The Interchain Foundation puts aside $26.4M to grow Cosmos ecosystem

The Interchain Foundation (ICF), a non-profit organization dedicated to driving growth in the Cosmos ecosystem, has allocated $26.4 million to fund Interchain Stack development and adoption in 2024.

This amount is significantly less than in previous years. In the 2023 budget, the ICF planned to provide $40 million to the ecosystem, and in 2022 the foundation spent $54.1 million on ecosystem growth.

Generally speaking, ICF Funding has been split into five core areas within the Cosmos ecosystem. These areas include consensus layer software CometBFT, the Cosmos software development kit (SDK), the Interblockchain Communication protocol (IBC), the smart contracting platform for cross-chain interoperability CosmWasm, and the programming language CosmJS.

The foundation will allocate approximately $3 million to Informal Systems for work on CometBFT. The ICF noted that Informal Systems has maintained this software and its predecessor, Tendermint Core, since early 2022. This funding is to assist Informal Systems in improving the modularity and efficiency of ComeBFT.

Binary Builders will receive a tentative $3.5 million from the ICF, and Zondax will be given roughly $1 million to improve the Cosmos SDK that developers can use to build their own Cosmos chains.

The largest sum of money has been set aside to continue improving the IBC, with $7.5 million being given to Informal Systems, Interchain GmbH and Strangelove Labs to expand the rollout and growth of the bridging solution.

$2.5 million will be Confio GmbH for work on CosmWasm, the smart contracting framework and $155 thousand will be given to Cosmology to make CosmJS more robust.

An additional $1.5 million will be allocated to audits for the interchain stack and the remainder, roughly $7.2 million of the budget, will be used as a strategic reserve.

The ICF did not respond to Blockwork’s request for comment prior to publication.

Wider Cosmos moves

The Cosmos ecosystem has seen various projects uniting over the past few months.

In October, liquid staking zone Stride proposed a merger between itself and the Cosmos Hub by converting its governance token, STRD, into Cosmos’ ATOM. Ecosystem participants later rejected this proposal, believing ATOM should remain neutral.

Then, in December, Cosmos’s largest decentralized exchange, Osmosis, decided to merge with cross-chain lending protocol Umee. The teams are currently discussing how the different product code bases can be weaved, with a “call to action” proposal to be expected over the next few months.

That same month, smart-contracting platform Neutron revealed that it had purchased 25% of Confio GmbH, the team building CosmWasm. Neutron is also rebranding itself to become the Integrated Application Network.

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