CHIPs discussion phase: Atomic IBC Megablocks

Atomic IBC is a proposed direction which would allow consumer chains to have much deeper integration with each other, in the form of being able to synchronously process bundles of transactions between consumer chains, while processing all other transactions in parallel. Atomic IBC’s optional synchronous processing of bundles transactions gives users the ability to access functionality that has much better UX (complicated cross chain workflows can complete in 5 seconds instead of 2-3 minutes), and gives developers the ability to develop this functionality with much less code (asynchronous cross chain workflows must be able to handle any one of their steps failing or timing out, and the state of the chains involved changes during the workflow). In short, Atomic IBC could allow for the UX of a smart contract platform, with the scalability of a multi-chain system. It also provides a point of differentiation for the Hub in a likely future where shared security is commoditized. Megablocks vs other approaches There are several different architectures that could be used for Atomic IBC. The first is Megablocks, where all participating consumer chains are effectively run as one…

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Hey, I loved the illustration.

The multiplexer shim is exactly what I had in mind for this, and love the way it is described.

interesting proposal. I don’t think Their should be voted for this Project. Or what do you think about this Atomic IBC Team proposal.

What’s the difference between Megablocks architecture and chimera chains (as proposed by anoma)

Typhon's Chimera Chains | Blog - Anoma

Chimera Chains generalize shared sequencers. They use a consensus based on Heterogeneous Paxos to simplify cross-blockchain atomic transactions for chains with overlapping trust models.

If these are similar in concept, can there be a collaboration between informal and Anoma team?

Thanks for the question. We’re actually going to do a report comparing different approaches to atomic composability between applications.

Megablocks is somewhere on the spectrum between Solana and heterogenous paxos, where Solana emphasizes deeper integration between applications while heterogenous paxos emphasizes scalability and independence.

Megablocks should allow application developers to write something that looks just like a standalone Cosmos-SDK chain, while having access to atomic composability that looks roughly like smart contract calls but with a bit more overhead and only in the context of an atomic bundle. However, all atomic ibc chains on Megablocks must run on the same validator set.

That’s pretty cool actually. I wonder if there were any news on formal verification implementations too?

Hi ,
Is there any news or a roadmap about Megablocks implementation ?

As far as I know, Atomic IBC (Megablocks) was deprioritized in favor of focusing on shared security.

Ho
thanks !
I was imagining about Neutron, Osmosis, Stride and others with atomic IBC, I think it could be very bullish
App chains with the same level of composability of L1 smart contracts it’s mind blowing IMO

It can always be re-prioritized. Initial technical derisking was done in Q1’24.

How can we support this ?

This still sounds cool conceptually. Curious if it can be cooked up again next year once these other features are live.

It can definitely come back on the roadmap soon. The CometBFT team is likely going to investigate how to support Megablocks as best as possible.

I was thinking about Atomic IBC,
Let’s say, you have some $atom on any ICS chain, and all ICS chains accept $atom as fee coin
Do you know if atomic IBC could permit to send those atom to the chain I want to use to pay fee in one tx ?
For example I want to swap on astroport but I have nothing to pay fees on neutron, I have some Atom on Blockchain X , the front end detect those atom, put the transfer as the first tx to do before the swap , and finaly I could swap on neutron just because I had some atom somewhere ?
@jtremback ?