Defunding CosmWasm is a Threat to the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos Ecosystem

Today, the Interchain Foundation (ICF) announced a decision that will significantly impact the Cosmos ecosystem: they will be defunding CosmWasm. This is a huge blow to the infrastructure that powers almost the entire ecosystem and facilitates seamless cross-chain interoperability. At Atom Accelerator DAO (AADAO), we firmly believe that CosmWasm is a critical resource for the interchain, and its development must continue. We refuse to let this vital project falter. That’s why we’re stepping up – proposing to contribute $250K to kickstart the funding effort and motivate other chains to participate. The Impact of CosmWasm CosmWasm has become a cornerstone of the Cosmos ecosystem, powering chains like Osmosis, Injective, Mantra, Neutron, and most of the 100+ chains in the ecosystem. With over 1.79 million downloads of the CosmWasm standard library, the framework’s reach and utility are undeniable. Analyzing data from just 15 chains over the past 12 months, 15.7k CosmWasm contracts were deployed, with 5.2m accounts interacting with them, and $5.7 million generated in fees from those contracts! CosmWasm is a game-changer for the Cosmos ecosystem as it empowers developers to…

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Please keep us in touch about which chains do support this coalition

Hi folks, I think its worth clarifying the position of Interchain as laid out in the blog post today! The ICF is reducing its spending on CosmWasm, but it’s deeply committed to supporting long-term maintenance, improved security, and continued development of the project. The popularity of CosmWasm within the Cosmos ecosystem is undeniable (rust smart contracts are awesome!), and its used by many chains today (as OP writes). But we don’t consider it a critical driver for growth of the ecosystem, or on the Cosmos Hub, over the next year, based on conversations with teams. • The tooling and developer ecosystem around it is still very nascent compared to other VMs, especially the EVM. And the # of developers who are familiar with it is still very low compared to other VMs. • Meanwhile, we’ve heard that simply adding support for other popular VMs (the EVM in particular but also SVM and Move) will drive integrations, liquidity, and devs for the ecosystem almost immediately (Many teams want to deploy liquidity into the ecosystem but literally can’t justify the expense of re-implementing their infrastructure / contracts for Cosmwasm with the current opportunity size). So…

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I imagine that if the cosmos hub community agrees to fund cosmwasm (something that the hub does not use and does not really benefit from) it would mean that there would be a double spending of atoms since Interchain Inc. would fund this at its level and that it essentially holds atoms. For me it is an assumed no, no return for the hub, then no expenses for the others if it is only one way as in the past. The day when the other cosmos chains will pay maintenance fees to the hub if it is intended to fund the cosmos technical stack then it will be a big yes. for the moment I call it theft.

triple spending because AADAO will pay with their atoms. lol

CosmWasm is undoubtedly a cornerstone of the Cosmos ecosystem today, but what will happen when we open the doors to developers using EVM, SVM, or even Move VM? Two outcomes are likely. On the one hand, CosmWasm’s relative share will decrease. However, these new developers will discover the cosmos ecosystem leading to a likely increase in the overall number of developers. On the other hand, it is highly probable that integrating modules like EVM or SVM will be less suited to CometBFT and the Cosmos SDK compared to CosmWasm today. In other words, new developers who are genuinely drawn to the cosmos ecosystem may quickly learn to use cosmwasm to fully optimize their projects which would tend towards an increase in the number of developers on cosmwasm and which would justify an investment. From the Hub’s perspective, even though it doesn’t use CosmWasm directly except when enabled by governance, Neutron does rely on it and needs the necessary support to remain the leading permissionless CosmWasm platform. If the Hub considers Neutron an economic partner, it will need to support it in one way or another. In this context, investing more in CosmWasm could be a good strategy, even if I…

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Wasmvm isn’t safe as is, in any form, permissioned or not. github.com/CosmWasm/wasmd run tests many times `CosmWasm:main` ← `faddat:patch-12` opened 11:58AM - 21 Oct 24 UTC faddat +41 -1 This pull request runs the tests twenty times with a cache and twenty times with … out a cache on linux and mac, for a grand total of eighty runs of the test suite. The observed error is always: `log runtime: bad pointer in frame github.com/CosmWasm/wasmvm/v2/internal/api.AnalyzeCode at 0xc001268738: 0x1 fatal error: invalid pointer found on stack ` This pull request makes no changes to the code in this repository, and simply runs its tests eighty times. Note that I could have made a private report of this issue, except: x.com Simon Warta (@simon_warta) on X @simon_warta For the time being I will stop all sorts conversations with Jacob Gadikian, privately and publicly. He is showing again and again that he has no interest in a constructive and appreciative conversation. He is campaigning against people and organisations he identifies as targets.…

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Guinch_Roze:

The day when the other cosmos chains will pay maintenance fees to the hub if it is intended to fund the cosmos technical stack then it will be a big yes. for the moment I call it theft.

