Weekly CosmWasm Dev Digest #14 - October 13, 2023
ISSUE #14 - Cosmoverse Edition!
Hello cosmos devs! This week’s edition is special since not only I will covered what have happened during Cosmos last week but also, interesting things and alpha I got during Cosmoverse!
As you might know, Cosmoverse 2023 took place from Oct 2-5, in Istanbul, which I had the pleasure to attend. It was so interesting to meet so many of you IRL I only interacted with on X before 🤩.
Let's dive in!
🚀 Releases
Mars V2 Lands on Osmosis: Mars V2 has touched down on Osmosis, bringing new features and opportunities for DeFi enthusiasts, increasing capital efficiency and recreating most features CEXes offer like subaccounts and things like that. Definitely check it out.
Revamped Multisig Tool: Confio Tech's multisig tool gets a facelift, including support for testnets, new message types, ability to send multiple coins on a single transaction and more. Great improvements imo! Check it out.
🛠️ Developments
BitVM: The Bitcoin Network is gearing up for significant enhancements. BitVM allows you to theoretically do any computation on chain, without doing changes to the Bitcoin Network! BitVM deserves a dedicated post on its own, but for what I understand it’s like a limited version of EVM. Check it out and stay tuned as this thing is evolving fast!
Migaloo V3 Launch: Migaloo V3 is here, featuring PFM and IBC hooks.
Kepler Enables IBC Swaps: Kepler Wallet now supports IBC swaps thanks for Skip, simplifying cross-chain asset management. Read more about it here.
Stargaze breaks barriers, allowing you to buy NFTs with different tokens, even if they reside on separate chains 🤩. Learn more.
🗳️ Governance
TFL Proposal: Terraform Labs (TFL) proposes initiatives to kickstart the Terra economy, leveraging TFL's resources and expertise. This is a very exciting initiative, I encourage you to take part on the discussion!
Cosmoverse 2023
There were a lot of presentations, workshops and even hackathons during Cosmoverse, and if you have been in one of such events before you understand it is physically impossible to attend to everything as many of them happen in parallel.
It was a great event with a lot of people, more than last year’s Cosmoverse for what I could see. Great venue, amazing food, great people. Kudos to Cryptocito & his team for organizing it.
I encourage you to watch the livestreams, here they are:
Idk if there are recordings of the workshops, i would really love it since i missed so many interesting ones, there were cameras all around so I believe there should be footage somewhere, let me know if you find it!
I still need to catch up with some of the presentations, but overall, these are my takes and what I consider the highlights of the conference:
Osmosis V2
Osmosis had two presentations during the conference regarding the next iteration of Osmosis. The things Sunny presented were very exciting, namely improving the UX by making Abstract Accounts part of the SDK. Not only that, but integrating oauth authenticators natively so users can create private keys with regular web2 logins such as Twitter, Google and more.
This has massive implications.
It means regular people that are not familiar with crypto will be able to interact with Osmosis (and hopefully other apps in the ecosystem) by using web2 logins.
What was particularly interesting for me was that you will be able to add multiple authenticators to the same account and add permissions/restrictions to it. Imagine you want to have a wallet on your phone to vote in gov proposals. You ONLY want to vote with that wallet and nothing else. There will be pre- and post-transaction hooks you can use to for example verify that no funds left the wallet if say Twitter login was used.
This is extremely powerful and I can’t wait to see the new types of use cases this will enable.
There are also a bunch of new UI changes and features being added on Osmosis V2, so many to cover in this “summary“. Long story short, bullish on Osmosis.
TFL
Chris from Terraform Labs presented what the future of Terra looks like, and the philosophy they are building on.
This was one of the best if not the best presentation of the whole conference.
A very important point Chris mentioned was that TFL is dedicated on building products and services that drive real economic activity, the exact same premise Do Kwon built UST on. No BS protocols here, let’s see what they have in store:
Station V3: TFL learned so many lessons by messing up Station V2. Station V1 was a great wallet, simple UI, intuitive and most importantly, it WORKED (unlike V2 😅). Cris said, “If you loved V1, you are gonna love V3”.
