Call: Overview of Tendermint/IBC/Cosmos Stack w/ @cwgoes

The ZcashFoundation was recently joined by @cwgoes to give a high-level overview of Tendermint, as a standalone alternative to PoW, & the Cosmos/IBC stack as a potential platform for Zcash to migrate to.

Check out the Video on our Youtube:

I also created this document with some other resources for those interested:

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I recommend people also watch this video with Kevin Sekniqi who is one of the lead engineers at Avalanche. He talks about some of the same things Christopher does, but talks more generally about consensus and talks about how Avalanche is different from Tendermint and manages to increase node count.

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Yeah, that’s a good point - I didn’t touch upon Avalanche-style systems in this overview and I probably should have. Under strict classical definitions what Avalanche does doesn’t count as “consensus”, but this is a pedantic quibble. The real trade-off though (imho) is the lack of external finality: Avalanche-style “swarm consensus” does allow unbounded numbers of nodes, but unfortunately (as far as I am aware) it doesn’t provide any kind of non-interactively verifiable transcript that nodes outside the original consensus set could use to verify finality of a particular block. Because of this, Avalanche-style systems which want to be interoperable generally have to use multisignature bridges with much less security than their consensus (as the Avalanche chain does at the moment).

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