Who's Building dApps On COSMOS: 2020 UPDATE

Early Bitcoin and Ethereum investors have earned significant profits on their coins. All they needed to do was tinker around with new tech, learn how to mine, or just use the first dApps that were rewarding their users with free coins. Today, Bitcoin is over a decade old and Ethereum has already lived through its best years. In this environment, everyone’s now asking “Who’s next?” Well, the answer to this is what tech-enthusiasts like to call Blockchain 3.0!

In this article, we’re going to discuss the Cosmos network and analyze why it’s one of the most promising technologies today, and what projects were developed on it in 2020.

Cosmos is not a blockchain. Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains, each powered by BFT consensus algorithms, such as the Tendermint consensus. Being an ecosystem of multiple blockchains, the network can scale up to meet the current traffic needs. As such, project developers won’t have to worry about scalability anymore. If the decentralization market faces mainstream adoption, every dApp built on the Cosmos network will be ready for it.

Bitcoin and Ehtereum are both following an old isolated architecture. Bitcoin was the first public blockchain that introduced the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism. Ethereum offered the possibility to build decentralized applications on top of this, so having one blockchain to sustain all of the traffic is not currently possible. That’s why Ethereum has seen network congestion. Blockchain manifests itself differently, however; instead of going down like traditional servers, it just becomes slow and very expensive to use. 

Beyond this, we can’t even talk about other blockchains, as the most popular ones are either a fork of one of the codebases built on top of these blockchains or are simply in an experimental phase. Plus, the scalability limitations are not specific to Ethereum but to all protocols that use a single blockchain.

Cosmos is making blockchain interoperable. You can see their vision as creating an “Internet of blockchains” in which the individual networks can communicate with each other in a decentralized way. Being part of the same ecosystem, Cosmos can guarantee that the transactions are quickly processed and blockchains can maintain sovereignty.

The team made it easy for developers of any kind to build their project on top of the Cosmos network. Open-source tools like Tendermint, the Cosmos SDK, and IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communications Protocol) are publicly available to connect and interact with the Cosmos blockchains. This ecosystem is growing fast with new projects joining the network and building decentralized applications ready to use right from day one. Let’s discover a few of these projects that were started in 2020!

TomiEx Exchange

TomiEx is a new-generation cryptocurrency exchange whose coin TEX is based on the Cosmos blockchain. The exchange is using the innovative Proof-of-Stake (PoS) technology to reward members for supporting the community. 

The project issued a symbolic coin called TEX and imposed a strict limit of 575,000,000 TEX coins. TEX is developed using the Cosmos-SDK framework, which made it easy for the team to implement the PoS algorithm securely. With PoS, the TomiEx exchange has a built-in marketing tool to attract new users. As soon as the number of unique users reaches 200,000, the PoS technology will be suspended and a reverse mechanism for burning token emissions will be activated. The number of burned tokens will be determined by the number of users. If fewer users are using the exchange, more tokens will be burnt. If the number of users goes up again, the coin issuance will continue. The exchange economy is essentially governed by the PoS algorithm.

The whole mechanism won’t be possible without the Cosmos ecosystem. Cosmos is using the PoS method which makes the consensus mechanism completely virtual. We are talking about 200,000 unique users on a single blockchain. That is not possible on any other blockchain protocol. Cosmos is making it possible and TEX holders can be assured in knowing that they will receive their daily rewards generated in real time.

Band Protocol

Band Protocol is a decentralized oracle framework that uses a data delivery network, a blockchain built on Cosmos-SDK to accommodate user-defined data requests, and a support data oracle on multiple blockchains all in one. With Cosmos, Band becomes a cross-chain data oracle. As a quick refresher, a data oracle is a service that can aggregate and connect real-world data to decentralized applications and smart contracts on a blockchain. 

Initially, Band Protocol was using common datasets that Ethereum smart contracts could request data from. At the time, the protocol relied on the team to keep these datasets updated. They were communicating with data providers, but the onboarding of each entity was very slow. Later on, the team joined the Cosmos network to create a new, specialized oracle protocol that would be faster, cheaper, and more developer-friendly.

The new BandChain is built using the Cosmos SDK, which makes it simple for Band Protocol to implement an oracle on virtually any blockchain, making it a true blockchain-agnostic service.

Aragon

Aragon is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that allows third parties to easily create their own DAOs by using pre-defined smart contracts. Aragon Chain is being developed on the Cosmos network that uses a PoS consensus mechanism to allow for fast transactions between DAOs on the network at a very low cost. 

The team sees governance as the top of any given human structure, so they are making it easy for any project to implement such a system within its network. Governance means constant interaction with the community, a load that can’t be sustained by Ethereum. That’s why the team chose to build Aragon Chain’s features using Cosmos SDK. By default, the chain will support EVM, which makes it easy for them to deploy their existing apps on the newly created chain without future development. 

Later on, Aragon Chain could become a chain in the Cosmos network and interoperate with other chains, even Ethereum, instead of using a direct bridge to the Ethereum mainnet.

Bluzelle

Bluzelle is a data storage blockchain that offers decentralized applications an easy way to access and maintain a decentralized database. Bluzelle Chain is based on Cosmos, which allows its solution to be easily accessible in a fast and affordable way by any dApp.

With Cosmos, Bluzelle expands from database offerings to data services. The project will soon be able to offer data wallets, data feeds, and data oracles. Not only will this help the ecosystem scale, but it also gives Bluzelle access to PoS where farmers can earn BLZ coins for good behavior. BLZ holders can become delegators and pool tokens with a farmer to increase the stake and share rewards. These are all original features that Bluzelle can implement and ship faster thanks to the Cosmos integration.

On top of everything, the Cosmos ecosystem expands Bluzelle horizons as it can dynamically connect to other applications using the IBC protocol. That makes it even easier for other dApps to access Bluzelle services.

OKExChain

OKExChain is a public blockchain developed by the OKEx cryptocurrency exchange team. The chain is based on a Cosmos SDK forked chain and is used as the underlying architecture for the exchange’s ecosystem.

The chain is structured in a way that any participant can become a super-node, allowing developers and businesses to build decentralized applications or issue digital assets with ease. To achieve a scalable, efficient, and user-friendly development experience, OKExChain is developed on top of the Cosmos SDK. In this way, OKExChain supports integration with multiple ecosystems, allowing data transmission between different isometric chains. The OKEx team is offering a cross-chain toolkit containing various cross-chain protocols for new and existing apps to be able to communicate with the other chains with ease.

OKExChain wouldn’t be able to allow interoperability without the cross-chain features of the Cosmos SDK. OKDEX will be the dApp launched on OKExChain, and one of its main features will be the ability to trade pairs on the other chains within the Cosmos ecosystem.

These are five projects that are being integrated within the Cosmos ecosystem. Cosmos makes blockchain powerful and easy to develop with the modularity of its Cosmos SDK. If you are a developer, feel free to reach out to the team members of any of these projects to discover how easy the implementation process was for each of them.

If you are a blockchain enthusiast, the user-friendliness, performance, and low transaction fees of these apps will amaze you. Cosmos showed the dApp ecosystem that decentralization can be achieved without scalability compromises. Are you ready for a seamless product experience?