Cosmos’ Shared Security Model Gets Vote Of Confidence

The first proposal to allow a blockchain to derive its security from the Cosmos Hub, a major blockchain worth over $3B, has received near-unanimous support.

Neutron, the blockchain looking to outsource its security to the Cosmos Hub, bills itself as a smart contract platform geared towards DeFi. The Cosmos Hub will receive 25% of transaction fees and miner extractable value (MEV) from the Neutron chain, as well as 7% of the supply of its NTRN tokens.

If the proposal passes next week, Neutron would become the first chain to use Replicated Security, as the shared security feature is called.

Cosmos’ ATOM token is relatively unchanged over the past month.

ATOM Price. Source: Coingecko

It’s a major milestone, according to Ethan Buchman, the co-founder of Cosmos. Buchman is also the CEO of Informal Systems, the company which released the first version of Replicated Security. “It opens up a development ecosystem around Cosmos Hub for the first time, really,” he told The Defiant.

Stride, a liquid staking protocol like Lido Finance and Rocket Pool, also has a live vote to adopt the shared security model.

Replicated Security offers a potential solution to the chicken-or-the-egg problem of starting a new blockchain — a blockchain’s security usually derives from validators who need to hold a project’s native token to secure the network. If that token is cheap, as it often is when a project begins, a malicious actor can potentially gain control of the new blockchain at a relatively low cost. If a project is secured by the Cosmos Hub, which is valued at $3.3B, the problem of easy corruption is theoretically eliminated.

With Neutron and Stride potentially set to use the model, the Cosmos ecosystem may be entering a new era where businesses can safely spin up “consumer chains” with relative ease.

Appchain Model Gains Traction

While Cosmos has always championed the concept of app-specific chains, there’s been rising activity throughout crypto to provide tooling for smaller projects to launch blockchains specific to them. Leading layer 2 network Arbitrum, itself built on Ethereum, launched a product called Orbit to allow projects to quickly spin up custom blockchains.

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And Optimism, another major scaling solution, is pursuing its own model, called a Superchain, which involves an ecosystem of chains, similar to the Cosmos model.

Buchman doesn’t see the convergence as a threat to Cosmos. “I think it’s all complementary,” he said. “I think it’s nice to see the ETH community increasingly coming to terms with the Cosmos vision and approach.”