“At first, there was Bitcoin, out of the entropy soup of the greater All. Then, there was Ethereum, which was created in the likeness of Bitcoin, but made Turing complete.

Among these were Tendermint and Cosmos to engineer robust PoS and IBC. Then came Gno upon Cosmos and there spring forth Gnoland, simulated by the Gnomes of the Greater Resistance.”

The quote above, derived directly from the gno repository, encapsulates the historical background behind Gno.land’s creation. Bitcoin has achieved decentralization of value, Ethereum has achieved decentralization of systems, and Cosmos has achieved interoperability of decentralized systems. Each generation has brought significant improvements to the blockchain space, making it a friendlier environment for both users and developers.

The birth of the Tendermint and IBC has enabled robusticity of consensus between untrusted parties and the simplicity of creating independent blockchains that are fully customizable while being interoperable by nature. Today, a significant number of Top 50 blockchains by market capitalization are built on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint. It is clear that the Cosmos Ecosystem is flourishing and the multichain future envisioned by Cosmos is turning into reality.

However, the set of ideas that serve as the pillars of the Cosmos Ecosystem’s architecture is slowly drifting away from its initial philosophy: Hub Minimalism. The founders of the Cosmos Hub believed that the functions of the hub should be as few as possible, with main reasons being: 1) preventing non-cross chain transactions from flooding the network, 2) keeping the functionality of zones and hubs separate, and 3) simplifying the hub to boost security (the recent halt of Juno Network validates this argument).

The deployment and the failure of the Gravity Dex on the Cosmos Hub coupled with the success of the Osmosis as an emerging dominant Hub created controversy within the Cosmos community. According to Map of Zones, Cosmos is ranked 3rd by IBC volume, and 4th by IBC transfers, which suggest that users prefer Hubs with more functionality such as Osmosis and Terra. Arguments that the Cosmos Hub should enable permissionless CosmWasm smart contacts or adopt a unique feature that can help Cosmos Hub regain its position as the leading hub are starting to confuse the community on where the Cosmos Hub should be headed, and if the tokenomics of ATOM needs modification.

Other blockchains are also faced with notable challenges: Ethereum users are suffering from unaffordable gas fees, Solana users from relatively frequent downtimes, and Terra users from the over-reliance on the performance of a single dapp that holds a majority of its native stablecoins.

Among the chaos, Jae Kwon, a core contributor to the Cosmos and Tendermint has been designing a new blockchain called Gnoland with the goal of optimizing the consensus process between validators, the completeness of the smart contract language, and the sustainability of the tokenomics.

“At first, there was Bitcoin, out of the entropy soup of the greater All. Then, there was Ethereum, which was created in the likeness of Bitcoin, but made Turing complete.

Among these were Tendermint and Cosmos to engineer robust PoS and IBC. Then came Gno upon Cosmos and there spring forth Gnoland, simulated by the Gnomes of the Greater Resistance.”

The quote above, derived directly from the gno repository, encapsulates the historical background behind Gno.land’s creation. Bitcoin has achieved decentralization of value, Ethereum has achieved decentralization of systems, and Cosmos has achieved interoperability of decentralized systems. Each generation has brought significant improvements to the blockchain space, making it a friendlier environment for both users and developers.

The birth of the Tendermint and IBC has enabled robusticity of consensus between untrusted parties and the simplicity of creating independent blockchains that are fully customizable while being interoperable by nature. Today, a significant number of Top 50 blockchains by market capitalization are built on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint. It is clear that the Cosmos Ecosystem is flourishing and the multichain future envisioned by Cosmos is turning into reality.

However, the set of ideas that serve as the pillars of the Cosmos Ecosystem’s architecture is slowly drifting away from its initial philosophy: Hub Minimalism. The founders of the Cosmos Hub believed that the functions of the hub should be as few as possible, with main reasons being: 1) preventing non-cross chain transactions from flooding the network, 2) keeping the functionality of zones and hubs separate, and 3) simplifying the hub to boost security (the recent halt of Juno Network validates this argument).

The deployment and the failure of the Gravity Dex on the Cosmos Hub coupled with the success of the Osmosis as an emerging dominant Hub created controversy within the Cosmos community. According to Map of Zones, Cosmos is ranked 3rd by IBC volume, and 4th by IBC transfers, which suggest that users prefer Hubs with more functionality such as Osmosis and Terra. Arguments that the Cosmos Hub should enable permissionless CosmWasm smart contacts or adopt a unique feature that can help Cosmos Hub regain its position as the leading hub are starting to confuse the community on where the Cosmos Hub should be headed, and if the tokenomics of ATOM needs modification.

Other blockchains are also faced with notable challenges: Ethereum users are suffering from unaffordable gas fees, Solana users from relatively frequent downtimes, and Terra users from the over-reliance on the performance of a single dapp that holds a majority of its native stablecoins.

Among the chaos, Jae Kwon, a core contributor to the Cosmos and Tendermint has been designing a new blockchain called Gnoland with the goal of optimizing the consensus process between validators, the completeness of the smart contract language, and the sustainability of the tokenomics.