1/ A Thread on Cosmos, the "internet of blockchains"
2/ Cosmos is "a novel blockchain network architecture that addresses all of these problems. Cosmos is a network connecting many independent blockchains, called zones.”
3/ I.e. The goal is to make blockchains highly interoperable by facilitating all crypto-to-crypto exchanges. This level of decentralized interoperability would allow for a lot more robust applications to be built on public blockchains.
4/ The Cosmos zones are powered by a consensus algorithm called tendermint which promises scalability and fast finality.
5/ The “primary” zone on Cosmos is called the Cosmos Hub. The Cosmos Hub connects all the other zones and is where the governance is built in to allow the network to adapt and upgrade.
6/ The Cosmos Hub communicates with the other zones via an inter-blockchain communication (IBC) protocol. Something like TCP for blockchains.
7/ Tokens can be transferred from one zone to another, while also isolating the failure of one zone from others.
8/ To take the simplest possible example, Here’s my understanding of what the system would look like to exchange ETH for BTC using Cosmos: 
9/ The Cosmos Hub is administered by 100 validators chosen as the ones which stake the most “atoms,” Cosmos internal token. The number of validators will scale to 300 over the course of 10 years.
10/ The zones are administered by independent validators who get to determine the rules of the zone. The idea is that different groups of validators will compete to have the “best” ETH zone, BTC zone, XMR zone, etc.
11/ There may be room for multiple ETH zones, multiple BTC zones, etc.
12/ One tradeoff is that fewer validators means faster finality (but less decentralization and probably more expensive) so perhaps there will be a cheaper, faster more centralized zone and a more expensive, slower, decentralized zone.
13/ Here’s an example of how it would work if you wanted to exchange BTC for ETH or vice versa (red text):
14/ This is pretty similar functionality to a cross chain atomic swap. What's the difference?
15/ Main differences are: that both parties have to be online for cross chain swamps, but not on Cosmos. Cosmos would probably have more liquidity because you can leave an open order and go offline. Liquidity tends to beget liquidity which could create a network effect
16/ Cross chain atomic swamps would have fewer fees and I suppose there is less trust because you don’t need to trust Cosmos?
17/ Current whitepaper here: github.com/cosmos/cosmos/…
18/ Questions I had:
19/ How battle tested is Tendermint as a consensus protocol? Lots of chatter but seems like not very much has been built on it. What are the best criticisms?
20/ What is the GTM strategy? What are the early use cases? Is it 0x competitor?
21/ As always, thoughts/feedback/corrections welcome.