Fyi, the hub does use cosmwasm. It has a live contract, daodao and is therefore at risk.

only that, to low for any founding imo

I definitely understand your point of view.

Hey Barry,

Montagu from AADAO here.
Thanks for providing further clarification and the rationale behind Interchain’s position!

bpiv400:

Of course, it’s still possible that, as an ecosystem, we won’t be able to raise the required funds for a dedicated team (e.g. Confio) to support CosmWasm

Exactly, this aligns with our primary concern, especially when considering that the Hub itself and one of its leading Consumer Chains both leverage CosmWasm. However, it is encouraging to hear that Interchain has developed a contingency plan should funding challenges arise.

bpiv400:

In addition, we’re recommending the ICF fund comprehensive audits of Cosmwasm, wasmd, and wasmvm in 2025

It’s also worth mentioning that we are fully aligned here. In fact, we have been lately working on similar initiatives and look forward to sharing more informations with the community later this week.

bpiv400:

our new focus on growth and the evidence that 10x or 100x growth requires a multi-VM approach

Agree with this completely.

But CW needs to be maintained until such a time that most of its current users have migrated away from it (assuming at least a 2-year timeline for the likes of Osmo, Injective, and Stargaze to reimplement everything). Someone should also hit up Thorchain, who I think just recently began working with CW to bring them into “Cosmos-proper”.

While the ICF has been the primary (not sole) funder of CW, given how slowly the ecosystem seems to be dragging its feet, IMO, CW should just switch to BSL (to force action) or we will likely need the in-house team at Interchain Inc to take over before the end of 2025.

To be clear, there is an underlying grant application for the Confio disbursement.

Thank you @ATOMAcceleratorDAO for the support and bring up the discussion. Thank you @bpiv400 for the detailed response in public explaining motivations and strategies. I respect all of those opinions and decisions.

Just one correction. Credit where credit is due. Between 2020 and 2024 significant (>=100k$) contributions to the development of the FOSS stack of CosmWasm were made by (in alphabetic order):

• Cosmos Hub
• Juno
• Neutron
• NYM
• Osmosis
• Terra / TFL
• Tgrade

Smaller contributions came in through Comdex, cyber~Congress, Crypto.com, Fetch.ai, Kujira, Persistence, Provenance and Stargaze. Those include a variety of different models such as audit sponsorships, donations and Subscriptions. That being said, it is correct that the ICF is historically the primary funder of CosmWasm development and the main funder by far right now.

However, that is not supposed to affect the big lines in the discussion which I appreciate.

I strongly support the Skip team taking bold steps to improve Cosmos without being beholden to inertia and existing power structures, and this looks like just the kind of bold move I was hoping to see. Personally, I’ve written contracts in both EVM and CosmWasm (Gravity Bridge and Hydro), and I don’t have a strong preference. I actually really enjoy both of them. However, I do have some questions for @bpiv400 and the rest of the team: • You’ve presented the concept of Interchain putting together a small team in house for maintenance as sort of a worst case scenario- to me this sounds very attractive, and like it’s the right step. Why is this not the default option, with the community maybe funding advanced features or something? • CosmWasm is very tightly integrated into Cosmos. Tokens, IBC, accounts and keys (Keplr etc), frontend, calling into other SDK modules- it all works pretty seamlessly from CosmWasm. CosmWasm is so well integrated that teams such as Stargaze and Osmosis have been able to build a lot of their core chain features with it instead of Cosmos-SDK. On the contrary, the experience with EVM (not sure about SVM) has historically been a lot less smooth, with…

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Hi - Adair here from Abstract, building interchain application infrastructure and tooling in CosmWasm for the last 3 years. Thank you @ATOMAcceleratorDAO for the post highlighting CosmWasm’s strengths and thank you @bpiv400 for your responses. I’d like to respond to a few points you brought up: bpiv400: • The tooling and developer ecosystem around it is still very nascent compared to other VMs, especially the EVM. And the # of developers who are familiar with it is still very low compared to other VMs. Claiming the CosmWasm developer ecosystem is underdeveloped is incorrect . The tooling is on par or superior to that of other VMs, including the EVM. (No links as they’re disallowed) • Scripting and Testing (like EVM Forge): cw-orchestrator : Environment-agnostic scripting (sync/async Rust), unit & integration testing, IBC abstractions, a CLI, live chain-state clone testing, and snapshot testing. Every script supports live environments. • Indexing : dao-dao-indexer, with incredibly fine-grained event handling • Tracing (like Tenderly) : CosmWasm Tracing Tool • Frameworks : Sylvia, Abstract SDK, Fadroma • Interchain Infrastructure :…

