At this time, blockchains communicate via fixed solutions (state channel, sidechain, exchange, bridge, and so on). With Cosmos' Stargate update scheduled for February 18, the tools for blockchain interoperability will be available on the mainnet.
A great moment in the history of cryptocurrencies
“This is a long-awaited release for a lot of Cosmos-based projects,” Band Protocol's Kevin Lu said of Stargate. "To us, this will enable seamless, seamless integrations with any decentralized Cosmos-based application, forwarding Oracle data in a highly scalable and tamper-proof manner."
Zaki Manian of Iqlusion, who leads much of Cosmos development, explained that once Stargate is available, a governance vote will be needed to activate inter-blockchain communication (IBC), which will take two weeks to finalize.
Tendermint-based chains will need to upgrade to Cosmos SDK to launch IBC technology. If such chains activate Stargate en masse, this has the potential to be a great moment, not just for Cosmos but for the entire history of cryptocurrencies. Many independent bridges have been built between blockchains so far, but Stargage could mark a new era in composability, where we see a great system that allows many different chains to exchange value and build on each other's strengths.
Many chains intend to connect to Stargate
There are Tendermint-based projects more important than many might imagine. A new site called Cosmos-Cap is monitoring the market capitalization of projects in the ecosystem, valuing all chains together currently at just under $ 13 billion.
Cosmos' native token, ATOM, is currently trading around $ 8, with a market capitalization of $ 1,9 billion. Cosmos-Cap shows (among others) Binance Chain, the Terra stablecoin system, the aforementioned Oracle Band project, the Oasis privacy blockchain and the MakerDAO Kava debt platform and Bitcoin Revolution.
While not on that list, payments and remittances blockchain Celo has also taken steps to connect with Stargate. Like many big updates, Stargate could add other side benefits to Tendermint-based blockchains, such as faster throughput and the implementation of Google's protocol buffer standard (which should also be suitable for interoperability).
Since 2019, the Cosmos project has been as volatile as cryptocurrency in general. Although the project's financial health improved in late 2019 thanks to conservative treasury management, in early 2020 it looked like it was falling apart from a staffing point of view.
Despite everything, already in the early summer it seemed that Cosmos had withstood the internal storms. With the few interoperability tools available in the ecosystem, composability should facilitate this first phase and FOMO will encourage laggards to download updates quickly. This could become very interesting. As Ethereum tests its Beacon chain, Cosmos will have something very similar to a fragmented system running on the mainnet.
