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Cosmos Labs is acquiring the @mintscanio product suite and welcoming select Mintscan personnel to the Cosmos Labs Ecosystem team.
This business expansion adds new team members to the Ecosystem team across product, engineering, and operations.
It also allocates dedicated resources to the Cosmos Hub and key ecosystem infrastructure to support reliability and growth.
cosmos.network/blog/cosmos-l…
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Asking a financial institution to adopt new technology to join your network is the fastest way to kill it.
Cosmos Software Engineer @AmoghChaubey explains why the strongest payment networks are built for the most constrained participant, not the most sophisticated one.
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Read the full article:
cosmos.network/blog/ask-bank…
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Every counterparty in a transaction increases the risk of hacks and scams for all participants.
The Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) allows bank ledgers to communicate peer-to-peer, reducing counterparties to 1: the recipient.
Your institution has complete control over your cybersecurity profile.
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Can specific cybersecurity policies be enforced across counterparty connections?
- IBC gives you the ability to define custom access controls and automated workflows built around your own regulatory and security requirements.
Your benefit: You have complete end-to-end control if a specific risk scenario is detected.
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At Cosmos, we build interoperability infrastructure that puts institutions in control.
Every major feature goes through multiple rounds of internal review and an independent external audit.
If you're evaluating how IBC fits your security requirements, we're happy to walk you through it.
cosmos.network/ibc-interoper…
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Point Zero Forum in Zurich is happening now.
Maghnus Mareneck @0xMagmar, our Co-CEO, is on the ground in Zurich today. If you're at the forum, reach out.
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Central banks, regulators, and financial institutions, 2,000 leaders from 66 countries, in the same room solving the questions that actually shape policy and infrastructure:
- what Europe's digital money strategy looks like,
- how MiCA enforcement changes the stablecoin landscape,
- how capital markets infrastructure gets rebuilt for the next decade.
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A bank can join every major DLT network and still not reach the counterparties it needs for to deliver different values, connections, and experiences.
IBC can solve this bottleneck.
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Many counterparties are not on Canton, and thus, the bank is connected only to what Canton can reach.
The bank is connected to a small slice of the market.
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Cosmos enables customers to access many networks through interoperability at the network layers, asset layers, and business layers.
IBC connects to Canton and to central banks, payment networks, other DLT consortia, and core banking infrastructure at the same time, with no lock-in to a single ecosystem.
Let’s talk more about this: cosmos.network/contact
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My deepest sympathies for the affected users who lost funds in the Axelar <> Secret exploit. Both teams have published their post mortems, and as the lead maintainer of IBC, I will clarify some questions we have been receiving from users and teams who use IBC.
-- First, the IBC core and ICS20 (IBC's lock-and-mint token standard) have not been exploited. This means that if your company or team uses IBC core or ICS20, this exploit does not affect you.
-- The exploited contract was uniquely deployed on Secret to facilitate communication between Axelar and Secret. It is not an upstream component of IBC or Axelar.
-- The exploited contract was IBC-enabled (ie it ingested messages produced by IBC core and reacted to them). It appears to be a fork of a contract typically used to convert between ICS20 tokens and CW20 tokens.
-- The contract had been modified to enable the Axelar network to mint/burn SNIP20 tokens (Secret's unique private token standard) via IBC.
-- The modifications to the contract included the deletion of a safety check that enabled the attack to mint unbacked tokens by sending messages from another channel (ie not from Axelar)
-- In the official ICS-20 protocol specification and implementation, this is not possible because each token denomination can only be minted by messages received over a specific channel associated with the token.
I would like to reiterate that the situation is extremely unfortunate and difficult for affected users and the teams maintaining Secret and Axelar. We have been in touch with both teams and are working with them to support affected users.
Post mortems:
1. Secret: forum.scrt.network/t/securit…
2. Axelar: commonprefix.com/blog/secret…
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Cosmos - The Interchain ⚛️ retweeted
There’s been some confusion around the Secret Network incident, so we want to clarify: neither Axelar nor IBC was compromised. The exploited token smart contract was not developed, deployed, or maintained by Axelar. Axelar’s firewalling prevented the impact from spreading to other chains.
The exploited contract was a fork of the CW20-ICS20 implementation with two core security checks commented out that enabled an “infinite mint” bug. By removing checks designed to prevent this class of issue, the fork changed the contract’s trust model without undergoing a new audit.
Anyone can deploy contracts that wrap assets from other chains over IBC. The same contract pattern is also used to wrap tokens from other chains to Secret, but this deployment was vulnerable because its Secret-side fork had core security checks removed. The issue was not Axelar-specific logic or a flaw in IBC itself.
For more details, check out the full incident analysis: commonprefix.com/blog/secret…
We have identified an incident affecting assets bridged over IBC to Secret Network from the Axelar chain, with approximately $4.67M worth of tokens taken. Based on current information, the issue is isolated to the Secret-side ICS-20 smart contract of the Cosmos IBC connection between Secret and Axelar, used for assets bridged from Axelar to Secret.
Immediately upon becoming aware of the incident, the Axelar emergency committee has disabled the Secret and Secret-SNIP connections. We're reaching out to the relevant exchanges and law enforcement agencies. The incident is isolated to assets on Secret bridged over IBC from Axelar. No other IBC connections or Secret tokens appear impacted. No other Axelar integrations are affected. Axelar’s core protocol is not affected. We're preparing a detailed post-mortem.
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If you think of compliance as an add-on for institutional digital ledger deployments, you're mistaken.
Compliance must be integrated into the infrastructure for FIs and FSBs to capture the operational and margin benefits of a digital ledger solution.
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@Future0fThings featured Cosmos on how our stack supports institutions through permissioned access controls, configurable governance rules, and interoperability.
thefutureofthings.com/28787-…
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What regulated financial institutions actually need when building on digital ledger infrastructure is:
- auditability,
- access control,
- settlement finality,
- reporting and risk management.
Cosmos can do all that. Check more: cosmos.network/
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IBC connects any ledger to any system that supports signing, without any third-party intermediary in between.
Barry Plunkett @BPIV400, co-CEO of Cosmos, breaks down what makes IBC different.
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1. IBC interoperates with any ledger
The issue: Most solutions route bank-to-bank settlement through an intermediary.
The solution: Institutions use IBC to have direct peer-to-peer communication between any two ledgers or systems, including Besu, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, and others.
The benefit: Banks gain the flexibility to transact with any counterparty, regardless of the infrastructure they chose, without being locked into a single network that limits opportunity.
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2. IBC keeps data under your control
The issue: When a third party has to help process a transaction, data may be shared outside the institution. That creates a potential honeypot for hackers.
The solution: With IBC, the data remains strictly between the institution sending the transaction and the receiving counterparty. Nothing shared with a third party.
The benefit: Banks retain full control over their data and security environment, reducing exposure to breaches, regulatory risk, and the operational overhead of managing third-party data agreements.
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