The free movement in and out of cryptocurrency communities is crucial if we want to maintain the open, inclusive values that the industry was built on. Today 99% of crypto-to-crypto exchange volume is happening on centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. Trusted 3rd party bridges work well for some people, but censorship, security breaches and theft have proven to be major problems that users of centralized exchanges face. A self-sovereign bridge that connects cryptocurrency communities is an important piece of infrastructure that the space needs. This is where the Cosmos SDK, the Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol and Tendermint come together.
Every project that uses the Cosmos SDK can gain interoperability in the Cosmos network by utilizing the IBC and connecting to a hub. The Cosmos Hub will be the leading hub at the onset, but there may be many hubs over time that connect different zones. If you are building a Bitcoin peg zone like Nomic, you can use IBC to connect to the Cosmos Hub and make BTC interoperable with any token also connected to the Cosmos Hub. You could imagine interfaces on top of a widely connected hub to make the decentralized exchange of any IBC-enabled token (not just ERC-20) possible. This new construct removes power from centralized exchanges and empower cryptocurrency users to freely move in and out of different communities.
