and observing unique issues we may not have predicted. We want to continuously raise the bar for testing all of our code so that it is as exhaustive as possible. Exhaustive testing should lead to faster and more confident upgrades to the Cosmos Hub.

If you are interested in learning more about the simulator and the simulation tools we use, check the Github repository that hosts runsim’s source code, the Cosmos SDK documentation and continue to check our Stargate updates here: https://github.com/cosmosdevs/stargate/.

Why Do We Test Cosmos Stargate with Software Simulations? was originally published in Cosmos Community Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Tendermint, we stand firmly behind our values. Whilst our teams remain focused on delivering innovation and quality, we believe that our values represent who we are, thus impacting what and how we deliver. Kindness, collaboration, integrity, transparency, sustainability: they could all be succinctly summarised in one word — openness.

Maximizing for openness is a prerequisite for giving and receiving feedback from the community that we aim to serve. While many things changed at Tendermint over the first two quarters, one thing did not: our most important client was and still is the thriving ecosystem of individuals, communities, charitable initiatives, and for-profit companies that we call the Cosmos Ecosystem.

Shared ownership

Inspired by the way the Interchain Foundation maintains the Cosmos trademark and administers the Cosmos GitHub organization, at Tendermint we maintain the Tendermint trademark and, in line with our vision for greater transparency, share the responsibility of administering the Tendermint GitHub organization.

Representatives of Interchain GmbH, Informal Systems Inc., and Tendermint will co-own the github.com/tendermint organization to carry out core research and development of the Tendermint technology stack. Collective responsibility will be shared across these three organizations and none shall retain veto power.

Tendermint GitHub Owners

Listed below are the primary owners of the Tendermint organization on GitHub.

Ethan Buchman, Informal Systems Inc

Ethan Buchman is co-founder of the Tendermint and Cosmos projects, and is CEO of Informal Systems, where he leads a team focused on verifiable distributed systems and organizations. He also serves as Vice-President of the Interchain Foundation.

Jae Kwon, Tendermint Inc

Jae Kwon, Chief Architect at Tendermint, is the inventor of the Tendermint consensus protocol and co-founder of Cosmos. He focuses on protocol architecture and design. He also serves as the President of the Interchain Foundation.

Tess Rinearson, Interchain GmbH

Tess Rinearson is the VP of Engineering at Interchain GmbH. She leads the development of Tendermint Core and was previously VP of Engineering at Interstellar and Chain.

Alessio Treglia, Tendermint Inc

Alessio Treglia is the Director of Engineering at Tendermint. He joined the Tendermint team in 2018. He leads the Cosmos Cash project and was previously VP of Global Markets Operations Technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

For the Community

By sharing ownership of the Tendermint GitHub organization, we’re taking another step towards our core values of collaboration and sustainability. We believe that opening up development of Tendermint-related software will better ensure its longevity and be the starting point for an autonomous Tendermint development community.

As open-source contributors, nothing makes us happier than working in a company that builds vital tooling for open-source enthusiasts. My team and I take pride in our commitment to continuing to build exciting technology and to share the knowledge acquired along the way to grow the global blockchain ecosystem. Knowledge transfer is a pillar of innovation: git clone our code, try it out, test it, break it and please, pretty please! Do let us know what you think about it; we do welcome feedback in any way, shape, or form.

A Digital Agora

In the long term, we envision the Tendermint Github organization will become a digital agora. We intend to foster a diverse and inclusive environment, open to all organizations, for developers passionate to work on Tendermint core components and specifications.

We look forward to building together with you!

(Big thanks to Tess Rinearson for the invaluable contributions to this blog post.)

Sharing the Tendermint Github Organization was originally published in Tendermint Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Virgo Manifesto, and subsequently, project Virgo, was revealed on November 2019 with the aim of advancing human coordination and passion for environmental protection and sustainable energy. Gathering and using information accurately to coordinate decision making is one of mankind’s greatest strengths. Today’s technology can enhance how people organize and coordinate , which requires meaningful, critical dialogue between technologists, regulators and citizens of the world.

However, technology alone will not solve the problem facing future generations. If the Virgo mission is to succeed, it needs to lead by example in coordinating and working together effectively. This was discussed at length during the blockchain interoperability roundtable at INATBA’s Global Blockchain Congress, Convergence 2019 in Malaga.

Tendermint’s Virgo initiative shares similar objectives to INATBA; namely the vision to help foster equitable digital coordination and governance. INATBA’s unique role in facilitating public-private engagement is essential to develop the industry, encourage the uptake of blockchain solutions and develop governance structures. These were the major drivers in Virgo’s decision to join INATBA, which provides Virgo with a voice in the European Union’s technology evaluations and regulatory efforts.

