CosmosATOM#20

Cosmos (ATOM) is a cryptocurrency based on technology that allows blockchain economies to interact with each other. Back in 2017, the Swiss non-profit which supports Cosmos and its ecosystem raised $16.8 million in just half an hour, making the platform’s launch one of crypto-history’s most successful fundraisers. An open-source project built by the Tendermint team in 2014, founders Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman sought to create modularity while allowing blockchains to remain sovereign. Proof-of-work protocols and blockchains themselves have several disadvantages, which Cosmos seeks to remedy; the former are relatively slow, expensive, unscalable, and environmentally damaging. Meanwhile, blockchain applications are complex and difficult for developers to understand; their economies are siloed, which is good for security but bad for interconnectivity as blockchains cannot transfer assets between one another. Sidestepping these pitfalls, Cosmos uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus engine to power its Proof-of-stake mechanism. The technology allows for profound flexibility and scalability, where people can build custom and secure blockchain applications on top of a generic engine.