Introduction

Gno.land is a developing layer 1 blockchain built with the Cosmos-SDK and powered by Tendermint consensus. It’s an initiative being led by Tendermint CEO and Cosmos co-founder Jae Kwon after departing from the core team. Gnoland will be a platform for developing smart contracts written in Gnolang, a custom fork of Golang.

The chain will be powered by a dual-token structure using the $GNOT token for gas and security, and the $GNOSH token for governance. Ultimately, it focuses on optimizing smart contract development and aligning governance with those who have contributed to the network’s growth.

The Problem

To create applications, developers need scalable frameworks. This is especially true in for blockchains, and is something that ultimately inspired the creation of Gnoland. Seeing the flaws in many existing frameworks, Kwon began to consider how to improve upon issues with language accessibility, data persistence, garbage collection, etc.

Consensus and governance in general with models like Proof-of-Stake rely on an economic structure to secure the chain. With this comes a sort of “mercenary capital” potential at the consensus level, with some validators just in it for the rewards. It also means one’s say in governance depends on how much money they have, no matter how much they have actually contributed to the network.

The Goal

Simply put, good frameworks are a powerful utility and are much needed for building applications with ease. Gnoland will establish a new environment for deploying smart contracts written in a simple yet powerful programming language, all on a network maintained by those most aligned with it.

Gnoland will revolve around fundamental core values like censorship resistance, accessibility, and interoperability. The chain and Gnolang language will be an ideal framework for application builders, and in time Gnoland will grow its own buzzing native ecosystem.

With PoC consensus, governance and the active validator set will revolve around those who contribute most to the network, not just those who can put down the most money.

How Does it Work? Gnolang

Gnolang is created by Jae Kwon himself, and it is a fork of the Go programming language. The Cosmos-SDK is also written in Golang, and it has nice trade-offs in general making it the best language for the Gno’s framework.

Gnolang’s ethos is focused around accessibility. As Jae Kwon notes, Javascript is leading in terms of general language adoption because of how accessible it makes programming. Gnolang is a Go interpreter that directly interprets the AST, which is basically source code.

This means that if you are a developer who knows Go, making changes does not require learning any separate backends (decompilers) for interpreting bytecode. It also means that contracts are totally transparent and easy to work with.

“As a technologist, I'm interested in GNO because it's the only contract platform that I'm aware of that executes contracts as their source code instead of as a compiled binary.” - Jacob Gadikian

Developers well-versed in an already widespread language like Go can easily adapt to developing with Gnolang. It is resource-effective, efficient in memory management (garbage collection), has built-in determinism, and is overall extremely simple to use.

How Does it Work? Gnoland

Gnoland is a decentralized and scalable layer 1 network for deploying smart contracts (called “Realms”). It has a driven mission to bring a new virtual machine (GnoVM) that powers a flourishing ecosystem of applications. It strives to create simple, secure, scalable software for people around the world, and it will all be built with the robust Gnolang smart contract programming language.

Gnoland is powered by a fork of Tendermint named “New Tendermint”. It is focused on addressing real world issues today, like state-led censorship, the control of money, and other geopolitical forces.

While searching for frameworks, Kwon was focused on building a type of system where data persistence is less of a worry, and where ORMs and databases are not necessary. Gnolang is so well-integrated with the system that deploying on the chain will be beyond simple and easy.

The chain will be secured by an active set of 334 validators and slashing will be enabled. Hardware requirements will be lightweight to avoid any type of hardware-based validator centralization.

Proof-of-Contribution will ensure the chain is secured by dedicated validators who helped build Gnoland. An on-chain mechanism will verify and prove chosen validators’ contributions publicly.

This steers validators away from being “in it for the money” and rather those validating transactions will be most interested in seeing the chain thrive. It also ensures that governance is comprised of those who contribute in some way, rather than prioritizing how much money one can put down.

Partnerships

Gnoland currently has no official partnerships, and it does not plan to focus on being IBC-enabled right away. However, once it and its ecosystem are connected to the broader IBC ecosystem, it will have a plethora of partnership opportunities at its disposal.

Tokenomics

• $GNOT Price: N/A

Market Capitalization: N/A

Circulating Supply: N/A

Total Supply: N/A

• $GNOSH Price: N/A

Market Capitalization: N/A

Circulating Supply: N/A

Total Supply: N/A

Learn more about the token distribution here.

$GNOT will be used to secure the Gnoland network, used to pay gas fees for all transactions on the network. It will be a fork of the $ATOM distribution and will also have a premine supply for contributors. It will inherit a fixed-inflationary model to pay validators.

1 billion $GNOT will be emitted at launch, 750 million of which will go to $ATOM holders and stakers. Those stakers who voted NO or NO WITH VETO on Prop #69 in the Cosmos Hub will receive a bonus.

$GNOSH will be used to reward contributors via the Proof-of-Contribution model, and it can be acquired through certain tasks. It is the governance token of the network. $GNOSH holders receive a portion of the network’s transaction fees alongside validators.

Conclusion

Gnoland will be a revolutionary addition to the Cosmos ecosystem. It will be laser-focused on quality core values, and it ensures those participating in consensus and governance have a shared intent of Gnoland’s success.

Accompanied by the Gno programming language, Gnoland will specialize in being a seamless platform to deploy on top of and spark a new frontier of decentralized applications for Cosmonauts and beyond.

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