Why Build on Cosmos?
This post is inspired by a challenge from Akash founder Greg Osuri.
Preface—Technical Knowledge vs Marketing
I would like to preface this post with something I feel like is a problem in the IT industry (where I work) and why I’m about to perpetuate that problem. Despite talk about employee burnout in the tech space, which I’m sure exists, there is also a huge amount of inefficiency in tech companies. At my current job, we honestly need to put in perhaps 4 hours of work per day before we move on to personal endeavors. How is this possible?
Well, most companies are managed by non-technical people. There are clear benefits to this, but some seldom discussed pitfalls. The reality is many of my bosses don’t understand what I do, nor do they particularly want to, after all, they hired me to take care of their IT problems! The issue is that since they lack the knowledge to understand my position, it becomes incredibly difficult to assess my performance to any degree of accuracy. As long as things are working, there’s no bugs, we aren’t hacked, etc. the company is satisfied with my performance.
This is an example of benevolent knowledge gaps. My boss hires me to do a specialized job, but lacks the understanding to manage me (replace me with any IT/software engineer/tech job) with equal efficiency to the sales department.
An extension of this concept are non-benevolent knowledge gaps. These are when people lack the technical understanding to really understand something, but speak on the issue as if they do. Many crypto-influencers have absolutely no idea how to create a blockchain token, and some may not know how to program at all. Someone taught them metaphors to explain Bitcoin and they mistook these oversimplifications as legitimate understanding of blockchain technology.
So, that was a long aside! I’m sorry if that felt like a waste of time. My point is essentially that while I am in IT, design web-sites for fun, etc. I am NOT an expert in blockchain technology. I can program simple things in Solidity, but am realistically a beginner in blockchain. And that’s only one language amongst dozens or hundreds. I will therefore give my oversimplified opinion about why Cosmos is a great mix of scalability/deployability and why it is useful over other layer ones like Avalanche.
The Actual Article
In blockchain, there is a constant struggle to solve the trilemma—the tradeoff between scalability, security, and decentralization. Many chains claim to solve this tradeoff triangle, yet the legitimacy of these claims are questionable.
Cosmos is useful because it seeks to strike a balance between these three principles as opposed to “solving” them. The Cosmos hub has an average transaction time of ~8 seconds, has 125 validators, and relies on tendermint BFT for security. Tendermint “is the most (and only) mature BFT consensus engine in existence. It is widely used across the industry and is considered the gold standard consensus engine for building Proof-of-Stake systems.”
Now, a quick run down on some of the competitors. Why not use Ethereum? Ethereum currently has a scaling issue with average transaction times historically ranging between 15 seconds to 5 minutes. I have personally attempted transactions with low gas fees that got stuck for days. I ultimately had to set another transaction with a higher gas fee and adjust the nonce value to cancel the first transaction just to get my ETH back. The block time has also proven highly vulnerable to alterations based on network activity. In the past year alone, block time has increased ~43%. Additionally, miners are being phased out, a fee burning mechanism is about to be implemented (the fabled EIP-1559), network sharding is being considered, and the ecosystem is moving to Proof of Stake with only around 6% of ETH currently staked. I love Ethereum and it has my respect for trying to evolve, but its infrastructure is clearly unstable and we simply don’t know how these changes will resolve.
Now on to Avalanche, since that was the chain mentioned in the original tweet! Avalanche is a super cool idea. It’s split into 3 chains that mint and burn back and forth. Avalanche is also crazy fast, claiming it can process 4,500 tps. Sounds great! Unfortunately, that pesky trilemma has something to say. Avalanche is a very new L1 and hasn’t had the time to work out the kinks yet. Back in February, “high” volume attributed to one application launching, Pangolin, led the validators to accept invalid mints between primary chains, damaging network consensus. Ultimately, the bug was fixed and a small amount of additional AVAX was minted and then burned by the foundation to offset the inflation. Unlike Cosmos, which is battle tested, Avalanche is still new and issues with this consensus model may continuously propagate once adoption increases. As a developer, would you bet your life’s work on a new consensus model (though not an original one) that failed its first real test at scaling or the most mature BFT engine in existence? This fact is one reason why Ethereum is still so dominant: it’s reliable, tested, and proven.
So…why build on Cosmos? It has a track record of performance, offers proven interoperability, has a stable governance and consensus model, is relatively fast, is continuously decentralizing, and has appeared to scale well so far. Avalanche and Ethereum cannot say the same, at least yet!
