The Interchain Foundation (ICF), a Swiss non-profit that is focused on advancing interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized networks, confirms that the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC), the backbone of the Cosmos ecosystem, “surpassed 11 million transfers in February.”
Introduced in March 2021 as part of Cosmos’ Stargate upgrade, to date, “38 projects have activated IBC, with Fetch AI, Altered Carbon, Sommelier and cheqd joining the IBC interchain in February.”
The February release of Interchain Accounts “allows blockchains to securely control accounts on other chains over IBC, bringing exponential composability between Cosmos zones without reducing zone sovereignty.”
Charleen Fei, IBC Product Lead at the Interchain Foundation, said:
“If the crypto narrative of 2020 was around DeFi and the deconstruction of financial systems to composable primitives, 2021 saw the growth of interoperability—the interaction of these primitives across the growing diversity of crypto ecosystems—as a major component of the narrative. However, this world of sovereign interchain ecosystems with their own values and assets was already a prescient and integral part of the original 2016 Cosmos whitepaper, and continues to be a core part of the Cosmos thesis and stack. As the rest of the blockchain space catches up to the idea that the future is the multichain, we are paving the way for our vision of this world with features such as Interchain Accounts.”
The Interchain Foundation funds, stewards, and “advances” the Cosmos Ecosystem. Actively supporting and incentivizing development within the ecosystem, the Interchain Foundation plays “an integral role in the community-driven initiatives to drive innovation within Cosmos. Upcoming upgrades to the Cosmos ecosystem include Interchain Security which will further improve user experience in quickly and easily deploying high-security blockchains.”
Fei added:
“Reaching the end goal of mass adoption will require continued work being done on making interoperability protocols powerful and secure, but an equally important challenge to tackle will be usability. Having a truly interoperable landscape also presents a new set of usability challenges and we are already seeing the first iterations of solutions across the entire Interchain in the forms of Interchain native block explorers, interfaces, and wallets. We hope to continue to inspire what is next—a rich and diverse landscape of yet-to-be mapped out products which will comprise the Interchain.”
As covered, Cosmos is “a decentralized network of independent, scalable, sustainable, and interoperable blockchains; there are more than 250 blockchain apps and services in the Cosmos Network with over $125 billion of digital assets under management.”
Focused on scalability and usability, Cosmos “enables developers to rapidly and easily build blockchain applications.” By enabling blockchains to transact with one another, Cosmos “creates a network of application-specific chains, spanning user-owned and operated platforms for decentralized finance (DeFi), social impact, privacy, gaming, as well as secure enterprise systems.”