Our fourth quarter of funding proposals closed submissions on October 31st, 2020. This is the third time our new process has been followed since the update last year. We reviewed the applications internally and compiled the proposals recommended by the Board of Management. These were included with comments from the Technical Advisory Board and submitted to the Foundation Council for approval. The time spent since then was on finalizing service agreements and getting the required signatures in place.
The following proposals have now been finalized and work has begun by the respective teams. This comes in tandem with the Q4 Financial Transparency Report. To apply for Q1 2021 please submit applications by February 14th at apply.interchain.io.
Althea Network has received follow-on funding from their original proposal to productionize the Cosmos Ethereum bridge module, previously known as Peggy. They have been working together with UniFiDAO to rebrand as the Gravity Bridge. This latest agreement includes bi-directional capabilities so that not only can Eth-native assets travel to and from the Cosmos Hub, but Cosmos-native assets can travel to and from Mainnet Ethereum. This feature is nick-named “Atoms-on-Uniswap” because it enables ATOMs to interact with the popular Ethereum Dex Uniswap, as well as any other ERC-20 compliant smart contract. Furthermore this agreement will go to funding an incentivized testnet leading up to a mainnet launch.
Ape Unit, the team who has been working on the Eventivize platform with support from the Interchain Foundation, has finalized another agreement to be the stewards of the new User Experience Working Group (UX WG) which has already made fast progress on the concept of a Cosmos Hub as a registry for Chain-IDs and more. Furthermore they will be working with projects and contributors across the ecosystem to develop best practices for user facing interfaces to coherently display and interact with IBC connected assets. These learnings will be crystalized and presented on a soon-to-be-released platform they are developing, called NeueUX.
Bianjie AI, the team building IRISNet, have finalized a service agreement with the Interchain Foundation to add capabilities to the Cosmos SDK that would allow it to be legally compliant with enterprise standards in the Chinese market. These extensions will make it possible for developers to build on the Open Permissioned Blockchain (OPB), part of the Chinese Blockchain Service Network (BSN).
Not yet released Cosmos SDK Package Manager, Atlas, is being built by Fission Labs. They have recently finalized a service agreement to extend the capabilities of this package manager to include a network crawler that will keep track of open and available nodes. This kind of service will play an important role in the ongoing efforts of the UX WG mentioned earlier, in providing client developers with a robust list of available network endpoints with which to verify IBC enabled assets. We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate Fission Labs founder, Aleksandr Bezobuchuk, on his Brazilian Ju-Jitsu Silver Medal at the 2020 World Master IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu Championship.
Sam Panter has recently finalized a service agreement with the Interchain Foundation to take his open source Multi-Sig wallet to production quality. Expect to see improved functionality for multi-signature accounts in the shape of a web app with convenient message passing and signing capabilities.
Sikka has recently finalized a service agreement with the Interchain Foundation to begin research on threshold decryption for transactions in consensus. This would go towards an eventual implementation of the technique in the Tendermint Core codebase. This technology is an exciting development in the ongoing race between users and miners and the ever-increasing danger of Miner Extractable Value (MEV). Enabled, this would allow transactions to become encrypted while in the mempool and decrypted only once they have been securely finalized within a block. As a result block producers (miners/validator) would not be able to read and reorder transactions for their own benefit.
Todd Santoro Designs has finalized a service agreement for ongoing maintenance of the Cosmos Jobs platform. Launched last year it has quickly grown to become a destination for jobs and candidates who are interested in new opportunities within the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. If you’re looking for work or looking to hire take a look at Cosmos Jobs.
