Is Evmos just the starting point? How Cevmos ignites the scalability of Cosmos

Author: 0x137, BlockBeats Rhythm

The Rektdrop airdrop of Evmos has created enough buzz for the Cosmos ecosystem. The community has also started discussing the Evmos ecosystem more frequently, among which a topic about "Cevmos" has garnered special attention, being referred to by many tech experts as a solution that will soon ignite scalability in the Cosmos ecosystem. So what exactly is Cevmos? Why can it ignite the Cosmos ecosystem?

The Assembly Line of Blockchain

If someone asks what blockchain is, how would you respond?

Many might say: Blockchain is a distributed network ledger where users produce transactions, nodes validate their validity, and record them in blocks. As of now, this answer is not wrong. Almost all blockchains today consist of users, validating nodes, and blocks, each responsible for generating transactions, validating and settling transactions, and recording transaction history.

If we liken blockchain to a restaurant, it would look like this: the restaurant has only one waiter, who needs to handle all operations and management tasks, such as taking orders, cooking, and accounting. If this is a street-side bun shop, this operational model poses no major issues, but if it is a trendy restaurant in the CBD, it might close down in a few days, as no customer would wait one or two days for a meal.

This is essentially the problem faced by many Layer 1 Monolithic Blockchains today. Take Ethereum, for example; all transactions, settlements, and block production occur on the same chain, and users can only settle their transactions after the previous block is completed.

Thus, with the widespread adoption of Ethereum today, issues like network congestion and skyrocketing fees have emerged. To get their transactions included in a block sooner, people have to engage in expensive "gas wars," and transaction speeds have become increasingly slow, which is the "scalability problem" we are familiar with.

Solutions proposed by developers for this issue

The most familiar solution is, of course, changing the consensus mechanism. Public chains like Avalanche and BSC have adopted new Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanisms to improve network settlement and block production speeds, thus achieving stronger scalability. But fundamentally, these chains have merely replaced their waiter with a robot, without innovating their operational model.

Therefore, in the face of surging transaction demand, the network still encounters the same issues. For instance, recently, Fantom experienced a spike in gas fees to $3 or $4 due to the "Solidly craze."

Another solution is Rollups, which alleviate the burden on public chains by moving transactions off-chain. However, it is important to note that settlement and block production are still handled by the underlying public chain. In other words, the restaurant has merely hired an additional waiter to handle order-taking. Thus, we find that Ethereum's Rollups still face high gas issues because they have to compete with non-Rollups applications. For example, Arbitrum spends an average of $90,000 on gas daily.

So, is there a better solution? In fact, from common sense, we know that the best method is division of labor and collaboration—hiring three waiters, each responsible for taking orders, cooking, and accounting, so that each waiter can play to their strengths, significantly improving the restaurant's efficiency. This is what Cevmos aims to achieve.

What is Cevmos? What solutions does it offer?

Cevmos, composed of Celestia and Evmos, will be the result of collaboration between these two teams, expected to launch in Q2 of next year. Celestia is an L1 public chain built using the Cosmos SDK, but unlike other public chains, Celestia is vividly referred to by its team as a "Lazy Ledger."

The reason for this is that Celestia's sole purpose is to store transaction records and provide Data Availability (DA) through its consensus mechanism; it does not even care about the specific content it stores.

By providing data availability, other developers can build their own settlement layers (like EVM) and execution layers (like application chains) on Celestia in the form of Rollups, without needing to design a consensus mechanism for their own chains. In other words, Celestia separates the functions of taking orders, cooking, and accounting, which we refer to as a Modular Blockchain.

The benefit of this approach is that developers can fully leverage their expertise to create the best EVM settlement layer or application chain interaction experience. As a whole, the modular blockchain can enhance every aspect without making trade-offs. Evmos will become the first significant settlement layer built on Celestia.

Evmos is a combination of EVMos and CosmOS, and this name clearly indicates EVMOS's goal—to become the EVM of Cosmos.

