Cosmos and Polkadot are competing to see if they can stand on equal footing with Ethereum in the future

Cosmos and Polkadot are known as the " cross-chain duo", and the two have actually been trying hard to catch up with Ethereum. But some time ago, both ecosystems suffered different degrees of blows: Terra on Cosmos collapsed, bringing down the market; Acala on Polkadot had a minting error, which disappointed the market. With Ethereum successfully entering the Ethereum 2.0 era, its performance has been greatly improved, which has put tremendous pressure on Cosmos and Polkadot; however, the two are not to be outdone and have released major technical updates one after another. So what are the highlights of the technical upgrades of Cosmos and Polkadot? In the context of Ethereum 2.0, can Cosmos and Polkadot stand on equal footing with it?

Cosmos 2.0 is coming, decentralization and inter-chain security upgrades attract attention

The Cosmos 2.0 conference has just ended, so let’s talk about Cosmos first. The advantages of Cosmos 1.0 are mainly the integrity and practicality of the cross-chain ecosystem, but the disadvantages are centralization and the remaining security risks, and the value of ATOM tokens is not well reflected. The new version of the COSMOS white paper, Cosmos Hub 2.0, has been announced at the Cosmoverse conference in Medellin, Colombia. The white paper proposes a major expansion of the practicality of the Cosmos Hub and clarifies a new vision for the Cosmos Hub’s native token ATOM.

Cosmos consists of a Hub and several Zones, where the Hub is equivalent to the processing center for big data computing, and the Zone is equivalent to a public chain with specific application functions. Cosmos positioned itself as an infrastructure service provider at this conference. Secondly, Cosmos proposed a new layered architecture, which mainly includes: 1. Social coordination technology, the default homepage and coordination layer of Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, etc.; 2. Cross-chain security, consumer chains protected by the Hub; 3. Liquidity pledge, used in DeFi ; 4. Interchain Scheduler, a secure block space market; 5. Interchain Allocator, the entrusting party develops and adjusts the ATOM-based market platform.

Cosmos developer Zaki said in his speech at the Cosmoverse conference that today's ATOM has almost become a meme coin in the Cosmos ecosystem, but ATOM can actually do more. Its new role is to develop a resilient cross-chain economy. In Cosmos2.0, the cross-chain coordinator and cross-chain allocator are based on a specific Hub. In the future, the Hub will generate income from cross-chain economic activities by creating a block space market and charging matching fees. At present, the solutions for Cosmos 2.0 to solve decentralization and security are mainly interchain accounts and interchain security. Interchain accounts mainly solve the problem of over-centralization, and its main idea is to enhance the interactivity between Hub and Zone, and between Zone and Zone. This function may be launched at the end of the year. Interchain security aims to increase the cost of evil for ecological nodes through economic models and pledge rules, so that all powerful players in the ecosystem will voluntarily bind themselves to the interests of the ecosystem. In addition, the cross-chain query function will also be launched later to support users in the ecosystem to query assets and data across chains.

Polkadot’s latest roadmap is released, with frequent positive news around the end of the year

As the Polkadot community enters the last quarter of 2022, the founder of Polkadot also announced Polkadot’s latest roadmap, which will have multiple positive effects around the end of the year.

According to Polkadot's latest roadmap, Polkadot asynchronous support will be ready by the end of 2022 and deployed on Kusama , and then on Polkadot, and is currently awaiting the results of audits and tests. Parallel threads will be launched in the first quarter/second quarter of 2023. Parallel threads are "plug-and-play" parachains. XCM v3 depends on Weights V2, and Polkadot aims to be ready for deployment by the end of 2022, with Weights V2 to be put into use in mid-October 2022. Polkadot's first group parachain is the Polkadot Alliance, which is expected to be launched in late October. The launch plan for Polkadot's cross-chain hub is being developed and is expected to be launched before the end of the year. The cross-chain hub is a message routing service within each network. Starting from version 0.9.28, the nomination pool will be added to Polkadot, and soon the Polkadot team will add a quick unstaking function to the staking system. The Polkadot staking dashboard will soon end its public beta, and the dashboard is currently fully functional and ready to use. Polkadot’s penalty mechanism is called Disputes Slashing and is expected to be ready for launch by the end of this year. Once Disputes Slashing is enabled, validators who submit invalid parachain blocks will be fined all their staked tokens, and validators who make errors will be fined a small amount of staked tokens to prevent spam.

The most important thing in Polkadot's new roadmap is the new governance system, which is scheduled to be deployed on Kusama in early Q4 2022 (most likely through Runtime v.0.9.30). The new governance framework eliminates the Council and Technical Committee, introduces the Polkadot Fellowship, and submits every decision in Polkadot to the community for referendum. Among them, the delegation system allows community leaders to vote for all decisions or decisions in certain specific areas or focus areas. The act of voting, submitting a referendum, or becoming a representative is completely permissionless. Governance V2 reflects the ability of Polkadot's on-chain governance mechanism to upgrade itself.

Can Cosmos and Polkadot stand on equal footing with Ethereum?

Ethereum has many competitors, but as time goes by, some have fallen behind, and some are increasingly valued. Cosmos and Polkadot are the two most promising ones, and DYD X has chosen to migrate from Ethereum to the Cosmos network. So, can Cosmos and Polkadot stand on equal footing with Ethereum in the future?

Michelle Bailhe, partner of Sequoia Capital, talked about her views on the development stages of the crypto industry in an article "Ask Not Wen Moon–Ask Why Moon" written at the end of 2021. She said in the article: The first stage of the crypto industry is isolation. The crypto world, as an isolated island, is disconnected from the non-crypto world. The crypto industry has built its own core protocol; the second stage of the crypto world is connectivity, connecting the crypto and non-crypto worlds. The non-crypto world sees the value of crypto and builds/purchases infrastructure to access it; the third stage is maturity, the integration of the crypto and non-crypto worlds.

The current crypto market is undoubtedly in the connectivity stage. Connecting the crypto world with the non-crypto world and breaking the island effect is the main development direction of this stage. Cosmos and Polkadot should not be regarded as just a public chain, but as the infrastructure of the public chain, because they can not only link the public chain, but also connect the enterprise alliance chain and private chain. Cosmos and Polkadot are Layer 0, while Ethereum is Layer 1. In the coming era of crypto, Cosmos and Polkadot have every chance to stand on equal footing with Ethereum.

As Michelle Bailhe said: "Over the next decade, the number of users and developers with access to encryption will increase 10-100 times. We think we are in the second phase that has just begun." In terms of investment direction, Maguire said that Sequoia Capital is particularly interested in cross-chain interoperability and the GameFi project, and said that multi-chain is the future.