Agoric and the Interchain Foundation Announce Strategic Collaboration to Develop Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol

Agoric will collaborate with Cosmos core developers on delivering cross-chain interoperability standard.

At the Cosmos Hackathon in Berlin on June 20th, 2019, our team and the Interchain Foundation (ICF) announced a collaboration agreement for the Cosmos chain to improve cross-chain interoperability. ICF is the non-profit foundation that supports R&D in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Our team will design and deliver a new IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol, in collaboration with the core developers of the Cosmos Network, to form the foundation of both the Cosmos and Agoric networks. This will provide true interoperability across multiple blockchains, and expand the market available to millions of current and future smart contracts developers worldwide.

Agoric provides developers the tools to safely build smart contracts and digital assets, using a secure subset of JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language. With IBC, the Agoric support for creating and reusing smart contract components will leverage and provide value across the rapidly growing Cosmos ecosystem.

Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist of Agoric, says: “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with the Cosmos team, and have found our experience to be fruitful and invigorating. Agoric and Cosmos independently designed two different interchain protocols. Our protocols solve overlapping sets of problems, often with very similar mechanisms. After a series of intense conversations, we have jointly agreed to merge the strength of each into one elegant protocol, the new IBC, which will address all of the problems that we were trying to solve separately. We are designing and building this new IBC foundation together. Agoric will build the rest of our protocol stack for composable, distributed smart contracts on this foundation.”

E. Dean Tribble, Chief Executive of Agoric, adds: “We are delighted to be working with the ICF on developing the Cosmos network, and the Agoric team is already seeing alignment in the teams’ vision and strategy for interoperability standards, confirming that this is a natural partnership with great potential.”

Jae Kwon, Interchain Foundation President, founder and CEO of Tendermint and co-founder of the Cosmos project says “We are fortunate to be able to work alongside the giants at Agoric toward building a common IBC specification. Agoric’s experience and approach to formalizing secure smart contracts in a decentralized environment is much needed and well aligned with the Cosmos interchain vision.”

Ethan Buchman, co-founder of the Cosmos project and Technical Director, Interchain Foundation, adds: “The Agoric team has been working on protocols for transferring digital rights between mutually distrusting parties for decades, and we’re honored to be collaborating with them on IBC. Their input has been extremely valuable, and the alignment between our protocol stacks means we can move forward together using IBC as a common foundation. The Cosmos Network, the larger interchain ecosystem, and the global developer community, will surely be much better off as a result.”