Agoric links with Cosmos devs to deliver new interchain protocol

Agoric and the Interchain Foundation (ICF) have announced a collaboration agreement for the Cosmos chain to improve cross-chain interoperability. Agoric is the secure smart contracts startup which recently raised $4 million from notable global investors. ICF is a non-profit foundation that supports R&D for the Cosmos Network.

The Agoric team will design and deliver a new IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol, in collaboration with the core developers of the Cosmos Network, to form the foundation of both the Cosmos and Agoric networks. This will provide true interoperability across multiple blockchains, and expand the market available to millions of current and future smart contracts developers worldwide.

Agoric provides developers the tools to safely build smart contracts and digital assets, using a secure subset of JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language. With IBC, the Agoric support for creating and reusing smart contract components will leverage and provide value across the rapidly growing Cosmos ecosystem.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to work with the Cosmos team, and have found our experience to be fruitful and invigorating. Agoric and Cosmos independently designed two different interchain protocols,. Our protocols solve overlapping sets of problems, often with very similar mechanisms. After a series of intense conversations, we have jointly agreed to merge the strength of each into one elegant protocol, the new IBC, which will address all of the problems that we were trying to solve separately. We are designing and building this new IBC foundation together. Agoric will build the rest of our protocol stack for composable, distributed smart contracts on this foundation.”
– Mark S. Miller, Chief Scientist of Agoric

“We are fortunate to be able to work alongside the giants at Agoric toward building a common IBC specification. Agoric’s experience and approach to formalizing secure smart contracts in a decentralized environment is much needed and well aligned with the Cosmos interchain vision.”
– Jae Kwon, Interchain Foundation President, founder and CEO of Tendermint and co-founder of the Cosmos project

“The Agoric team has been working on protocols for transferring digital rights between mutually distrusting parties for decades, and we’re honored to be collaborating with them on IBC. Their input has been extremely valuable, and the alignment between our protocol stacks means we can move forward together using IBC as a common foundation. The Cosmos Network, the larger interchain ecosystem, and the global developer community, will surely be much better off as a result.”
– Ethan Buchman, co-founder of the Cosmos project and Technical Director, Interchain Foundation