Q2 2024 Developer Bulletin
The IBC Developer Bulletin is a concise quarterly update covering what was shipped this quarter and what is planned for the next quarter. It covers the IBC specifications, the Go and Rust implementations, and relayers. The end of this article recaps ecosystem news and additional IBC work from Q2.
Latest Releases for the IBC Protocol Stack in Q2
Builds on the v8.3.0 release which enabled queries through Interchain Accounts and support for conditional clients, which allow one light client to depend on another to verify state, important for enabling trust-minimized interoperability with rollup frameworks such as Rollkit.
This release adds enhanced packet filtering capabilities. It builds on v1.9.0, which added support for IBC channel upgradability - the ability to add new features to existing channels - and dynamic gas fees through the x/feemarket module developed by Skip.
Revamped the ibc-testkit crate, to allow better simulation scenarios and contexts more like real blockchain environments. This built on the prior releases in the quarter which introduced the client recovery feature, as well as the ibc-client-cw crate that streamlines CosmWasm contract creation for light clients built using ibc-rs.
Updated the ibc-proto dependency to v0.42.
Work in Progress for Upcoming Releases
Ibc-go
v9.0.0 will be released in the second half of Q3, after an audit by Atredis. The main features in this release are:
- ICS20 v2 - updates to the ICS-20 Fungible Token Transfer Module
- Support for multi-token transfers to facilitate the use case of transfer and supply liquidity.
- Support for token forwarding and path unwinding to enable transferring tokens across multiple chains, referred to as multiple hops, and atomic unwinding of tokens back to their origin.
- Separation of the base denom from the trace, the path the token has traveled, to support better usability for front end applications.
- Moving to use protobuf encoding for the packet data instead of json.
- 02-client routing refactor
- Decouple client message routing from the data encoding for better usability of the Wasm light client
Ibc-rs
Working on initiatives in preparation for the v1 release:
- Refactoring and tidying error handling architecture.
- Implement missing parts of ICS05 and ICS26 for a more complete module management architecture.
- Create a landing page and complete documentation.
Additional IBC Updates and News from Q2
A quick summary of ecosystem news and other useful updates from the IBC development community.
- Solana joined the IBC network with Composable’s launch of an AVS enabling Solana <> Cosmos IBC.
- ICS-721, the NFT transfer module for IBC had its first major in-production use case when Stargaze and Osmosis co-launched a collection; over 10,000 NFTs have now been transferred over IBC.
- Release of Interchaintest v8.4.0 and v8.3.0, adding support for Interchain Security v5, Informal’s CometMock testing framework, and functionality improvements like remote JSON configs and YAML configuration support.
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