IBC has already connected 29 chains in the Cosmos ecosystem and facilitated the free movement of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets between them. But, what exactly is IBC, and what does it mean for Kava?

In a nutshell, the IBC enables blockchains to talk to each other, and it’s the backbone of the Cosmos ecosystem.

Released earlier this year, the IBC will boot blockchain interoperability into hyperdrive. Kava 9 includes channels between Kava Network and several IBC-enabled chains. Each channel will become a major trade route carrying new value, use-cases, and users to the Kava Network.

The development of IBC picked up in the summer of 2019, and IBC’s launch was announced alongside the Stargate upgrade in February 2021 and was launched around April of the same year.

Members of the IBC Working Group include Tendermint, Agoric Systems, and the Interchain Foundation.

The IBC protocol can be likened to shipping container standardization, which enabled global economic trade without the necessity of political alignment between nation-states. The former lead researcher at Tendermint, Sunny Aggarwal, calls it “economic integration without political integration.”

As a general protocol for facilitating trustless communication between independent blockchains, the IBC is a major facet of Cosmos’s Internet of Blockchains vision. To understand what that all means for Kava, let’s look under the hood and inspect the IBC engine.

IBC can be implemented by any consensus mechanism that supports fast finality (like Tendermint Core).

The IBC standardizes what Zones (the application-specific blockchains of the Cosmos ecosystem) can expect when interacting with one another. Sticking with the shipping container analogy, the IBC allows the creation of shipping channels between Zones, like trade routes between different ports.

That’s important because before the IBC, the different blockchains of the Cosmos ecosystem, each with its own rules, had no effective way to communicate or “ship goods” to one another.

Both chains need to have IBC enabled to transact IBC assets. That entails each chain having a version of the consensus algorithm of the other so that they know how both chains find consensus. The most compatible option is to use Tendermint Core as the consensus mechanism.

What makes the IBC so powerful is its versatility — The IBC’s standardized form, the Inter‐Chain Standard (ICS), will work with any compatible blockchain, not just Cosmos ecosystem chains.

However, the IBC is highly compatible with the Cosmos ecosystem and could be the unifying force that the ecosystem lacked by its own nature (a centerless ecosystem of application-specific blockchains built with open-source software). A big reason for that is the Tendermint-based Cosmos SDK maintains dedicated support for the IBC.

IBC has already connected 29 chains in the Cosmos ecosystem and facilitated the free movement of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets between them. But, what exactly is IBC, and what does it mean for Kava?

In a nutshell, the IBC enables blockchains to talk to each other, and it’s the backbone of the Cosmos ecosystem.

Released earlier this year, the IBC will boot blockchain interoperability into hyperdrive. Kava 9 includes channels between Kava Network and several IBC-enabled chains. Each channel will become a major trade route carrying new value, use-cases, and users to the Kava Network.

The development of IBC picked up in the summer of 2019, and IBC’s launch was announced alongside the Stargate upgrade in February 2021 and was launched around April of the same year.

Members of the IBC Working Group include Tendermint, Agoric Systems, and the Interchain Foundation.

The IBC protocol can be likened to shipping container standardization, which enabled global economic trade without the necessity of political alignment between nation-states. The former lead researcher at Tendermint, Sunny Aggarwal, calls it “economic integration without political integration.”

As a general protocol for facilitating trustless communication between independent blockchains, the IBC is a major facet of Cosmos’s Internet of Blockchains vision. To understand what that all means for Kava, let’s look under the hood and inspect the IBC engine.

IBC can be implemented by any consensus mechanism that supports fast finality (like Tendermint Core).

The IBC standardizes what Zones (the application-specific blockchains of the Cosmos ecosystem) can expect when interacting with one another. Sticking with the shipping container analogy, the IBC allows the creation of shipping channels between Zones, like trade routes between different ports.

That’s important because before the IBC, the different blockchains of the Cosmos ecosystem, each with its own rules, had no effective way to communicate or “ship goods” to one another.

Both chains need to have IBC enabled to transact IBC assets. That entails each chain having a version of the consensus algorithm of the other so that they know how both chains find consensus. The most compatible option is to use Tendermint Core as the consensus mechanism.

What makes the IBC so powerful is its versatility — The IBC’s standardized form, the Inter‐Chain Standard (ICS), will work with any compatible blockchain, not just Cosmos ecosystem chains.

However, the IBC is highly compatible with the Cosmos ecosystem and could be the unifying force that the ecosystem lacked by its own nature (a centerless ecosystem of application-specific blockchains built with open-source software). A big reason for that is the Tendermint-based Cosmos SDK maintains dedicated support for the IBC.