The Interchain Foundation (ICF), headquartered in Switzerland and responsible for developing the Cosmos cross-chain communication protocol, has outlined a budget of $26.4 million for the upcoming year to sustain and enhance the Cosmos ecosystem.
As per the announcement on December 13, the ICF's roadmap for 2024 prioritizes funding towards strengthening key aspects of the Interchain Stack. A substantial portion of $3 million is earmarked for CometBFT, the Byzantine Fault Tolerance engine of Cosmos designed for state machine replication. Furthermore, $4.5 million is allocated to the development of the Cosmos software development kit, while $7.5 million is set aside for enhancing Cosmos' native inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC).
The remaining $4.155 million is designated for the advancement of the smart contract framework CosmWasm, the digital library CosmJS, and ensuring ecosystem security through audits. Maria Gomez, Director of the ICF Board of Directors, emphasized the funding program's aim to fortify the open-source Interchain Stack as a driver for increased connectivity across blockchains. She stated that their role in the ecosystem is to act as stewards facilitating interoperability among different chains.
Currently, Cosmos' IBC bridge connects 46 blockchains, collectively holding a token value of $13 billion. However, this falls short of the target set by Cosmos' core developer, Tendermint (now Ignite), of achieving 200 IBCs by 2022, as announced in November 2021.
During the current year, the ICF has dedicated a total of $40 million to foster ecosystem development. Initiatives like the Cross-Chain Developer Academy, the Cosmos Developer Portal, the Cross-Chain Builder Program, and integration efforts with other blockchain technologies such as Polkadot and Hyperledger have been supported. Notably, the Cosmos ecosystem has largely avoided the various hacking incidents associated with cross-chain bridges.
