A little bit of chit-chat
A new proposal on the Hub is looking to change how the Community Pool is managed. The proposal proposes a rule that any projects receiving funding to deploy chains or consumer chains must open source their binary code and smart contracts before mainnet launch. In addition, wallet projects that allow users to store their private keys and interact with the chain must also be open-source to receive funding. As per the proposal, if these open-source requirements are not met, funding would be halted until they are met. The rules also state that future grants would only go to projects where every component is open-source, further prioritising open source projects within the ecosystem.
The State of the Interchain
The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol had a successful year in 2022, with several major releases and new features. One new feature, fee middleware, was implemented to incentivise relayers to help IBC scale sustainably. Another new feature, called Interchain Accounts, allows chains to open and control accounts on host chains and was made more user-friendly with the v6.0.0 release.
The protocol also underwent a “client refactor” to make it easier to develop light clients that track different consensus algorithms. Regarding on-chain metrics, 53 active chains on the interchain and IBC accounted for $30.3 billion in cross-chain transfers. Interchain Accounts have also been used on mainnet by two interchain liquid staking protocols, Stride and Quicksilver.
The ibc-go and ibc (spec) repositories had significant activity, with over 1,000 contributors and nearly 2,000 commits in the ibc-go repository alone. Some priorities for 2023 include improving the IBC protocol and expanding its adoption.
Quicksilver Update
Just after launching the chain, the Quicksilver Liquid Staking Zone experienced some hiccups that the team and the validator community needed to overcome. On December 23rd, 2022, the Quicksilver Liquid Staking Protocol was targeted in a sabotage attempt during its onboarding of the Cosmos Hub. An attacker exploited a security vulnerability in the Cosmos Hub’s version of IBC-go to block Quicksilver’s onboarding and prevent the protocol from gaining control of an Interchain Account.
The vulnerability, which has since been fixed in a later version of IBC-go, allowed the attacker to determine the address of the protocol’s delegate account and initiate it by sending tokens to it before it was registered. As a result, the Quicksilver protocol believed it controlled the account, but it was unable to execute transactions with it. To protect users and partners, the Quicksilver team shut down the Interchain Queries relayers and coordinated a preemptive chain halt at block 115000.
The chain resumed producing blocks on January 3rd, and things seem to be going smoothly. It has since passed a governance vote to onboard Stargaze to the protocol.
Airdrops List
Here’s a list of upcoming airdrops.
Wrap Up
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A little bit of intergalactic music for you