Cosmos Chains Can Evolve Into Polkadot Parachains Thanks to New SDK

Cosmos developers will be welcoming the news that their chains can now connect with Polkadot’s Substrate network of parachains with minimal effort.

Until now, projects elected to build on Cosmos would have been forced to remain there, given the costs and time associated with migrating to a different blockchain and rebuilding from scratch.

A new SDK from Adoriasoft promises to provide painless chain-switching on-demand, allowing Cosmos chains to be repurposed as Polkadot parachains. Not only will Cosmos projects that make the switch be able to capitalize on Polkadot’s enviable network effects and developer community, but they will be freed from the burden of securing their own chain, which will be projected by Polkadot’s Relay Chain.

Polkadot Parachains as a Service

The Cosmos SDK Parachain Development Kit created by Adoriasoft allows developers to host their Cosmos chain or Zone on Polkadot and connect to the Polkadot Relay Chain. As a result, Cosmos developers won’t need to focus on building their own security network of validators to save their efforts for creating their own projects.

The Polkadot team explained in the grant awarded to Adoriasoft that the goal was to “build a functionality that allows anyone who has built a chain with the Cosmos SDK to turn that chain into a full Polkadot parachain. The purpose here is that any sovereign chain created with the Cosmos SDK could connect with Polkadot and not be responsible for their own security.”

There are many reasons why the new Cosmos SDK Parachain Development Kit is likely to be heavily utilized in the months to come. According to Tendermint, over $6 billion in assets are managed by public blockchains built with the Cosmos SDK – all of which now have the ability to migrate to Polkadot with the minimum of fuss.

To date, Cosmos has attracted a diverse range of use cases, including such applications as:

• Open finance: the ability to trade across different token economies
• Gaming: building blockchain games with digital merchandise
• Healthcare: storing patient data and sharing it with approved healthcare providers
• Prediction market: where users can bet on the result of future events with no middleman
• Cross-border payments: sending funds globally on-chain at a low cost
• Real estate: the ability to store and transfer deeds of ownership with the blockchain acting as the notary for the purpose of verification.

These projects and use cases can now be ported over to Polkadot, whose world of interoperable parachains beckons.

Fitting It All Together

Ordinarily, Polkadot and Cosmos are like Montagues and Capulets: they share the same city but do not communicate. Adoriasoft’s SDK will put an end to that by making it possible for Cosmos’ Tendermint-powered consensus to connect to Polkadot’s Substrate framework. Ultimately, Adoriasoft aims to make it possible for any Cosmos app to connect to Polkadot’s Relay Chain.

The best part is that Cosmos projects can retain their existing architecture since the specially devised SDK allows transaction data to be relayed to Cosmos nodes, whose state can then be updated before responding to the Substrate node. The first phase of implementing the SDK has been successfully completed, allowing the first Cosmos app to interact with Substrate.

The next phase will see Cosmos validator election incorporated into the Substrate consensus layer, allowing seamless communication between the two blockchain ecosystems and enticing Cosmos developers to bring their brilliance to Polkadot’s scalable ecosystem.