IBC is about to go live in a matter of hours

A huge moment for @cosmos. . . but also perhaps a big moment for the whole crypto ecosystem — this launch lays the foundation for what could become an ecosystem-wide standard for inter-blockchain communication.

(....)

Right now, interoperability is accomplished through glorified multi-sigs, trusted bridges, and other hacks.

If you started out from first principles to build a generalized, trustless, scalable protocol for chain-to-chain communication, you'd basically end up at IBC.

IBC is.... (per my understanding)

1. Impartial: to connect, a chain only needs to have finality & the ability to generate state proofs. No assumptions are made on security or consensus.

2. Foundational: IBC protocol only handles data transport, authentication, and ordering. Application protocols will be built on top of IBC to make sense of this data and incorporate additional logic (ex. token locking/releasing for x-chain token transfers)

3. Trustless: On-chain light clients validate state of other chains. Relayers relay data from one chain to another, but don't have to be trusted.

4. Scalable: No additional staked capital needed to ensure trustlessness + validators don't need to run full nodes for different chains. Once IBC compatible, a chain can connect to any other IBC chain OR can route X-chain messages through a hub who connects to many other chains.

The key challenge of IBC — to connect to IBC, a chain needs a light-client implementation that is in IBC's standardized form & needs to be able to receive/interpret IBC data from other chains.

This requires some dev work upfront (and probably a small chain upgrade).

However, chains built with the Cosmos SDK are IBC compatible out of the box, so the whole Cosmos ecosystem can plug in quickly.

So while IBC isn't Cosmos-specific, it is able to bootstrap off of the existing Cosmos ecosystem.

Within the next year, network effects will kick in as Cosmos-SDK-based chains adopt IBC.

Other chains will want to become IBC-compatible to tap into all the value within the IBC ecosystem.

Here's all the value that can quickly plug into IBC (w/ FD network value)...

@BinanceChain ($29B) + BSC apps ($1B+)
@terra_money ($7B) + @mirror_protocol ($1.6B)
@cosmoshub — $5.6B
@thorchain_org — $2B
@BandProtocol — $1.6B
@InjectiveLabs — $1.4B

(continued)
@OasisLabs — $1.3B
@kava_labs — $0.5B
@agoric (soon)
@sifchain (soon)
+ More

And on top of this, a number of other major chains are already in the process of becoming IBC compatible:

Ethereum [Peggy / Gravity Bridge]
@CeloOrg
@solana
@zcash
Substrate (Polkadot) https://chorus.one/projects#Interoperability

Competing & complimentary interoperability standards may arise, but IBC is clearly out in front in terms of establishing itself as a Schelling point for X-chain communication.

Hats off to everyone who contributed to IBC! So pumped to see this live.

@iqlusioninc @informalinc @agoric @jack_zampolin @zmanian @cwgoes (and many others I'm missing)