Enterprise: We know Enterprise, a DAO tool made by TFL. It’s clean and has a good UX/UI. But Enterprise it’s gonna be more than a DAO tool, there are gonna be a suite of applications build around it that will allow you to run a business on chain. So what are these applications?
Treasury: an application to allow Enterprise DAOs to manage their treasury and run payments. Cosmos first and IBC enabled.
Payments: an application allowing Enterprise DAOs to run payroll on chain, create vesting contracts for token allocations and payment streams. All those payrolls/streams are represented as NFT so you can use them on DeFi protocols, we are likely gonna see some degen moves with this feature.
Labor Market: a place were DAOs or individuals can go and post or find jobs. It’s all tied with a decentralized reputation layer TLF has built based on Polygon ID 👀. The reputation you build can be taken with you anywhere, Web2 and Web3, there’s no platform lockups. Based on what I heard in some recent spaces, the reputation has zero-knowledge tech on it, enabling you to proof something to say a employer without revealing the underlying details.
Hub: a wrapper for all these apps. The hub will continue to expand, also developers can come and build apps for it.
Warp: this one is not new, but still worth mentioning. It’s an app that allows you to automate actions on chain. Think of it as cronjobs on chain.
Foundation: a tool to run infrastructure. RPC endpoints, indexers and all that good stuff. If you are running these, you know it can be a nightmare, especially when you just want to focus on your application. Go talk to TFL about it, they will do it all for you, for free.
Alliance: also not knew, a Cosmos SDK module that allows you to redirect your staking rewards. Chains that have the alliance module up and running are Terra, Migaloo, Chihuahua (I believe) and Carbon. There are plenty of use cases, but in short it allows you to align economic incentives between chains while enhancing security.
Jax: a way to write smart contracts in Javascript on Terra. I am not a fan of this one as I believe Javascript is too error-prone to write smart contracts, but still I am glad new dev tools are being built!.
Verity: the decentralized identity layer tied to the Labor Market application.
Tashkent: a set of tools to allow you to build your own market places. The Labor Market app is an implementation of Tashkent.
Quill: an 2 years R&D effort to rebuild the Terra blockchain, making it faster, cheaper, more decentralized, IBC and Cosmos SDK compatible. Taking the Terra blockchain to the next level in order to host apps that can handle real economic activity.
Well that was quite a list from TFL. But wait, there’s more. There are about 8 more applications on the pipeline ready to go.
When talking to Chris, Vlad, Evan, MC and the rest of TFL, I understood they are building the lego blocks they need first in order to build what they really envision. Very bullish on this.
Circle
Circle did a presentation on CCTP, what’s that? No, It’s not Chainlink’s CCIP 😅. The USDC Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) empowers seamless cross-chain transfers for USDC, bridging different blockchain ecosystems.
Remember native USDC came recently into the Cosmos via Noble? Well, with CCTP, you can transfer USDC in any chain into Noble, cheap and with fast finality.
The interesting thing about CCTP is that is not a bridge. They basically burn USDC in one chain and mint it in the other one. There’s a set of relayers scanning for CCTP transactions that take care of the job.
Composable
Perhaps one of the major news of the event was that IBC is finally coming into EVM. It’s not a secret that Composable has been working on an IBC implementation for EVM chains via Picasso Network.
Is IBC on EVM ready?
Not quite, but almost, it’s on Ethereum Testnet! Check more details about it here.
Newmetric
Jesse from Newmetric, ex infra lead at TFL lead a workshop on a tool he has been building for years called Cradle.
Amazing tool, really. It allows you to fork a mainnet and manipulate any balances, do any transactions as if you were the owner of any wallet (by bypassing the key verification checks), time travel into the future, test bulk transactions and so on. Really good tool and I look forward to using this.
Why is this useful?
Have you ever tried testing contract migrations? Or testing how your rewards contract would perform 5 years into the future? If so, you know that is a massive PAIN to do it properly, if possible. This tool allows you to do such things and more.
🤝 Sponsors
If you are a project in the Cosmos ecosystem and would to get exclusive coverage, detailed articles or videos showcasing your product, please reach out to me at @jvr0x and let’s see what we can cook together!
That's a wrap for this week! I hope you liked the alpha.
Stay informed, stay curious, and keep exploring the cosmos!