Cosmos Hub postpones vote date following white paper revision
Revised paper. [pdf]
Also worth reading the original from September: New Cosmos white paper repurposes ATOM token and refines vision, and the paper.
The Cosmos Hub’s inaugural role was to originate the internet of blockchains. It did so by resourcing the development of the Cosmos SDK, IBC, and Tendermint, the core open-source primitives for the blockchain applications that now populate the interchain. However, with an active and increasingly sophisticated IBC network, the needs of the interchain have evolved. Accordingly, the Cosmos Hub must also transition into a new role: to grow a resilient interchain economy.
All this chain linkage is interesting and, compared to other chains, has been pioneering; using IBC usually works quickly and cheaply compared to other chains I don't wish to mention.
However, this network of links creates ever-more dependencies, and a network of dependencies has a habit of spreading contagion when one chain has a serious issue. The value of each token in terms of network-utility is not the same as its financial value as reflected in markets.
What I see as desperately missing from all this is the understanding that the financial protocols must be updated and made more resilient. That understanding must come first as when I ask about such things nobody seems to be working on this. I have to add that, even though Osmosis is based on Balancer protocols, I don't see many Osmosis devs who truly understand this. If they did, why have they just created crappy binary constant-content pools? Where are the Balancer options?
They tell me many people find such constructs "complicated". Well, no shit! But if we got rid of everything the average person doesn't understand then we'd have no mortgages, no loans, no pensions, no annuities, no stockmarkets etc etc, - and those are just financial products, never mind tech. What I've seen, is that most people just react to experience, so there is no point expecting them to read the mathematics behind swap pools; you have to create the experience.
The creation of deeper interchain connections leaves open the danger of further contagion events - such as another LUNA crash landing - so the decentralised finance protocols must be made to minimise such catastrophic epidemics.