What Ethereum can learn from Cosmos by Ethan Frey

As Ethereum moves closer to a Wasm-native runtime, it is good to learn from other technically strong Wasm projects. CosmWasm is a Cosmos-native smart contract engine based on Wasm, designed from the ground up with a security-first mentality. We learned much from Ethereum’s successes and failures and would like to share our experiences as well. Cosmos is a network of over 50 PoS Blockchains connected via trust-minimized IBC bridges. It has been a pioneer in BFT consensus algorithms, secure bridging technology, and the multi-chain / app-chain thesis since 2016. CosmWasm started in 2019 and is now the best smart contract platform made for Cosmos… but it’s not just for Cosmos. It is the reason many projects have migrated to Cosmos - Engima (now Secret) and dYdX from Ethereum; Burnt Finance and Katana from Solana; Datachain from Hyperledger and more. It powered Terra’s DeFi ecosystem. And Composable Finance is even running CosmWasm contracts on a Polkadot parachain. CosmWasm is also the first multi-chain native smart contract engine, allowing contracts to directly interact with other chains by defining custom IBC protocols. For example, a DAO on Juno can vote to issue an NFT on Stargaze, and place protocol-owned liquidity to it’s pools on Osmosis. It is also being used to build out Mesh Security, a decentralized, multi-chain future for PoS chains to share security bidirectionally. We would love to introduce the Ethereum community to CosmWasm and invite them to learn more; whether it is getting inspiration for eWasm, or potentially integrating CosmWasm alongside the EVM in a layer 2 rollup.