Right now, blockchains communicate via tacked-on solutions (state channels, sidechains, swaps, bridges and so on). With the Stargate update to Cosmos on Feb. 18, the tools for native blockchain interoperability will be live on mainnet.
“This is a long-awaited release for many Cosmos-based projects out there,” Band Protocol’s Kevin Lu told CoinDesk via email. “For us this will enable seamless and simple integrations with any Cosmos-based decentralized application, relaying oracle data in a highly scalable and tamper-proof manner.”
Iqlusion’s Zaki Manian, who leads much of the development for Cosmos, explained that once Stargate goes live, a governance vote will be required to switch on inter-blockchain communication (IBC), which will take two weeks to finalize.
So at the earliest, all systems go for IBC would be early March. That said, Tendermint chains need to upgrade to the Cosmos SDK for this to happen. Manian said this is probably one or two weeks of work for most dev…