Polkadot and Cosmos are the leading interoperability protocols in the space currently. Polkadot was co-created by Dr. Gavin Wood, a co-creator of Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin.
Cosmos is created by the Tendermint team as another way of communicating across different blockchains.
While both technologies’ end goals are similar, they have very different implementations that I’d like to double click on.
Implementation
Polkadot has a main chain called the Relay Chain — with child chain offshoots like parachains. Parachains have their own operations, but they always re-connect back to the Relay Chain for overall governance, security, statefulness, etc.
Cosmos has a ‘hub and zone’ model. Each zone is a spoke connected to a hub — which is a central connector chain between zones. Hubs can be connected with other hubs, and this interconnected network is the Cosmos network. Each zone is self-sovereign and only connects back to hubs for inter-blockchain communication (IBC) and governance.
Development
Polkadot is not live on mainnet (i.e., real money) yet. They have a ‘testnet’ network called Kusama, and plenty of developer support and a vibrant community of dapps being built — arguably having a better community than that of Cosmos.
In contrast, Cosmos is live. It’s the foundation for mainly successful blockchains like Terra and Binance Chain (not Binance Smart Chain).
Security
Polkadot leverages the shared security of the Relay Chain — thus, parachains are able to use the robust pooled security of the overall Polkadot network vs. bootstrapping security and consensus from scratch.
Cosmos zones have individual security that they each individually security. There is no shared security, even in the event of a linking through a hub.
Customization
Because of shared consensus of parachains to the Relay Chain, Polkadot doesn’t have a lot of customization of the parameters of the blockchain compared to Cosmos.
In contrast, Cosmos has a lot of blockchains that form their own consensus, parameters, and can even form private networks without communicating with the rest of the network.
Membership
Polkadot hosts an auction to be a parachain, meaning that projects have to pay to become a parachain on the network.
In Cosmos, anyone can build a hub or a zone — for free.
Consensus
Polka uses a consensus mechanism called GRANDPA, in which the Relay Chain decides on the state of the whole ecosystem. Since GRANDPA just validates based on the highest block, this consensus can — in theory — scale to >1000 validators.
Again, it’s not live and hasn’t been tested in prod yet.
Cosmos has the Tendermint consensus, in which each zone quickly talks to one another for one-block finality. This consensus may potentially cause overload for validators and may not scale past 200 validators.
Governance
Polkadot has a strict voting process based on stake-weighted voting of the native coin DOT.
In Cosmos, each zone/hub has their own governance. They stake ATOM, the native coin, in order to participate in Cosmos, one of the major hubs in the network (but again, participate in the Cosmos hub is purely optional in Cosmos).
Cross-chain Messaging
This is where Polkadot shines. Arbitrary message passing between parachains. is supported through this protocol. This means that Parachain A can call a smart contract inside Parachain B; cross-chain composability is strong. However, this may overload validators though to keep track of all the parachain states.
Cosmos has Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC), which is good for token transfers across zones through the hub. Just token transfers, not true composability.
SDKs
Polkadot has its Substrate SDK: a WebAssembly (WASM) compiler for any language to build protocols and apps on Polkadot. Substrate also has more modules out-of-the-box than Cosmos.
The Cosmos SDK is Go-based.
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