It´s official: CosmWasm Integration to the Cosmos Hub!🐱‍🏍
By: Misang Ryu
Tags: Proposal, Multichain, Governance, Smart Contracts, Cosmos Hub

CosmWasm Hub Proposal Passed

We are thrilled to announce that the proposal #25 on the integration of CosmWasm to the Cosmos Hub has passed successfully! We are proud that there was more voting participation(72.42%) than any other proposal except the Cosmos Hub 3 upgrades and Governance Hub funding proposal. We also made a new record of delegator turn out, 5% of the whole network, what a pleasant surprise!

Amount to spend: 25k ATOMs from the community pool

Voting period: 12th-26th May 2020

Voter turnout: 72.42 %

Yes vote: 99.99%

CosmWasm is humbled by the response from the Cosmos community for the support and confidence in the proposal.

It is an important proposal as it places a smart contract container at the heart of the Cosmos Hub.

The CosmWasm team are looking forward to tailoring CosmWasm so it is “Ready for Integration¨ following the IBC upgrade.

What is this proposal for?

Validator-reviewed smart contract capability for the Cosmos Hub

Governance control over the complete lifecycle of smart contracts on the Hub, including upgrading and shutting down.

Working example of staking derivatives, deployed to a testnet

Why CosmWasm integration to Hub important?

After the launch of IBC(Inter-Blockchain Communication), there will be many competing hubs. The hub will need to provide necessary functionality and adapt to the needs of the ecosystem in a timely manner, without requiring downtime or forking. CosmWasm allows faster and easier iterations.

IBC is the future of the Cosmos Hub, and CosmWasm is the key to make the Hub to be the center of the ecosystem. Two largest post-IBC value propositions, relaying Dynamic IBC Protocols and Rented Security(Cross-chain staking), using ATOMs as collateral for smaller zones, would greatly benefit from CosmWasm’s flexibility.

Adding code to Gaia can open up security issues, and this should be tightly controlled. A misbehaving CosmWasm contract cannot damage the functionality of other contracts. It doesn’t add any functionality to Hub nor allow anyone to upload contracts or run them. It just provides a mechanism for Governance to add new functionality to the Hub in a very incremental approach.

With CosmWasm integration to the Hub, the entry barrier to add functionality gets much lower. This opens up the door wider to those non-core developers too.

Action to build proposed features

We are adding some key features to CosmWasm to convert it from a permissionless, immutable smart contract platform to a permissioned platform with Governance control for upgrading or shutting down contracts. This is a key requirement to be able to integrate CosmWasm to the Cosmos Hub with minimal disruption. Follow the implementation of the proposed features, we plan to demonstrate it on a testnet and fine tune following community feedback.

Our goal is to get the technology ready. You can test out, experiment, play around with all the possible scenarios of CosmWasm smart contracts. For example building a staking derivatives module. CosmWasm smart contracts provide the basic technology and then Governance decides the actual execution after reflection and discussion from the community based on the experience of trying the software.

Future Plan

We will continue development of CosmWasm, especially adding IBC integration as well as working towards a stable 1.0 release that can be audited and safely deployed (Q4 2020).

With the 0.8 release, CosmWasm allows the Hub integration work of secure smart contracts with native SDK modules in a permissionless setting. Between this and a recent ICF grant for IBC integration, we will focus on contract migration, adding optional permissioning/governance control, integrating IBC with CosmWasm contracts, and building out a healthy developer ecosystem of tooling and contracts around CosmWasm.

With the Cosmos Hub, we now have 6 projects-CyberCongress, Enigma, OKChain, Regen Network, Terra- committed or seriously considering integration of CosmWasm on their mainnet and we hope to be the go-to for smart contracts in the Cosmos that want to leverage all existing Cosmos SDK logic.

Community feedback

There were some concerns regarding security, complexity, timeline and smart contract autonomy against the governance but overall, we have received highly positive and supportive feedback from diverse social networks;

Figment Networks: “An important next step to keeping the Hub and ATOM competitive”

Asmodot: “A big thumbs up for this. This is one of the most important proposals Cosmos has to make and will greatly influence the future value proposition of the Hub”

Zaki Manian: “The most bullish thing to happen for ATOM in 2020, let’s build some comparative advantage.”

“The big thing that CosmWasm will let us do is extend the slashing conditions on the Hub to allow ATOMs to provide collateral to more zones”

Certus One: “Adding smart contracts increases the Hub utility”

Serejandmyself: “Very happy to see diversification of the community pool funds”

Chorus One: “We think this feature may help the Cosmos Hub to establish itself as the center of the IBC ecosystem by enabling quicker connections and other desired features”

Stakewith.us: “It’s important to implement a governance mechanism to add new functionalities to the Cosmos Hub in a post-IBC world.”

Thank you for your support, community!

Stay tuned for our next announcement of milestone achievement!