What is History of Cosmos

The history of Cosmos began in 2014 when founder Jae Kwon published "Tendermint: Consensus without Mining", proposing Tendermint, a consensus mechanism that does not require PoW mining. Subsequently, Jae Kwon founded Tendermint Inc with the aim of developing applications based on Tendermint's consensus theory.

In 2016, Tendermint Inc released the "Cosmos Whitepaper - A Network of Distributed Legders", marking the birth of the Cosmos network. The whitepaper envisioned Cosmos as a network of many independent blockchains (referred to as Zones in the whitepaper) that share the Tendermint consensus mechanism and are connected to each other via the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol.

In 2017, Cosmos established the InterChain Foundation, a non-profit organization modeled after the Ethereum Foundation, to advance the Cosmos network and ecosystem. On April 5, Cosmos conducted a public offering of native token $ATOM, raising $16.8 million for the Cosmos network at $0.1.

In 2018, development of Tendermint, the Cosmos SDK, the IBC protocol, and the Lunie wallet were completed, and Cosmos released several public testnets in order to verify the stability of the technology.

On March 14, 2019, the mainnet of Cosmos Hub, the 1st blockchain in the Cosmos network, went live. The following day, Cosmos announced a $9 million Series A round of funding led by Paradigm.

In February 2021, Cosmos completed the Stargate upgrade, marking the formal integration of the IBC protocol into the Cosmos network and the completion of the vision expressed in the initial whitepaper. Since then, more than 50 blockchains, including Terra, Cronos, and Osmosis, have been deployed.

On May 9, 2022, the native stablecoin of Terra ecosystem, $UST, was depegged and the resulting collapse of the Terra ecosystem. Terra blockchain then halted on May 13. In June, the derivative DEX dYdX announced that it would deploy the dYdX Chain using the Cosmos SDK.

In September of the same year, Cosmos released the ATOM 2.0 whitepaper. The whitepaper states that future upgrades will introduce inter-chain security and a new $ATOM value capture method for Cosmos, among other things. Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman also wrote an article reviewing the history of Cosmos and calling it the "Initiation" phase of Cosmos until September 2022. In this phase, Cosmos is mainly completing the technology stack based on the 2016 version of the white paper. After September 2022, Cosmos will move into the next phase of its development - a completely new phase called "Integration". In this phase, Cosmos wants to demonstrate its ability to play a role in the real-world political and economic sphere.

In March 2023, Circle, the stablecoin issuer, announced that it will use the Cosmos SDK to deploy Noble, a standalone blockchain based on the Cosmos network, for issuing native $USDC to the Cosmos ecosystem.