Introducing Evmos, the EVM Compatible Hub on Cosmos

Why we are not launching as Ethermint

Published in

The Evmos Blog

4 min readSep 30, 2021

It’s been a long wait for EVM-compatibility in the Cosmos. As the OG Cosmonauts know, the Ethermint project was first conceived in 2016.

Today we are introducing Evmos, the EVM hub of Cosmos, making it easy for Smart Contracts to deploy and communicate within the Cosmos. By the end of the year, we will have full EVM-compatibility (equivalence, yes) in the Cosmos.

Evmos is the Ethermint hub that will aim to connect application specific Ethermint chains, Cosmos chains (IBC), Ethereum (Gravity Bridge), and other EVM environments.

Ethermint’s Evolution

Ethermint’s journey began in October of 2016 with the goal of bringing the scalability of Tendermint’s consensus protocol to Ethereum, or EVM-based applications. With recent solutions such as Polygon or L2 options such as Arbitrum or rollups, the original vision has already been realized. Hence, the original Ethermint chain no longer delivers as interesting a value proposition to the general crypto ecosystem.

The vision has now evolved. We see a future of multiple highly secure, fast finality, EVM-based chains that provide interoperability and greater composability for smart contracts in the Interchain. Our team (Tharsis) is also dedicated to pushing on the frontiers of UX, whether it’s for developers, users or operators. Fast finality is quickly gaining traction in the Ethereum community; Vitalik himself has written about the need for a Tendermint-like consensus model for the Ethereum beacon chain. Tharsis has committed to providing this vision to the community by the end of 2021.

“Ethermint is ETH 3.0" — George Wosmongton, Founding Father of Osmosis

Our team has been the core development team behind the Ethermint codebase since April 2021. The community voted to provide the team with initial capital to begin operations and grow a team under Cosmos proposal #44. For the last few months, the team has been hard at work shipping code, scaling the team and putting together a compelling vision for an EVM chain in the Cosmos that will last for years, rather than months. The team is led by Federico Kunze Küllmer, a full-time Cosmos contributor since 2017, having worked on Peggy (former Gravity Bridge), Cosmos SDK, and IBC, and Akash Khosla, who was previously a Software Engineer at Anchorage, a digital asset custodian and bank. Both founders have been focused on organic community-led growth from their initial beginnings in crypto, growing Blockchain at Berkeley into one of the most notable university-based organizations.

Why we are not launching the hub as Ethermint

When we went to the Cosmos forums to facilitate discussion on Proposal 44, we became aware there was history for the “Ethermint” trademark.

Our team was optimistic that with time and discussions we’d be able to figure out the usage of the original name, but we wanted to acknowledge that we were wrong here.

The “Ethermint” trademark is currently owned by All in Bits Inc., DBA Tendermint Inc., the company behind the initial launch of the Cosmos Hub. We have been in discussions with All in Bits (AiB) to find a legal path for using the trademark. Unfortunately, the matter is complex and is out of our control.

While we originally planned to launch a community proposal to get insights on naming, we have been advised by our legal counsel that it’s best to rebrand in order to launch in a timely manner and avoid any potential problems down the road.

This issue has been the biggest blocker towards launch and has delayed the official testnet launch, which we announced in August.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the scope of the Ethermint has grown a lot from its past versions and is now in a very different ecosystem than it started. We think a new name is suitable for the brand to signify this increase in scope, as Ethermint will only contain code pertaining to the EVM module.

For these reasons, we have decided to name our upcoming deployment Evmos.

Evmos is the Ethermint ecosystem

Evmos, “EVM-on-Cosmos” pronounced “Ev-mos”, is only the beginning. Evmos will be an application-agnostic chain that will be interoperable with the Ethereum Mainnet, EVM-compatible environments, and other BFT chains via IBC, making it easy for users and developers to easily move value between chains. But the vision for Ethermint expands beyond Evmos as we plan to support the development of application-specific chains that leverage the Ethermint library, which we will continue to maintain.

Our commitment to community first, responsible disclosure

The decision to operate under the new name of Evmos does not affect our ability to deliver mainnet this year: we want to make it a practice to be transparent and engage with you, the community.

As core developers of Evmos and the Ethermint library, we will be hard at work in the coming weeks to do a full rebrand. We ask for the cooperation and support of the community to help us through this transition so that we can launch the testnet next week!

We are also looking for additional cosmonauts to join the team and if you’re interested, please check out our careers page.

Sincerely,

The Cosmonauts at Tharsis 🌋