Bison Trails, the premier blockchain infrastructure platform as-a-service company, announced today it will support secure participation and read/write infrastructure across the Cosmos ecosystem, deployed and managed with enterprise-grade security best practices.
The Cosmos ecosystem is made up of multiple Tendermint-based blockchains (blockchains that run on the Tendermint open-source software and consensus engine). It launched with Cosmos Hub, the first blockchain in the ecosystem, in 2019. In February 2021, following the successful Stargate upgrade, Cosmos accomplished its vision of enabling interoperability across its ecosystem of blockchains to power the development of a wide range of cross-chain applications, which include cross-chain token transfers, atomic swaps, multi-chain smart contracts, and various kinds of data sharding.
To date, the Tendermint ecosystem has seen a wide variety of DeFi-oriented projects being built with the Cosmos SDK (Software Development Kit) including Terra, Thorchain, Kava, Binance Chain, Agoric, and Band Protocol. Following the Stargate upgrade, these different Tendermint protocols have the ability to be interoperable.
“An interoperable blockchain environment holds tremendous potential to expand the use cases and reach of existing applications, as well as encouraging broader sharing, community building, and open innovation,” said Joe Lallouz, CEO of Bison Trails. “Cosmos’ vision is very closely aligned with Bison Trails’ mission of strengthening the entire ecosystem, and we look forward to empowering participants and developers in the community with our fully-managed infrastructure.”
Bison Trails will offer Participation and QT (Query and Transaction) node clusters for Cosmos.
- Participation Clusters (validator nodes and supporting infrastructure) will enable participants to stake and delegate their tokens, while keeping the network secure and decentralized. Participants can earn rewards both through transaction fees, as well as through delegation rewards as a Cosmos validator.
Bison Trails Participation Clusters for Cosmos are designed with industry-leading security best practices. Validator nodes are hosted in a private network. Sentry nodes act as an interface between the validator nodes and the public blockchain network, helping validator nodes stay private and reducing the risk of DDoS and remote access attacks. Participation Clusters are deployed with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), ensuring that the private keys for validators never exist outside of the HSM device, making them significantly harder to compromise.
- Private QT Clusters will enable customers to read and query data from the Cosmos Hub, validate transactions, and write transfers or smart contract interactions.
QT clusters for the Cosmos ecosystem offer full nodes, archival nodes, and light client support to enable efficient access to data from the Cosmos Hub based on participants’ needs.
“Making it easier for multiple parties to participate through block production and read-write infrastructure is key to strengthening the blockchain ecosystem. We offer a secure, reliable way to participate and build in the Cosmos network as well as other Tendermint & Cosmos-SDK based chains,” said Aaron Henshaw, CTO of Bison Trails. “By supporting Stargate, the most recent Cosmos Hub upgrade, we are proud to be part of the realization of the original white paper and look forward to supporting the continued growth of this vibrant platform, as well as the broader Tendermint ecosystem.”
“The interoperability enabled by Stargate will greatly accelerate the rate at which new chains form in the Cosmos ecosystem, especially in fast growing use cases like DeFi,” said Zaki Manian, Principal Cofounder of iqlusion and a Cosmos developer. “This interoperability makes it more important than ever to have reliable infrastructure providers secure and provide access to the Cosmos multi-chain ecosystem. Bison Trails is one of the longest running Cosmos validators and I am excited to continue collaborating with them on Cosmos."
For more information on running Participation or QT nodes for Cosmos, please visit: https://bisontrails.co/contact/
