The decentralized autonomous organization Atom Accelerator has joined Neutron, the Cosmos-based integrated application network, in committing $250,000 of funding to support the ongoing development and maintenance of the CosmWasm smart contract platform next year.
They’re advertising their donations in order to raise awareness about the importance of CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem and the need to keep it alive, and ultimately, they hope to entice a coalition of projects to step up and provide additional support.
The move comes after the Interchain Foundation, the governing organization of the Cosmos Network, announced that it’s no longer going to keep funding the development of CosmWasm. The community-taken decision was framed as a strategic move, with Interchain arguing that CosmWasm is no longer the critical driver of growth in the Cosmos ecosystem that it once was.
The importance of CosmWasm
CosmWasm is a smart contract framework that’s based on the Rust programming language, which is known for its simplicity, performance and reliability. It’s used by developers to build decentralized applications that can interact with any chain in the Cosmos Network. It was designed by Confio, and it is the most popular smart contract platform in the crypto industry after Solidity, leveraging the WebAssembly or Wasm runtime.
It has emerged as the cornerstone of interoperability in the Cosmos Network, providing the foundation for dApps that can communicate with dozens of interconnected blockchains over the IBC protocol. Its modular design is perfectly suited to the creation of more complex, cross-chain dApps that can interact with the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
For a long time, CosmWasm was seen as one of the most important growth drivers in the Cosmos Network, powering applications across Cosmos chains like Neutron, Mantra, Osmosis and Injective. All told, it has been downloaded more than 1.79 million times, and in the last year, more than 15,700 CosmWasm smart contracts were deployed. Those smart contracts interacted with more than 5.2 million accounts, generating $5.7 million in fees.
Although no one is denying the important role of CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem, the Interchain Foundation says that its priorities now lie elsewhere. In particular, it’s focused on improving support for multiple, popular VMs that will allow market makers, custodians, DeFi protocols and others to start exploring the Cosmos ecosystem, and so it needs to devote more resources to those initiatives.
As a result, it has opted to sacrifice CosmWasm’s funding, though it says it remains “deeply committed to supporting long-term maintenance, improved security, and continued development of the project.”
A Call For Action
In a blog post, Atom Accelerator argues that CosmWasm is much more than just a smart contract platform, as it plays a key role in supporting the development of high-performance, cross-chain dApps in the wider Cosmos ecosystem.
The main thrust of Atom’s argument is that the Cosmos Network needs more applications rather than appchains to keep growing, as these are much simpler to build, and CosmWasm is by far the most popular, and reliable platform for building them.
The Interchain Foundation will still donate $700,000 to Confio. That money will be dispensed throughout the first half of next year, and will primarily be used for maintenance and adding support for IBC Eureka. However, that amount represents only a quarter of the money it provided to CosmWasm in 2024, and even with the $500,000 contributed by Atom Accelerator and Neutron, it still needs much more.
That’s why it makes sense for the CosmWasm community to draw on the support of a coalition of blockchains that benefit from it most. In fact, Atom Accelerator itself notes that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect the Interchain Foundation to continue to fund the development of CosmWasm alone, especially when so many other projects are thriving because of its existence.
The fact is, most Cosmos projects wouldn’t be where they are today without CosmWasm, and so in its hour of need, the time has come for them to step up and show their appreciation. And there’s no better way to do that than by chipping in with the funding required to secure its long term future.