The first two blockchains on the Cosmos Hub’s, Interchain Security, have officially passed governance and are ready to launch

Intro

The Cosmos Hub’s newest feature, Interchain Security, has been very active this month, with two blockchains gaining governance approval, to join as the first Interchain secured chains. Those chains being Neutron and Stride. But first, let’s start with:

What is Interchain Security?

Interchain Security allows for new or existing blockchains, to skip the line of finding validators and let’s them hook into the existing ATOM validator set. This means that projects can retain sovereignty, have fees on chain paid in their native currency AND lease the Cosmos Hubs economic security. What does it take from the protocol being added? The chain has to be approved via ATOM Governance.

In this approval process they need to show as much info as possible to ensure this addition to the validator set will be worth the extra work a validator will have to do. But while this provides more work, it could show even more profit for ATOM validators and stakers.

These chains that lease ATOMs validator set, will be paying the ATOM validators and stakers in their native currency. Or they can also be paying in any fee token, that the consumer chain utilizes (so this could mean ATOM or another IBC native currency, could be used rather than the consumer chain having its own token). This additional yield will be on top of the staking rewards from ATOM (20% at time of writing).

Now that we have a better understanding of Interchain Security, let’s take a look at Neutron and Stride:

Neutron

Neutron is a Cosmwasm enabled Smart contracting platform, that will be leveraging the Cosmos Hubs economic security, through Interchain (Replicated) Security. Neutron will be home to Lido liquid staking services for the Cosmos Ecosystem. Neutron has also announced that the Astroport Dex will also be coming to its suite of dApps. Neutron has officially launched as a partner chain for Replicated Security. Currently, activity is limited, as it is in a “warm up period”, as they stress test the chain, to ensure that the chain and its connection to the Hub’s validator set are safe and secure, before real economic activity begins on the chain via their airdrop.

Up next we have:

Stride

Stride is a liquid staking protocol for the Cosmos ecosystem. At the moment, the Stride blockchain liquid stakes for 7 blockchains. One of the value propositions of Stride is that while it provides liquid staking services, it also earns fees from the user, paid in the token they are staking. Thereby, as it stands today, if you stake their native token, STRD, you will earn STRD inflation as well as the staked tokens of 7 other chains (more are being on-boarded).

Over all, this means that since security is being switched to the Cosmos Hubs validator set, then as a delegator to the Cosmos Hub, you will earn STRD inflation and protocol fees from all of those chains, just by staking ATOM.

Conclusion:

With the launch of these first two chains on Interchain Security, we have taken a huge step towards the Cosmos Hub providing Interchain services, to make a more efficient Interchain. As well as, new era for the Cosmos Hub, now being deemed the beginning of the “ATOM Economic Zone” aka “AEZ”, on Cosmos Twitter.

This new economic zone has a lot of potential to help the Cosmos expand rapidly, to new horizons in the overall world of blockchain. A few more blockchains to look forward too as the next chains to become Interchain Secured are Noble blockchain (bringing native USDC), as well as Duality (Cosmos ecosystem Dex, using ATOM as its main utility token). I look forward to updating the community further on these blockchain, once there is further info on them launching as Interchain secured chains!