While most blockchains are designed as a platform for developers to build on top of Cosmos, they aim to allow developers to build their own blockchains. And instead, be a part of an internet of blockchain.

Note: This article is not financial advice.

While most are panicking about the state of their portfolios, currently, I’m using this opportunity to research and look into solid crypto picks. That I can either ride into the next bull run or that I can accumulate over the next few years and wait out this bear market. And regardless of which of those two outcomes ends up happening in the next few months or so, one pick I firmly got my eye on is Cosmos and its ATOM token.

Cosmos the answer to cross-chain communication?

While most chains are moving to proof of stake, there’s very little thought given to just how decentralisation is actually achieved on a perfect state network in its early years. For example, let’s say the proof of stake chain I’ve been working on in my free time is now production-ready, and I’m ready to roll it out publicly. With proof of work, I would just distribute the minor and tell people to go nuts. Everyone that starts mining then becomes a node and aids in the decentralisation of the network.

However, one big problem with proof of stake is that the coins aren’t distributed in this way. And therefore, there is no incentive for someone to actually run a node in the early years of a chain. So instead, the chain needs to sell off some of its tokens on the contingency that the people it sells it to then run nodes to aid the network.

Then slowly, over time, as tokens are sold and bought by the public, and ultra start running nodes on the network, and people start staking, which add to the decentralisation process. They will eventually transition into a fully decentralised blockchain, and any systems that were helping prop the network up when it wasn’t fully decentralised would be turned off.

This actually happened fairly recently with Cardano, where they produced their first-ever fully decentralised block. So, proof of stake requires a lot more work to actually build up the initial network than proof of work does. However, if we’re all moving forward towards proof of stake anyway, what is the solutions?17 Best Crypto Trading Bots in 2021 (Free & Paid)Best crypto trading bots for Binance, Coinbase, Kucoin, and other crypto exchanges in 2021. Quadency, Bitsgap…medium.com

Cosmos SDK

how do you create a tailored proof-of-stake chain without actually creating a proof-of-stake chain? On the Cosmos network, anyone can create a blockchain and then use the Cosmos hub as a central source of truth and also as a way to communicate with other blockchains on the Cosmos network.

They’re known on the platform zones. To figure out how Tendermint actually achieves this, we first need to break down a blockchain into its three most simple components, and they are as follows.

First, we have an application layer which is where the state machine lives; this is where the current state of the machine, any smart contracts or balances, and the state of the ledger happen.

Secondly, there’s a consensus layer which is where an agreement is reached on the absolute state of the ledger and a networking layer which is how nodes on the network communicate with all other nodes on the network.

So what if we abstracted the blockchain out instead of having all three of these figurative layers all in the same place? What if we instead split it out, so an SDK or a toolkit provided the consensus and networking layer. And then, a developer could just create just the application layer. This is where the three core components of Cosmos come in. Read More…