What is Cosmos?

Cosmos is a Proof of Stake consensus blockchain, powered by their native token ATOM. Coined as the "Internet of Blockchains", Cosmos has a large team behind it and began as a successful ICO on Ethereum resulting in the equivalent of $17 million in raised cryptocurrency funding. Even more astonishingly, through a serious of successful hedging strategies, the Cosmos team turned that $17 million into over $100 million in assets. This gave their team a large vault of funding to power their venture.

Tendermint and Cosmos are very interlinked. Tendermint BFT is the consensus engine that powers Cosmos and the teams work together closely. What however, makes Cosmos unique is that the goal of Cosmos is to allow many blockchains to be created off of Cosmos which are called a "zone". These zones stay linked to the Cosmos hub and the Cosmos hub maintains a record of the state of each zone and the zones keep a record of the Cosmos hub. This makes Cosmos unique, in that, the concept is not to be a single ruling blockchain but to allow many blockchains with their own needs to be created from the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem, while still maintaining the interoperability and state records between the chains. This is why Cosmos is known as the "Internet of Blockchains".

The Cosmos team has done a lot of stuff right. They have a very broad team which are tasked with very singular focuses to help the project move forward in different areas. Ethereum's smart contracts and transactions are struggling right now, due to very high usage. Fees of up to $20 are becoming normal on Ethereum's blockchain to get a transaction to go through in a reasonable timeframe. Cosmos is already able to handle far more transactions per second than Ethereum. This makes Cosmos an attractive alternative to Ethereum's existing dApps that are struggling with Ethereum's speed. However, moving a dApp from one blockchain to another isn't a trivial task, or is it?

Well, that was exactly the goal of Cosmos' Ethermint project. It was to allow Ethereum contracts to run on Cosmos with minimal changes, while even allowing the contracts to copy over all of the existing transactions that they have had up until their point of transfer, allowing them to continue operating seamlessly on the Cosmos ecosystem and not only that, interact with the various Cosmos zones. This has already lead to Aragon, which is a successfully launched project on Ethereum, to move to the Cosmos ecosystem by creating their own Cosmos zone called "Aragon Chain". Other examples of Cosmos zones include "Binance Chain", which was created by one of the biggest exchanges in the world, Binance. On this chain, Binance is already running their own decentralised exchange, utilising. the Cosmos ecosystem.

All of this comes together to make Cosmos into a strong contender for the future of blockchain. It is a successful iteration on the current fundamentals of blockchain technology which brings new functionality and higher transaction throughput to the space. ATOM, the native token of Cosmos has long been a part of our investment portfolio and has been performing well. We expect that it'll continue to perform well, as more Ethereum based decentralised applications that are struggling with the high transaction cost and low speed, will be tempted and eventually move into the Cosmos ecosystem, as some already have.