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THIS REPOSITORY IS UNDERGOING RAPID DEVELOPMENT AND NONE OF ITS INTERFACES IS CONSIDERED STABLE.
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
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The Cosmos SDK is the middleware platform that the Cosmos Hub is constructed from. The Hub is a blockchain (or, internet of blockchains) in which the Atom supply resides. The Atoms supply is defined at genesis and can change based on the rules of the Hub.
Under the hood, the Cosmos SDK is an ABCI application designed to be used with the Tendermint consensus engine to form a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency. It also provides a general purpose framework for extending the feature-set of the cryptocurrency by implementing plugins.
This SDK affords you all the tools you need to rapidly develop robust blockchains and blockchain applications which are interoperable with The Cosmos Hub. It is a blockchain development 'starter-pack' of common blockchain modules while not enforcing their use thus giving maximum flexibility for application customization. For example, does your app require fees, how do you want to log messages, do you enable IBC, do you even have a cryptocurrency? In this way, the Cosmos SDK is the Rails of cryptocurrencies.
Within this repository, the basecoin app serves as a reference implementation for how we build ABCI applications in Go, and is the framework in which we implement the Cosmos Hub. It's easy to use, and doesn't require any forking - just implement your plugin, import the libraries, and away you go with a full-stack blockchain and command line tool for transacting.
go get -u github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/cmd/basecoin
See the install guide for more details.
- Getting started with the Basecoin basics
- Learn to use the plugin system
- More features of the Basecoin tool
- Learn how to use Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)
- See more examples
To deploy a testnet, see our repository of deployment tools.
The basic concept for this SDK comes from years of web development. A number of
patterns have arisen in that realm of software which enable people to build remote
servers with APIs remarkably quickly and with high stability. The
ABCI application interface is similar to
a web API (DeliverTx is like POST and Query is like GET while SetOption is like
the admin playing with the config file). Here are some patterns that might be
useful:
- MVC - separate data model (storage) from business logic (controllers)
- Routers - easily direct each request to the appropriate controller
- Middleware - a series of wrappers that provide global functionality (like authentication) to all controllers
- Modules (gems, package, etc) - developers can write a self-contained package with a given set of functionality, which can be imported and reused in other apps
Also at play is the concept of different tables/schemas in databases, thus you can keep the different modules safely separated and avoid any accidental (or malicious) overwriting of data.
Not all of these can be compare one-to-one in the blockchain world, but they do provide inspiration for building orthogonal pieces that can easily be combined into various applications.