“INATBA is proud to welcome Virgo into our growing membership. They join an active and vibrant community, representing one of the widest ranging membership bases which is helping to shape the blockchain and DLT industry. We look forward to Virgo’s valued contributions to INATBA’s vibrant and expert working groups”, said Marc Taverner, INATBA’s recently appointed Executive Director.

The European Blockchain Observatory and Forum was established by the European Commission in collaboration with the European Parliament to “connect European and global expertise”. The forum acts as a collaboration platform for ‘knowledge sharing, community engagement, project mapping and on use cases and the regulatory framework, production of thematic reports and delivery of training.’ Virgo contributors have joined many of these working groups to contribute to and learn from the different participants in focus groups on topics such as; identity, social impact, privacy and governance.

Virgo is an open and inclusive initiative that aims to remove complex technology and provide the public with freely available organizational tools that incentivize and reward change. If you are interested, visit our website and join the movement.

About INATBA

Public-private cooperation is essential to progress and ensure uptake. Officially launched on 3rd April 2019, the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) is a multi-stakeholder organization based in Brussels. It brings together suppliers and users of Distributed Ledger Technologies with representatives of governmental organizations and standard setting bodies from all over the world. They share the common vision of promoting transparent governance, interoperability, legal certainty and trust in services enabled by blockchain and DLT.

Resources:

• https://inatba.org
• https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/blockchain-technologies

Tendermint Inc’s new open collaboration and org-tech initiative, Virgo, joins the International… was originally published in Tendermint Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Research and development (R&D) in blockchain technology is crucial to keep up to speed with the technological and legislative advances occurring in this space. Incorporating blockchain and distributed technology into university curriculums will allow students to build up the technical expertise and knowledge required to keep up with advances in the industry. Last year, the University of Malta launched its first Master’s in Blockchain and Distributed Technology degree programme. The programme provides students with a comprehensive overview of blockchain knowledge ranging from technology, to economics, and law and regulation.

We teamed up with Dr Joshua Ellul, Director of the Centre for Distributed Ledger Technologies and coordinator of the Masters in Blockchain and DLT at the University of Malta, to design lectures focusing on decentralized public blockchains. During the intensive three day course, the team collected feedback from Dr. Joshua Ellul and the students in relation to the lecture material, workshops and overall program. We wanted to share with the community a recap of the first-ever Cosmos academic training course and feedback. Education of future users and builders is crucial to blockchain and DLT open-source technology projects.

What was presented

• Blockchain theory
• Language design related to blockchain
• Wallets
• Non-Fungible Token (NFT)
• Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
• Bonding Curves
• DAICO
• Curation Markets
• Stable Tokens
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
• Zero Knowledge Proofs
• Frontrunning
• Hands on workshops to launch a blockchain application

Course recordings

• Introduction to Golang
• History and Future of Blockchains
• Tendermint Introduction

Course Material

• Introduction to Golang
• History and Future of Blockchains
• Blockchain Topics of Interest
• Tendermint Introduction
• Cosmos Nameservice Tutorial

Q&A with Joshua Ellul, the director of DLT Technologies Master at the University of Malta

What was your reasoning for starting the Master’s degree and what value did you see in inviting the Tendermint team to teach?

Joshua: A while back, myself and Prof. Gordon Pace, started for our own amusement researching into the realm of blockchain and smart contracts. But as it the DLT space became more popular in the academic field, we started devoting serious time and resources into academic research in the field. It became increasingly clear to us that interest was growing in the area and the large potential the technology offered to reshape many services. We still feel we were right. The government of Malta announced its intention to become the blockchain island. The timing was perfect. We reached out to the government and expressed our interest to learn more and extend our help with regards to the vision. We came to the conclusion that if we were to become the blockchain island that we would need people educated in the subject.

And during this process we started to consulate the government and legislators with regards to the regulation. We met with lawyers, businesses and individuals involved in this process. We started to notice a huge disconnect between tech, law and business . And this is really when Gordon and myself concluded that there was not only a need for texperts in blockchain, versed in the underlying technical aspects, but also from legal and business angles. Therefore, we came to realize that there is a need for a multidisciplinary Master’s programme targeting students from different backgrounds and providing them with a broader introduction to the various areas of blockchain, yet allowing students to dig deeper in their particular area of interest. That’s really where the ideas contained in the programme came to life.

How did you announce the creation of the programme and how do you view students’ feedback regarding this masterclass?

