Juno announced today that they will be leading development efforts and research on mesh security in collaboration with Osmosis. For the uninitiated, mesh security is an alternative to the Cosmos Hub’s interchain security. With ICS v1, also known as replicated security, consumer chains can rent security from the entire Cosmos Hub validator set.
Mesh security is a bit different, allowing opt-in and opt-out from numerous chains. A user could, for example, take their ATOM and stake it to Osmosis, Juno, and Injective. Mesh security is the idea of numerous chains within Cosmos all contributing to each other’s security in a “mesh” type fashion. Since chains in Cosmos rely on each other for various reasons (eg. Osmosis has many Axelar assets) this is a natural way for them to add additional security towards chains that they have a strong economic interest and dependence on. It would be quite bad for Osmosis if Axelar was attacked; mesh is a way to decrease those odds and further align the chains.
The goal for Juno in all of this is to become “The Interchain Incubator”, allowing new projects/DAOs to launch as CosmWasm contracts on Juno and then when (if) they find PMF to launch their own L1. The L1 would launch with its own token while also adopting mesh security from Juno stakeholders and/or stakeholders of other chains. Juno has also announced a partnership with Babylon, a chain that utilizes Bitcoin for checkpointing to decrease the risk of long range attacks for Cosmos chains and in turn decrease their bonding times.
Mesh security is a bold idea, and arguably is what the end state of interchain security will look like. While ATOM is creating (and starting to successfully meme) the AEZ (ATOM economic zone) some of the other Cosmos L1’s are more interested in mesh security. We’ll be hearing more from both of these camps as the year goes on.
