A New Direction

After working in the epicenter of the Cosmos ecosystem for 6 years, I have decided not to continue down the path the ICF is taking. After being at the center of it all for so long I wanted a change of scenery and pace. Cosmos has slowed down and innovation, while still present, is not in the areas I see the future of blockchain going.

I joined for the early vision of Cosmos, one where applications limited in throughput and computation (due to a VM) could build their own chain and define their own constraints. Application developers then began building sovereign chains because there was a premium when raising money for building L1s. This has led to a proliferation of chains launching without market validation. There were countless chains launched with high inflation that ended up robbing the token holders of value since the product was not yet figured out.

Over the past year I took a step back to think about the future of blockchain as a whole. I began to look at the Cosmos vision differently. AppChains are the correct vision, but how Cosmos does it creates silos. Think of cities with walls and IBC is a tunnel through the wall. Are cities with walls and small tunnels the final destination for Blockchain?

The Cosmos Appchain vision was a step in the right direction. It ushered in a new era of blockchains, allowing developers to build complex applications without sharing compute with other applications. Cosmos’s most powerful feature is sovereignty. Sovereignty allows users to build their own application and scale it how they want. However, there are two parts to sovereignty, execution and security. All anyone adopting the appchain thesis wants is sovereign execution, but only a few want sovereign security. Cosmos groups sovereignty into an omnibus, while sovereignty can be broken down based on user needs.

The rollup world has adopted sovereign execution as the main selling point. Security is adopted through different means, verification and block production. The rollup world adopted the fragmentation and isolation of chains from Cosmos. While the ecosystems can be unified, the fragmentation of liquidity and users is harder.

This has led me to the question, can sovereign execution be standalone and created in a way that offers users synchronous composability? Thus, recreating the same UX as a L1?

There are a few designs working towards this direction, specifically those around Based Rollups, Jam from Polkadot and finally Lazy Bridging from Celestia. While the designs of these three areas are overlapping, but not exactly the same, they combine interesting components that usher in a new era of blockchain applications.

As for myself and Binary, we will be moving closer to Celestia. The Celestia team is pushing forward in the direction that we believe will enable the next generation of applications. We are excited to also accelerate the roadmap of Celestia and the vision that Mustafa, Ismail and John have set out. This transition marks an important step in our journey as builders. While we’re stepping back from core maintenance of the Cosmos SDK, which has been a significant part of our work, we see tremendous opportunity in contributing to the next era of blockchain.

Celestia is just the first step in our new direction. We have several exciting projects planned that will leverage our experience in blockchain development, system design and product development. We’ll be announcing these projects as they materialize, each focusing on pushing the boundaries of how users interact with blockchains.

If you are interested in working with Binary Builders, reach out, marko@binary.builders or onur@binary.builders. We are happy to help you and your team in using the Cosmos SDK and its libraries to build your application and more.

Stay tuned for future product announcements by following https://x.com/binary_builders.