In an interview with Cointelegraph on the eve of Cosmos’ largest hackaton (ATOM), which takes place on November 11, 2021 in Lisbon, Tendermint’s CEO, Peng Zhong, delivers his analysis on blockchain and its Inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol. The latter, which was launched by Cosmos in March 2021, ensures the communication and transfer of assets between different blockchains. Tendermint is the main developer of Cosmos.
Cosmos CBI: from 200 to hundreds of thousands of connected blockchains
The launch of the CBI was, according to Zhang, “the biggest highlight” of Cosmos in 2021. He points out that 22 blockchains now support IBC, whereas in its early days, projects didn’t necessarily have ideas about how to leverage the protocol. Zhong says the number of cross-chain activities was higher than expected, and that “we are seeing a very positive growth cycle with CBI enabled,” with blockchains able to connect to decentralized exchanges in the ecosystem.
Zhong predicts about 200 chains interconnected via the CBI in 2022, and “tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of connected chains” in five years.
Cosmos dives into the metaverse, his major contribution to DeFi
Zhong also spoke on other topics such as Tendermint’s plans to introduce Cosmos into the metaverse. The latter is according to him “quite undefined for the moment”, specifying that there will certainly be the Metaverse that Facebook wants to build, but also other versions such as those of Google or Apple. For the CEO of Tendermint, the version of the metaverse “that most of us want today is open and permissionless”.
Zhong also described Cosmos as “the only ecosystem that is trying to democratize access to finance more than any other ecosystem.” In particular, he pointed to the fact that a project does not need to buy a token or pay gas to build on Cosmos, eliminating costly barriers to entry:
“and I think that’s something that’s very valuable in economies where you can’t really afford expensive transactions, and when you don’t really have the capital to really experiment with these hybrid ecosystems, like Polkadot or Avalanche or Ethereum, and bring in people who have time.”
As a result, Zhong anticipates an explosion in the number of interconnected blockchains through the CBI as early as 2022. The price of its native cryptocurrency ATOM had jumped recently thanks to Cosmos’ connections with Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC).
