Evmos, the EVM-Compatible Cosmos Chain, Mounts a Comeback

After months of hype ended in a botched launch in March, Evmos – the blockchain that aimed to improve Ethereum and Cosmos interoperability – is relaunching on Wednesday.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible, IBC-enabled Evmos blockchain was initially slated to launch in February as a way to fold Ethereum development into the Cosmos ecosystem. With strong community backing and innovative plans for a token airdrop, the chain seemed poised for success.

Yet, when Evmos launched in March after a short delay it was plagued by bugs and reports of users struggling to claim their airdropped tokens.

After an attempted update led to a “critical security vulnerability,” Evmos’s issues became large enough that validators coordinated to halt the entire chain.

“We decided as a community of validators and on the core team to just take a step back and try it again once we have everything sorted out,” said Evmos founder Federico Kunze Küllmer in an interview with CoinDesk.

Now, a month and a half after Evmos shut down, the team feels it is ready to try again.

Lessons learned

Over the past month, the Evmos team has worked to make it easy for users to claim tokens that were lost during Evmos’s buggy March airdrop.

As a part of this effort, the team is introducing a dashboard that, in addition to allowing users to stake their tokens and participate in protocol governance, will enable users to claim airdropped tokens.

“We implemented additional checks on the claiming process and we also introduced our recovery for all the funds that were stuck,” said Kunze Küllmer. “We also have a clear guide for how to claim the tokens and how to recover tokens permanently stuck.”

After a long list of complicated integrations brought down Evmos in March, Kunze Külmer said that “the main thing that we did as well from an engineering point of view is improve our testing processes and testing procedures.”

In explaining Evmos’s new testing procedures, Kunze Külmer pointed CoinDesk to new documentation the team has created for Evmos users and developers. In addition to keeping Evmos on track, the documentation will serve as a point of reference for members of the wider Cosmos community looking to learn from Evmos’s mistakes.

“We have these software upgrade guides for all our users so that not only we can benefit from the learning experience that we had with these failed upgrades, but other users in the Cosmos ecosystem can benefit,” explained Kunze Külmer.

Ethereum + Cosmos = Evmos

Cosmos is an interconnected community of blockchains that communicate via the so-called Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. In a world where new blockchains are popping up each day to cater to unique use cases, IBC makes it easy for distinct blockchains to swap assets and interoperate without the need for specialized tooling.

Over the past couple of years, Cosmos has scaled into one of the largest blockchain ecosystems, with popular IBC-enabled chains like Terra and Osmosis reaching a combined market cap of nearly $70 billion, according to Cosmos builders Ignite.

As Cosmos and other blockchain ecosystems have expanded, Ethereum continues to house most decentralized app development. Even as new non-Ethereum chains have stolen some of its spotlight, many of the most popular newer chains – among them Avalanche, Fantom and Polygon – are built to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

By making Evmos EVM-compatible, it will be easier for Ethereum-native developers to launch apps on the chain without extra overhead. It should also lead to a smoother experience for Ethereum users because they won’t need to ditch familiar tools like MetaMask.

Evmos initially planned to relaunch on Tuesday, but it opted to push the launch back 24 hours to Wednesday at 6 p.m. UTC. Per a tweet from the Evmos Twitter account, “Evmos cannot launch without 100% confidence that we are ready to rock.”