Evmos can integrate EVM-compatible public chains into the Cosmos ecosystem, meaning that tokens and NFT assets from chains like Avalanche and Fantom can be integrated into the Cosmos IBC ecosystem through Evmos, and even EVM-based applications can bridge into Cosmos.

As a bridge connecting the IBC world and the EVM world, Evmos is clearly an important asset settlement layer for Cosmos, and it will also face significant load pressure in the future. However, Evmos built on Celestia will see significant improvements.

As mentioned earlier, Rollups are a solution that separates the execution layer (i.e., transactions) from the settlement layer. However, an ideal Rollups settlement layer environment can only allow simple cross-chain transfers between Rollups smart contracts and the settlement layer, forcing non-Rollups applications to use Rollups smart contracts. This is because Rollups on EVM monolithic chains like Ethereum need to compete with non-Rollups applications, resulting in high gas costs.

Celestia, on the other hand, uses the Optimint consensus mechanism, allowing developers to build Rollups chains based on Cosmos. This means that the settlement layer on Celestia (e.g., Evmos) will also become a Rollups, while the execution layer built on the settlement layer (i.e., application chains) will become Rollups of Rollups. Whether ZKR or OR, these execution layers will exist as independent blockchains, focusing on optimization in specific areas while sharing the consensus mechanism and settlement layer.

Why does Cosmos need Cevmos?

You may ask, after all this, what does it have to do with Cosmos? We know that Cosmos, as a leading project in Web 3.0, aims to solve three major problems: interoperability, scalability, and innovation. The following will explain how Cevmos promotes the development of the Cosmos ecosystem while ensuring security from these three aspects.

Interoperability

Although the current IBC has helped Cosmos projects achieve good interoperability within the ecosystem, Cosmos chains cannot interoperate with EVM chains outside the ecosystem. This has caused projects within the Cosmos ecosystem to miss out on the benefits of the EVM ecosystem, such as the previous "Avalanche craze" and the recent "Solidly War."

Evmos fills the gap in EVM compatibility for Cosmos. With EVM compatibility, Tendermint PoS consensus mechanism, and IBC interoperability, developers can write or bridge EVM smart contracts on Evmos and use EVM assets in other applications within the Cosmos ecosystem.

Of course, Evmos also supports Cosmos chains accessing various protocols on EVM, such as Aave. Additionally, ecosystem applications like Osmosis will also have EVM asset pools, achieving asset diversification. Moreover, Evmos can interact with existing Ethereum clients and tools like Metamask, further expanding the user base.

To achieve the above goals, Evmos adopts an "ERC-20 module," linking ERC20 token contract addresses with Cosmos tokens to enable cross-chain asset representation and trading. Some may ask, what is the difference between this and the Gravity Bridge?

The answer is that there is no difference. If we discuss the cross-chain mechanism of Evmos and Gravity Bridge, both are the same, using a lock-and-mint model. However, when it comes to Cevmos built on Celestia, the situation is quite different.

By providing a consensus layer and a data availability (DA) layer, the Rollups cluster on Celestia only needs to verify whether each other's blocks are included in Celestia, or in other words, whether they are "available," thus maximizing the trustlessness of the verification process.

This is very useful in cross-chain communication. Cross-chain communication between clusters (e.g., Gravity Bridge) usually comes with high security risks, as it relies on less secure light clients that assume all transactions are honest and valid, meaning you must trust that the validators of the cross-chain bridge will not steal your funds.

However, Cevmos built on Celestia is different because it shares Celestia's DA layer, so light clients do not need to make these assumptions; they simply verify the availability of the data, thereby significantly enhancing the security of the cross-chain bridge.

Scalability

With the ability to interoperate with EVM, Evmos will inevitably bring traffic from the EVM ecosystem into Cosmos, which also raises scalability issues for Evmos and the Cosmos ecosystem. The biggest limitation of traditional monolithic chains is what we often refer to as the "trilemma," which requires trade-offs and compromises between decentralization, scalability, and security.

