The non-profit organization and steward of Cosmos, the Interchain Foundation (ICF), has announced the launch of Interchain Accounts, a protocol based on inter-blockchain communication (IBC).
Largest Software Upgrade to Cosmos Ecosystem
According to the official announcement shared with CryptoPotato, Cosmos’ latest update will enable an entire blockchain to control an account on a separate chain. The release of Interchain Account means that users will be able to access the whole Interchain with the help of their single Cosmos Hub account.
So far, IBC has activated 38 projects, some of which are – Terra, CryptoOrg and Gravity Bridge. In the last month alone, the IBC ecosystem exceeded 8.4 million transfers.
The main objective behind Interchain Accounts is to enable one blockchain to access the application characteristics of another, which can be in the form of stake, vote, swap tokens, among others.
Using IBC should help provide an easy way to create application composability, similar to the interaction of smart contracts on the EVM. The basic architecture consists of sovereign and interoperable blockchains. Therefore, the composability of Interchain Accounts does not remove the existing advantages of application-specific blockchains.
Charleen Fei, IBC Product Lead at the Interchain Foundation, said:
“Enabling composability in IBC allows innovation in distinct applications to be deployed without needing to upgrade the entire Interchain, providing a more scalable innovation model that preserves compatibility.
This is made possible by allowing lower-level primitives to be created, optimized, and then built into shared infrastructures that are both stateful (value through information) and permissionless (value through accessibility).”
Stargate paved the way for interoperable DeFi apps
Before Interchain Accounts, Stargate was a historic milestone for the Cosmos project. For the uninitiated, Stargate essentially represented a set of upgrades to add new features and performance improvements to blockchains built with the Cosmos SDK.
One of them is the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol, developed to deliver interoperability by enabling DLT networks to interact with each other.
Prior to the launch of IBC, networks were isolated from each other and individual projects had to develop their native bridges to communicate and connect to the larger blockchain ecosystem. At the end of 2021, Cosmos revealed to have recorded 5.8 million IBC transactions and an equally impressive traction among DeFi applications.
In yet another development, Cosmos-powered privacy startup Nym Technologies recently onboarded network validators such as Swisscom, Dokia Capital, Chorus One, Nodes, Guru, and a few others from the community like Commodum.
