We are excited to announce that Perun, a Hyperledger Lab, has published the first version of the Perun-CosmWasm blockchain backend. For the first time, this enables Perun Channels on the Cosmos Network using the CosmWasm smart contract technology. For our first release, we focused on payment channel functionality on a single Cosmos blockchain. This paves the way to enabling the full potential of Perun on Cosmos in the future: atomic transactions with arbitrary transaction logic across multiple Cosmos blockchains.
Payment Channels on Cosmos Network
A payment channel is a construct that allows users to transfer and swap funds at low latency and nearly zero fees without a trusted intermediary. It allows users to massively scale their transaction capabilities without losing the trustless nature of blockchain technology.
Figure 1: Alice and Bob create an off-chain channel to interact.
In the future, Perun will support channels across multiple blockchains—for example, two Cosmos chains, or a Cosmos chain and an Ethereum chain. This will enable cross-chain applications based on channel technology.
With the addition of CosmWasm, the Perun framework now contains three backends (Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos). Blockchain-agnostic applications can be written and run within Perun channels. The used backend can be exchanged with another to enable identical contracts across multiple blockchains. The possibility to add further backends increases the modularity of the architecture of blockchain-agnostic applications.
About Perun
Perun, a Hyperledger Lab, is a joint DLT Layer-2 interoperability and scaling project contributed by Robert Bosch GmbH’s project “Economy of Things” and PolyCrypt. PolyCrypt is a spin-off of the Technical University of Darmstadt (TUDa).
If you want to learn more about the framework, please refer to the white paper and our last Hyperledger labs post or this Hyperledger presentation on Perun or reach out via our Discord channel. (New to Discord? Go here for more and to get signed up.)