In latest shakeup, Interchain Foundation acquires Skip to refocus Cosmos Hub at ecosystem’s core
2024-12-11
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The Cosmos ecosystem is undergoing one of its most significant transformations to date.
The Interchain Foundation, Cosmos' leading development organization, announced Tuesday that it is acquiring blockchain solutions provider Skip, now rebranded as Interchain Inc., to centralize product development and unify the Cosmos ecosystem. This move marks a shift away from decentralized leadership as co-founder Ethan Buchman steps down from helping to lead the Swiss non-profit, positioning the ICF to revitalize its focus on growth and solidify the Cosmos Hub's role as the ecosystem's core.
“The acquisition of Skip marks a transformative moment for the Interchain Foundation and Cosmos itself,” ICF President Josh Cincinnati told The Block in a direct message. “By aligning with Skip's unparalleled execution and their rapport with the broader ecosystem, we are re-envisioning the way the ICF works. This is a seismic shift — not just in structure, but in our commitment to realizing the Cosmos vision with renewed purpose and focus by bringing the beating heart of Cosmos — its Hub and the Stack — together.”
Cosmos, the blockchain ecosystem highly focused on interoperability, has long suffered from fragmentation and competing visions for the future of the project. For years, the ICF has pursued a strategy of distributed product development, where individuals or organizations called “stewards” were responsible for building and maintaining key components of the network. 
As part of the growth-focused acquisition, Interchain will bring these functions “in-house,” unifying the developer experience of building using Cosmos’ open-source, modular frameworks and “blockchain-in-a-box” software kits. 
Launched in 2019, Cosmos pioneered the concept of an “appchain” ecosystem. The idea was to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable anyone to launch a blockchain dedicated to a specific purpose, ultimately creating a multiverse of networks that could all easily communicate with one another and share security. 
The key components of this system are the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, which allows application-specific chains to swap tokens easily with one another, and native Interchain Security, which allows these chains to pool the security features that make blockchains censorship-resistant. Tethering these appchains together is the Cosmos Hub, which has played a greater or lesser role in the vision of the "Interchain Stack" at various times since its launch.
To a large extent, Cosmos has prevailed in becoming a leading network to launch a new blockchain or decentralized app. Today, hundreds of appchains use the Interchain Stack, Cosmos’ blockchain-building software suite, representing tens of billions of dollars in value. Because of Cosmos’ shared architecture, these chains can easily share liquidity and assets.
Some leading crypto networks were launched using Cosmos’ tooling, including Binance’s native BNB Chain and the now defunct Terra blockchain. When Meta was still called Facebook, the company initially turned to Cosmos to build its ill-fated Libra/Diem project. Cosmos has also attracted chains like decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX to migrate over after finding Ethereum too expensive to use. 
Competing interests 
But Cosmos has also been subject to years of political and technical strife as maintaince of the network decentralized over time. While it is impossible to place the exact start of the infighting, Tendermint, the company that oversaw Cosmos’ ICO in 2017, broke up into several geographically dispersed entities in 2020. (Tendermint later rebranded to Ignite.)
Perhaps the clearest sign of Cosmos' lack of cohesion is the value of the Hub's native token, ATOM. Years ago, ATOM was a top-10 coin by market capitalization, but it barely cracks the top 50 these days. Throughout the years, key figureheads in the Cosmos space have considered launching competing tokens to revamp or eliminate Cosmos Hub as it is known. 
In just one instance of this turmoil at the top, Cosmos co-founder Jae Kwon decided to launch a breakaway token called atomone through a network fork amid disagreements over how much token inflation is needed to keep the Cosmos blockchain secure. Over the years, Kwon has repeatedly stepped back and returned to the project.
While distributed leadership is the stated goal of many blockchain efforts, Cosmos’ potpourris of corporations, non-profits and key-opinion havers — who very often have competing opinionated views on how to make the “multiverse” a reality — have often led to technical delays and internal spats that spill over into the public. 
Skipping ahead
To some extent, the Skip acquisition is an attempt to draw a line in the sand and announce that Cosmos has been and can remain a leading crypto industry innovator, Cincinnati said. The move is meant to “end the ambiguity surrounding the focus of the ICF. We have a much clearer path forward now,” Cincinnati told The Block. 
“Cosmos has long struggled with org fragmentation and a lack of core competencies at the foundation,” Cosmos co-founder and longtime ICF council member Buchman echoed in a post on X, adding that Cosmos Hub has begun to slip from its mantel. “[Skip’s co-founders] also see the critical importance of a hub blockchain at the heart of the ecosystem to coordinate, route, canonicalize, drive liquidity, support chain launches, and overall chain growth.”
“With the best possible leadership in place now at the ICF, I’m excited to move on from the board and pass the torch,” Buchman added. Cincinnati said the Foundation Council, which oversees the ICF, will elect three new board members.
Founded in 2022, the Skip Protocol has become a key infrastructure provider in the Cosmos universe. It provides a suite of tools aimed at improving interoperability between appchains, bolstering cross-chain transactions and abstracting away (or, as co-founders Plunkett and Mareneck often say, “skipping”) the complexities of blockchain bridging. 
“They have a consistent record of shipping great products that address real pain-points for users and developers in the Cosmos,” Cincinnati said. “And (I can say with some degree of introspection) unlike the ICF, Skip is universally loved by the Cosmos ecosystem, and has deep relationships with teams that have been growing more distant from the Cosmos. (a trend that I hope will now reverse).”
The hub of hubs
As part of the move to unify Cosmos’ infrastructure, the newly rebranded Interchain Inc. is recentering the Cosmos Hub and ATOM token “as key components of the Cosmos vision,” the team said in a statement. The company and ICF will work to “internalize” the development of the Interchain Stack and “treat it as a full-service bundle,” thereby improving developer experience and user onboarding. 
“The Hub will become a true hub, connecting Cosmos applications to users, liquidity, and services, helping each of them thrive,” Interchain said. Consequently, the growth of Cosmos apps will drive growth to the Hub, creating a flywheel to lift the ecosystem up.”
Turning the Cosmos Hub into a true hub for liquidity and security will help individual appchains and the ecosystem at large to expand. However, the Interchain team also said it wants to increase support for more native VMs (i.e., virtual machines) and programming languages like Rust. 
The team will also help launch the much-anticipated IBC v2, “IBC Eureka,” a simplified version of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol that will include native Ethereum support expected to launch in 2025. 
All of this, taken together, will “unlock much faster iteration cycles” while improving the usability and reliability of Cosmos, the team said. “It will also enable Interchain Inc. to expand the Interchain Stack to new architectures and environments, like sovereign rollups, L2s, and restaked services,” they added. 
It remains to be seen what network users and stakeholders think of this shakeup and whether investors can be lured back into supporting an ecosystem often known more for its drama than development. According to CoinGecko, ATOM was down nearly 20% in the 24 hours before publication time, making it one of the worst-performing tokens amid a wider market pullback on Monday. 
“I do think the community is still the open question here — they have to be on board with this direction too,” Cincinnati said.
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