Thread by @ThyBorg_

#Prop69 is getting everyone talking about CosmWasm so I thought it would be useful to explain what it is (while careful ignoring the hot debate around its implementation in the Cosmos Hub) 🧵

Unlike virtual-machine blockchains (like Ethereum) where everything is programmed as a set of smart contracts, the Cosmos SDK is a framework for application-specific blockchains

The framework is designed to build blockchains out of composable modules. Anyone can create a module, and integrating already-built modules is straightforward

CosmWasm is one such module. It's an implementation of WASM (WebAssembly) running on top of a Cosmos SDK application.

You can think of WebAssembly as the equivalent of the EVM: it serves as an intermediate language to compile the developer’s language into a portable virtual machine

WebAssembly is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium which includes Web2 giants like Mozilla, Microsoft, Google & Apple

CosmWasm is actually just one of several projects funded by @interchain_io to build a virtual machine on top of Tendermint, as a module for Cosmos

But CosmWasm is especially popular because it allows developers to write modules in Rust, which is consistently voted as one of the best general-purpose programming language for performance and safety

It gives chains the ability to upload code in transactions, without the need to restart. That allows for a much quicker deployment of new features

And while Juno, which uses CosmWasm, has enabled the default permissionless uploading of smart contracts, other chains can easily limit smart contract deployment to governance

Aside from Juno, CosmWasm is used in production by a lot of big name blockchains including Terra, Secret, Nym, Fetch, Persistence, Crypto(dot)org, and soon others like Osmosis

I'm planning to make a thread as objective as possible about the need (or lack thereof) for CosmWasm on the Cosmos Hub in the coming days

I also write educative & digestible threads on other topics such as airdrops, tokens, teams & projects, so you may consider giving me a follow @ThyBorg_ ✌️