Joshua: At the university, we had to undergo quality assurance processes, so we developed the programme and then went through the quality assurance — then the program was approved, we announced it both within the university and also internationally. We then started to inform individuals at conferences that we were to offer a Master’s degree in Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). So not too long ago, the largest crypto and media outlets found out about the course and it went viral across the news. We have received an overwhelming response from students both locally and internationally. The government through the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) gave the centre a scholarship worth €300,000, to help promote specialisation in the area.

What is the duration of the master class?

Joshua: 1 year full time or 2 years part time.

What do you expect your students to learn after this program and what kind of contribution do you believe they will bring to the blockchain industry?

Joshua: I believe the programme will lead to different types of careers. At the very least, we would expect that at the end of the programme, our students specialising in technical aspects will be able to go out into the real world and become a blockchain smart contracts specialist, but also have an appreciation for the business and regulatory environments. When you think about it, that smart contract code will have some form of implementation in law, it’s very important that our technology writers will be familiar with the regulatory framework within which they operate. Similarly those specialising in legal or business should be familiar with what smart contracts are and how they operate in order to fully understand how to regulate them, or create a use case for them.

We are helping to create individuals who will be able to work in multidisciplinary environments but who are also be experts within their particular profession, and from what I can tell from the students, they are really excited about not only digging deeper into their main area but also about all the other challenges that encapsulate the DLT industry.

How were you familiar with the Tendermint team and what got you interested in the technology?

Joshua: I met with Alessio Treglia (Head of EMEA Partnerships at Tendermint), at a conference in Malta, and as we started speaking about what Cosmos is doing, we realized that there would be potential for collaboration given what the programme wants to deliver to students and what is happening at Cosmos.

So it’s very important that on this programme, students have exposure to various aspects of industry related problems. That’s why we created an applied project where students will be able to work with industry members for 120 hours, a fact that immediately caught Alessio’s interest, and together we agreed that there could be potential to expose students to particular smart contracts or decentralized application platforms such as Cosmos. So we started discussing Cosmos and its mission to allow for inter blockchain communication, which really piqued my interest.

What are your takeaways from this collaboration? How did you find the courses presented by the Tendermint team in terms of information and structure? Will you invite more projects to collaborate and educate?

Joshua: The workshop held on the last day, was very beneficial, as it showed the students that not everything necessarily in this environment works the way we expect it to; and it is a part of the learning process.

And what I really liked is how Billy (Billy Rennekamp- Developer Relations Engineer) sat down with the students built a case from the ground up and allowed the students to identify these problems on their own, which was excellent. Or how the day before, Marko (Marko Baricevic-Developer Relations Engineer) showed the students how to build a network from the ground up.

Not only did students get an academic theoretical overview of how things work but by building applications on platforms, they were given the practical training that industry requires,

Once you create a program it is not only about seeing that it works according to the specification, but that it can actually live up to the requirements of a commercial off-the-shelf product or a releasable product.

You asked for it to not only be theory based but to also have workshops? Why was this?

Joshua: That’s right. What I noticed in this industry, especially in the DLT space is that everyone has to be hands-on in order to be able to build the tech. What is also interesting is that the people working on this cutting edge technology know that these challenges are also academic ones. So the space brings together not only professionals from business law and technology but also academia and the entire industry closer together and this is exactly what we want to encapsulate within this programme. I believe during these courses, one or two students already made a PR to Github and I would more than encourage them to continue doing that.

Students feedback session

Following the course, students in the DLT Master’s programme (IT stream), Alexander, Ryan, Martin and Karl gave feedback on the overall experience and course material.

How did you find this course presented by the Tendermint team?

Alexander: I learned a lot of new material as I wasn’t very much aware of Cosmos and Cosmos SDK or the ecosystem that it is built around. I was really impressed by the role of the Cosmos Hub, connecting different blockchains together. As the big blockchains are very dominant, if you allow private chains or smaller chains to access tokens, which are for example, running on Ethereum that adds another dimension. What most impressed me was learning about how you can create your own blockchain, but at the same time, how you can tap into the resources of the big chains that are dominant.

Ryan: The course structure was very well planned out even the pace by which the presenters went through the modulesIt was useful for me to see the technologies as they evolve, which was presented in a new light. I believe that this information will be very useful for me in my future work as well.

What programming language are you currently using?

Karl: C Sharp mostly and Javascript. Golang seems a little more complex compared to the languages I am used to, as it’s not object oriented, but I believe that once you get up to speed it becomes very easy to use.

Ryan: We are currently using C# & Python for backend and for frontend we use Angular JS, Angular 7, React and Javascript.

How do you find Golang compared to what you have learned so far?

