Staking Hub: Confio Tardigrade AMA
By: Clayton Menzel
Tags: Cosmwasm, Defi, Confio, Proof Of Stake, Cosmos Network

Confio are the people behind CosmWasm, the smart contract engine built for the Cosmos ecosystem. The Confio team is planning to launch a new chain within the Cosmos ecosystem called Tardigrade, with their CosmWasm smart contract engine at the center. On October 15th, we sat down with Martin Worner, Misang Ryu, and Orkun KülÇe of Confio joined us in Staking Hub to answer all of our questions.

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Quick Takes

Tardigrade plans to leverage CosmWasm in order to improve DeFi

Automated Market Maker will support ETH and ATOM trading pairs

Tardigrade plans to use Peggy to connect to Ethereum and implement IBC

Will use a Proof of Engagement Consensus

There will be on-chain governance

CosmWasm Primer

As mentioned before, CosmWasm is a smart contract engine for the Cosmos ecosystem that is being built by Confio. CosmWasm has similar architecture to Solidity contracts on Ethereum, but the Confio team claims that there will be improvements such as being more resilient to attack vectors like Reentrancy, Delegate Call, Block Timestamp, and Manipulation.

“As built for the Cosmos ecosystem, naturally tight integration with Cosmos-SDK and interoperability with multi-chains is guaranteed with IBC integration.” Orkun KülÇe, Confio Developer Evangelist & Engineer

Tardigrade Chain

The team at Confio sees Tardigrade as a self-regulated and self-governed chain built for “Regulated DeFi”.

“We are building governance frameworks to ensure that regulated institutions can comply by creating self-sovereign groups (a form of permissioned groups).” Martin Worner, Confio COO & VP of Product

Outside of this, the Confio team is also building an Automated Market Maker for Tardigrade with plans to support ETH/ATOM trading pairs at launch by leveraging Peggy, a peg zone for the Cosmos ecosystem and Ethereum. It will also support trading pairs of TDG, which is the native token on Tardigrade.

Proof of Engagement

Tardigrade will leverage a Proof of Engagement mechanism for consensus. Similar to Proof of Stake, validators will be rewarded on-chain if they successfully validate blocks, maintain quality uptime, and avoid committing any equivocations. In addition, validators will be rewarded for positive community contributions off-chain.

“The incentive mechanism of the Engagement Rewards is designed to bring community wide participation, and this collaboration makes a chain much stronger. Through the combination of Stake and Engagement Rewards you can have the case where high stake + low rewards is the same as low stake + high rewards, in addition, we use sigmoid curves as a way of disincentivizing reward through large stakes thus promoting decentralization.” Misang Ryu, Confio Head of Business Development & Sales

Types of engagement and rewards for said engagement are still to be determined by the Confio team. Overtime, decisions regarding engagement rewards will be decided on-chain via community vote.

Project Status

The Confio team is preparing to launch a Tardigrade incentivized testnet in Q4 of this year with the hopes of launching their Tardigrade mainnet in Q1 2021. You can join their community Discord if you would like to get involved.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Martin Worner, Misang Ryu, and Orkun KülÇe for spending an hour with Staking Hub to answer all of our questions!

Thank you Gavin for co-hosting and thanks to our Staking Hub community for all of your wonderful questions.

Feel free to join our Staking Hub Telegram group if you haven’t already.