The Cosmos ecosystem is entering a new chapter with the Interchain Foundation’s (ICF) acquisition of Skip and the establishment of Interchain Inc. The move represents a pivot from the ICF’s historical funding of disparate teams toward a more centralized and cohesive approach.
The new subsidiary, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck, will take charge of product development, ecosystem strategy and execution, the ICF announced earlier this week. On Thursday, a “community town hall” X space shed additional light on what to expect in 2025.
A unified stack
Cosmos has long been heralded for its modular technology stack, including Cosmos SDK, IBC, CometBFT, and CosmWasm. However, Plunkett described a lack of coordination in the ecosystem’s growth.
“There wasn’t any cohesive overarching connection,” Plunkett told Blockworks. “Each of them was going off in their own direction.”
Read more: Uniting the blockchain ecosystems: Q&A with Cosmos founder Ethan Buchman
Interchain Inc. aims to bridge these silos, including major “version 2” upgrades to both IBC — known as Eureka — and the Cosmos SDK. The SDK upgrade promises a 10–25x performance boost, while IBC Eureka simplifies the Interchain interop protocol to enable faster integration with non-Cosmos chains like Ethereum, EVM rollups and Solana.
“It’s a massive simplification of the IBC protocol that’s really going to allow the ecosystem to connect to other chains beyond [Cosmos]…in days or weeks,” Plunkett said during the X space.
In other words, Eureka “is like if ‘IBC Classic’ and Hyperlane had a baby,” as Cosmos-veteran builder Zaki Manian put it on the latest edition of the Bell Curve podcast.
Another cornerstone of the new strategy is expanding virtual machine (VM) support. An open-source EVM is in the works, with the team in discussions with projects like Injective and Cronos to consider adapting their EVM implementations.
“Most Cosmos chains want a simple, reliable and free path to add EVM functionality,” Plunkett said, emphasizing that Solidity contracts will be able to interact seamlessly with Cosmos SDK modules and vice versa.
Cosmos chains will also gain the flexibility to run any VM. “Users shouldn’t have to say, ‘If I’m going to build a Cosmos chain, then I can’t use whatever VM I want,’” Plunkett added.
The role of the Cosmos Hub
Addressing liquidity fragmentation across chains is a major priority for the Interchain Inc. team. Cosmos’ architecture, which empowers individual chains to operate independently, has inadvertently led to isolated liquidity pools. This hurts the overall ecosystem and discourages developers.
Read more: Unified Ethereum? Devcon panelists take on fragmentation challenges
Liquidity gets stuck on one chain and isn’t accessible from other chains, Mareneck said on X, adding, “One of the things we want to do is really unite that liquidity so that it’s more accessible from more applications, so we can use the full weight of Cosmos liquidity.”
The Cosmos Hub is central to this strategy. By providing liquidity services and reducing friction for developers, the Hub could position itself as the ecosystem’s growth engine.
Permissionless Interchain Security (ICS) will make it easier for projects to onboard to the Hub. Whereas initially chains had to apply to Hub governance to make use of ICS, that’s no longer the case.
Interchain Inc. is also focused on simplifying the developer experience, ensuring the Cosmos Hub provides essential services.
“We need to make it easier for builders and ensure the Hub provides services to grow and scale chains,” Plunkett said.
Read more: Solana gained highest share of new devs in 2024: Electric Capital
The Skip team’s reputation for collaboration is going to be key for realizing this new Hub vision.
“We have relationships at Skip with a lot of different projects…we want to continue to do that, working from the platform of the Cosmos Hub,” Mareneck said.
Skip has focused on providing services for builders and useful products for users, such as Skip Go, which now powers over half of all IBC volume, Plunkett said on Bell Curve.
Rather than enforcing participation, the team will offer “carrots, not sticks,” to align incentives and foster growth.
By consolidating development and focusing on liquidity and accessibility, the ICF hopes to create a more unified and dynamic ecosystem, reigniting the vision of Cosmos as the “Internet of Blockchains.”
Outgoing ICF board member Ethan Buchman, a co-founder of Cosmos, sees this move as a chance to reinvigorate the ecosystem and bring fragmented pieces together.
“We’ve been struggling with the organizational challenges and fragmentation,” Buchman told Blockworks. This is really the first time I think we’ve taken a kind of revolutionary step to address that.”
“It’s like I’ve been trying to put together the pieces of Humpty Dumpty for so many years and finally, we just went and recruited Batman,” he said.