Alexander: It’s definitely different because I am very used to classes being so much into object oriented programming, so it’s very new to me, I am still processing it. But for sure it is interesting and it seemed easy to use especially for someone who is used to code in C++ and C, kind of like an easy transition to me.

Karl: Golang seems a little more complex compared to the languages I am used to, as it’s not object oriented, but I believe that once you get up to speed it becomes very easy to use.

What is your most important takeaway from these lectures we held here?

Alexander: Definitely the ability to be able to integrate different blockchains using IBC.

Do you see yourself working on this technology in the future?

Alexander: Well what is nice about Tendermint is that you can be on your own chain but you are part of a bigger ecosystem. I also work as a consultant, therefore I can see the applications of private chains

Martin: Definitely, the amount of time that we have spent here is not enough for me to fully understand what’s under the hood of this technology, there is the need for additional study and I’m prepared to keep on reading and strengthening my knowledge in this regard.

What did you find most interesting from these courses?

Karl: I loved the “hands-on” approach as I was able to learn how to setup a node and how to develop a contract, which are the most important takeaways from this entire experience.

Ryan: What I loved from the entire programme was the Hackathon we did on the last day, it was more hands-on and we were able to do some coding using what we learned. From my personal experience, I know that I learn more from practical examples rather than lectures or presentations; I have to get my hands dirty to very much understand the information and in this matter, the tutors were very helpful.

Martin: My experience here was great; I didn’t imagine it would be such a full experience with a lot of useful information. I’ve learned a lot about what Cosmos is and I got to work with its features during the workshop days. Definitely, I’ll be using it for my future studies. It’s also nice to see that besides the traditional blockchains, there are also other ones which are much easier to implement. Although the information provided was new to me, there is a learning curve but I am excited and interested to follow up on this.

Support from Adriana, Marko, Michelle Leech. Feedback sessions conducted by Community Advocate, Adriana

A huge thank you goes to billy rennekamp, Adriana KalpaTech | Tendermint and Marko Baricevic for preparing the educational material and helping out organise the event.

Special thanks go to Jin Kwon for all the support. And a huge thank you goes to our good friends and partners Simply-VC. Without their help, this would not have been possible!

2020 kicks off with Tendermint Inc.’s first university course on blockchain was originally published in Tendermint Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Open source software allows us to build trust in a distributed, collaborative software development process, to know that the software behaves as expected and is reasonably secure. But the benefits of open source are strongest for those who directly interact with the source code. These people can use a computer which they trust to compile the source code into an operational version for themselves. Distributing binaries of open source software breaks this trust model, and reproducible builds restores it.

Tendermint Inc is taking the first steps towards a trustworthy binary distribution process. Our investment in reproducible builds makes doing binary distributions of the gaia software a possibility. We envision that the Cosmos Hub community will be our partners in building trust in this process. The governance features of the Cosmos Hub will enable a novel collaboration between Tendermint and that validator community to release only binaries that can be trusted by anyone.

Here is our game plan.

The release of the cosmoshub-3 will support our new reproducible build process. Tendermint developers will make a governance proposal with the hashes of all supported binaries. We will ask ATOM holders to reproduce the builds on computers they control and vote YES if the hashes match.

If the proposal passes, we will make the binaries available here via Github.

The benefits of reproducible builds

Gaia reproducible binaries then bring many significant advantages to developers and end users:

• Build sanity — the guarantee that the gaia suite can always be built from sources.
• Enable third-parties to independently verify executables to ensure that no vulnerabilities were introduced at build time.
• Large body of independent builders can eventually come to consensus on the correct reproducible binary output and protect themselves from targeted attacks.

How to verify that gaia binaries correspond to a repository snapshot

The gaia repository comes with the required tooling to build both server and client applications deterministically. First you need to clone https://github.com/cosmos/gaia and checkout the release branch or the commit you want to produce the binaries from. For instance, if you intend to build and sign reproducible binaries for all supported platforms of gaia’s master branch, you may want to do the following:

git clone https://github.com/cosmos/gaia && cd gaia

chmod +x contrib/gitian-build.sh

./contrib/gitian-build.sh -s email@example.com all

Append the -c flag to the above command if you want to upload your signature to the http://github.com/gaia/gaia.sigs repository as well.

If you want to build the binaries only without signing the build result, just type:

./contrib/gitian-build.sh all

Further information can be found here: github.com/cosmos/gaia/…/docs/reproducible-builds.md

References

• https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
• https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/pull/4262

Credits

Co-authored with Zaki Manian

Reproducible Builds was originally published in Tendermint Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.