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I was reluctant to post here, but I feel like there’s an angle which could use a little more emphasis in the overall narrative and vision: large, innovative, real-world applications. Some examples: • Simple but fun open gaming engines (Chess, Monopoly, Go, etc.) • More reliable recordkeeping (healthcare, business meetings, etc.) • eCommerce for tangible products with physical shipping • Supply chain verification all the way down to the end user • Voting systems and other tools needed for communities including but beyond the kinds of dao’s we’ve seen thus far. These are just a few examples to illustrate a point - not meant to be exhaustive or perfect, just meaningfully illustrative. My point is this: blockchain tech has uses far beyond the projects that have been successfully built in Solidity - and Solidity is simply a terrible choice for these particular requirements (even if it’s an excellent choice for many cryptocurrency projects). I and many others see CosmWasm as a framework for building products of the future. It is uniquely positioned for this because Rust is a state-of-the-art general purpose language with a robust third-party package ecosystem. In…

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Outside the strengths and weaknesses of Cosmos as a blockchain versus other blockchains, which is something that only people like ourselves know or care about, Cosmos is an empty shell without CW. Without it, the only thing that remains is a bunch of starving networks fighting over the same scraps of cash while a few oligarchic teams and validators ride out the wave. My overall gut feeling is that the health and longevity of CW shouldn’t be compromised or left hanging on the promise of future funding. Like a previous poster wrote, we haven’t even begun to explore applications of this technology to consumer markets, civics, science, generic “backend” engineering. Instead, the majority of dapps so far have been opportunistic land grabs, clones of existing products and trumped up “protocols.” At the same time, anything that’s not fully trustless or self-custodial is often dismissed or ignored because of premature ideological convictions. If CW isn’t sustained and strong going forward, there’s even less reason for anyone to try to use it in applications outside the domain of finance, which 90% of status quo blockchain teams think about. As someone who has been writing CW…

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Thank you for providing clarity on ICF’s position regarding CosmWasm funding. While I appreciate the strategic thinking behind supporting multiple VMs, I feel compelled to share some important perspectives as someone with extensive experience across CosmWasm, EVM, and SVM development. First, I want to challenge the characterization of CosmWasm’s tooling as “nascent.” Having worked extensively with multiple VMs, I can attest that CosmWasm’s developer experience is exceptionally polished and productive. The tooling has consistently improved with each release, and in many ways offers advantages over other VMs. The comparison to EVM or SVM tooling perhaps deserves a more nuanced discussion. While I understand the appeal of supporting multiple VMs to attract immediate liquidity and development activity, I worry we risk undervaluing CosmWasm’s unique strengths. It remains the only smart contract platform specifically designed for a multi-chain ecosystem - a fundamental differentiator that aligns perfectly with Cosmos’ vision. My primary concern is that relegating CosmWasm to purely maintenance mode could have far-reaching consequences. Development teams need confidence in the…

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Hi, I’m the founder of Ark Protocol. I’m also a builder with +20 years of dev xp. My “sole” skill is in CosmWasm. No Go and no Cosmos SDK. What does it mean in case CosmWasm stays in “maintenance mode” and no more else is funding it? This means it reaches its End-of-Lifecycle. Builders like me has either 2 options: a) leave Cosmos b) learn Go and Cosmos SDK a) will hurt all of us and b) requires time and resources to invest for - simply: pain in the ass. Ark, like many other protocols, build public goods and products. like ICS721 (aka the InterChain NFT bridge). There are 2 versions for the ICS721 spec: a module-based and a cw-based implementation. cw-ics721 covers lots of more features than the module version, like: • additional security measures by providing outgoing and incoming proxy contracts • callbacks, so other users can provide even more interchain features so again: Defunding CosmWasm => Maintenance-only => End-of-Lifecycle => no future with builders either leaving or few turning into hardcore Go-Cosmos-SDK-nerds => no products, no value for Cosmos. just my 2 cents on this! One more things: thx Ethan, Simon and Confio team for building…

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mr-t: thx Ethan, Simon and Confio team for building CosmWasm Very this kakucodes: My primary concern is that relegating CosmWasm to purely maintenance mode could have far-reaching consequences. It will, and I may have suggestions on the matter. I love the cw syntax and style. I hate wasmvm, when using a go chain, I think it’s dangerous. In the immediate term, I think it’s a good bet to port the virtual machine to go. (Or the cosmos stack to rust) dakom: Those of us who have written a fair amount of CosmWasm code are very aware of the devrel and tooling problem. We know the tooling needs some love (notwithstanding the resources @adairrr shared)- but that’s exactly the point. CosmWasm is much better positioned than EVM to get over that hurdle and make more kinds of application development on blockchain tech easier. It takes resources to get there Yeah it’s pretty good jtremback: On the other hand, I can’t think of an instance where a really iconic platform used the VM of another platform. Users of the EVM tend to be tightly associated with Ethereum itself, such as Polygon, and all the rollups. Do you think this is just…

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