But modular chains are not like this; by separating consensus, settlement, and execution layers, each module can achieve optimization. As the bottom consensus layer or DA layer for block production, Celestia only needs to provide data availability for the Rollups above it, without needing to execute and settle transactions.

With data availability, Celestia's light nodes do not need to verify transactions; they only need to check whether the block data is available. Therefore, by randomly downloading a small sample of the block, they can verify the validity of all its data with a very high probability. In this case, the light client can even be the user's computer, downloading relevant data and performing availability verification when the user executes a transaction.

It is clear that the security and scalability of Celestia come from the number of light clients. As the number of light clients increases, the size of each block can also increase without affecting the security and decentralization of the network itself, and larger blocks mean higher throughput.

Thus, contrary to current blockchains, Celestia and the Cevmos built on it will gain stronger scalability due to higher adoption rates, which is quite interesting.

Innovation

For many application developers, Cevmos also represents a "scalability choice." Unlike other EVM ecosystems, Cosmos adopts the concept of "application chains." Based on the SDK, a blockchain can focus on specific areas and achieve interoperability with other application chains in the Cosmos ecosystem through IBC.

However, the application chains here differ from those mentioned earlier; they still need to establish their own consensus mechanisms and validating nodes to launch their networks, which is why we see various staking options in the Keplr wallet. But for application developers unfamiliar with consensus mechanisms and settlements, this can become a challenge, as building a foundational architecture for specific applications seems somewhat redundant.

This is where Cevmos plays an important role, as it has already provided the consensus layer and settlement layer, allowing application chains to launch their networks directly in the form of Rollups without needing new consensus mechanisms and validating nodes. This brings convenience to many small and medium developers, saving them from complex consensus design and node development, and applications on Cevmos and the Cosmos ecosystem will experience explosive growth, further leading to higher adoption rates and scalability.

In addition to helping application chains launch, Cevmos also has a significant advantage in the sovereignty of modular chains. By using modular blockchains, governance rights can be subdivided to the execution layer applications without overlapping with other applications.

On Ethereum, if an application experiences widespread exploitation, it must go through a governance vote for approval; otherwise, the entire chain must undergo a hard fork, such as Ethereum Classic. Rollups are similar, as they all use Ethereum as their settlement and consensus layer.

However, on Celestia, Rollups do not use Celestia as their settlement layer, so they can fork applications without altering the data of the consensus layer. This will also encourage developers to experiment more and pave the way for ecological innovation.

Modularization: A New Approach to Blockchain

Since the birth of Ethereum, the scalability problem has been a challenge developers have sought to solve. However, due to the large community with diverse opinions and various interest groups, Ethereum's path to scalability has been quite difficult. In the current context of widespread blockchain adoption, many public chains have seized this opportunity, attracting many newcomers to crypto with fast and cheap networks.

But as mentioned at the beginning of the article, most public chains are still doing "the same old thing," ultimately constrained by the "trilemma." Take Solana as an example; to ensure low fees on the network, the team made unconditional commitments to guarantee computing power, but this sacrificed the degree of decentralization.

Cevmos, through Celestia's separation of consensus, settlement, and execution layers, achieves modularization of blockchain, providing a better scalability solution while ensuring the network's decentralization and security. This model could even provide solutions for Rollups on Ethereum in the near future.

According to the Celestia team, they are also developing a project called Quantum Gravity Bridge, which will allow Celestia to provide effective proofs for Ethereum EVM Rollups. In the future, if other EVM Rollups do not wish to use Cevmos to bridge into the Cosmos ecosystem, they can still choose to use their own EVM ecosystem as a settlement layer while simultaneously using Celestia as the DA layer, enjoying the benefits of Celestia.

In the future, there will not only be Evmos as a settlement layer on Celestia, and the crypto world will not only have one Celestia. Building scalable blockchains through modularization may become a new approach for the development of the crypto industry.