The Interchain Foundation (ICF), headquartered in Switzerland and the principal developer of the cross-chain communications protocol Cosmos, has allocated $26.4 million to maintain its ecosystem in 2024.
An announcement from December 13 states that the ICF 2024 roadmap “prioritizes funding for the optimal functionality of the Interchain Stack.” Committed to CometBFT, the Byzantine fault-tolerant engine developed by Cosmos for state machine replication, will receive $3 million of the allocated funds.
In the interim, the Cosmos software development package will receive $4.5 million in funding, while the native inter-blockchain communications protocol (IBC) of the Cosmos blockchain will receive $7.5 million.
Digital library CosmJS, smart contract framework CosmWasm, and ecosystem security audits will receive the remaining $4.155 million. “The objective of this year’s funding program is to strengthen the Interchain Stack, an open-source, free-to-use platform that acts as a catalyst for increased blockchain interconnectedness,” explained Maria Gomez, director of the ICF board. “Our position within the ecosystem is that of a steward, assisting the interchain in attaining its aim of interoperable sovereignty.”
The IBC bridge provided by Cosmos currently links 46 blockchains, which collectively possess tokens worth $13 billion. Despite being substantial, it falls short of the 200 IBCs-by-2022 objective established in November 2021 by Tendermint (now Ignite), the developer of Cosmos Core.
The Interchain Builders Program, the Interchain Developer Academy, and integration with other blockchain technologies, including Polkadot and Hyperledger, were among the initiatives for which the ICF allocated $40 million this year for ecosystem development.
Despite the prevalence of breaches in cross-chain bridges, the Cosmos ecosystem has remained largely unaffected.
