🔥 The launch of Cosmos IBC Tech - un.Block - un.Block

We will introduce you to the latest blockchain technology or product updates for the hot spots this week. Help you quickly understand the blockchain ecology and technology trends😉.

❓ Why IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication)

Each blockchain is an individual and autonomous system that doesn’t rely on external information to produce and validate ‘Blocks’. In the beginning, the developers created their Decentralized Applications (DApp) on Ethereum using the so-called “smart contracts”. Each DApp can interact with other DApps.

With the growing demands, Ethereum gradually failed to meet those complicated requirements. Common problems were performance bottlenecks and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) holding many defects (low efficiency, lacking standardized library, being difficult to debug, not supporting floating-point number, unmodifiable codebase……).

The developers then tried to customize a blockchain for their DApps. When these DApps were built on their own customized chains, communication became a problem. This means the autonomy characteristic of blockchain becomes the biggest obstacle. The problem of decentralizing safely and effectively has bothered the Cross-chain transmission of messages developers for a very long time.

👀 What is IBC

IBC（inter-blockchain communication protocol）is a general cross-chain information transmission protocol introduced by Cosmos. While ensuring the autonomy of each chain and the speed of transaction processing, IBC makes information and assets across the chain more decentralized, safe, and convenient. More than 200 services and applications and more than $80 billion of investments have adopted IBC. IBC is like TCP/IP protocol of the blockchain world, making blockchain networks possible.

With the help of IBC, blockchains adopting various consensus mechanisms can communicate with each other, as long as their consensus mechanisms meet the so-called “Fast Finality”, where all transactions can be quickly packaged and cannot be revoked or changed.

Since bitcoin and Ethereum don’t fully meet the requirements from such “Fast Finality”, Cosmos customizes inter-blockchain solutions for them: two customized blockchains supporting “Fast Finality” and IBC track the status of bitcoin and Ethereum respectively. Since these two customized chains are compatible with IBC and hold the latest knowledge of bitcoin and Ethereum, now any chains can communicate with Ethereum and Bitcoin.

🌰 IBC: An Example

Next, let’s use an example to explain how IBC works. Suppose we have two blockchains using IBC, called Earth and Mars. We want to send a “Hello world” from Earth to Mars. We first need to run a so-called “Relayer” for the message delivery. The relayer continuously checks the state of the chain and creates a transaction on another chain that contains the corresponding message. In the case of using IBC, a lite client of Mars will run on Earth so that Earth can verify the status of Mars and ensure that the information transmitted by Relayer is effective and accurate. Similarly, Mars will run a client of Earth.

Same as TCP/IP, the two chains first will do a “handshake” for identity authentication to prepare for secure message transmission. We then only need to create the corresponding “Hello world” message on Earth, and Relayer will transmit it to Mars. IBC ensures the security of data transmission, which is followed by triggering onAck, onTimedout, as well as other events.

Notice that IBC is only responsible for secure data transmission. For data serialization, it needs to be processed by applications built on the blockchain.

🌌 Cosmos IBC

IBC is a protocol that has been implemented in Cosmos-SDK. It may support Kepler, Substrate, Tendermint, Codechain in the future.

Cosmos is furthering the influence of Cosmos-SDK through IBC, but it is not the only player developing inter-blockchain and customized blockchain technologies. Polkadot is also the one who has its own solution. We will introduce you to the wonders of Polkadot if we have a chance.

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🕊️ Twitter: @unBlock256

📧 Email: [email protected]

🖌️ Graphics Design: Jenny

📙 Translator: Dylan

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