Decentralized autonomous organization Atom Accelerator has joined Neutron, the Cosmos-based integrated application network, in committing $250,000 in funding to support the continued development and maintenance of the CosmWasm smart contract platform next year.
They are promoting their donations to raise awareness of the importance of CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem and the need to keep it alive, and ultimately they hope to entice a coalition of projects to step up and provide additional support.
The move comes after the Interchain Foundation, the governing body of the Cosmos Network, announced that it will no longer continue to fund the development of CosmWasm. The decision made by the community was framed as a strategic move, with Interchain arguing that CosmWasm is no longer the critical engine of growth in the Cosmos ecosystem that it once was.
The importance of CosmWasm
CosmWasm is a smart contract framework based on the Rust programming language, known for its simplicity, performance and reliability. It is used by developers to build decentralized applications that can communicate with any chain in the Cosmos Network. Designed by Confio, it is the most popular smart contract platform in the crypto industry after Solidity, using the WebAssembly or Wasm runtime.
It has emerged as the cornerstone of interoperability in the Cosmos Network, providing the foundation for dApps that can communicate with dozens of interconnected blockchains via the IBC protocol. The modular design is perfectly suited for creating more complex, cross-chain dApps that can interact with the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
CosmWasm has long been seen as one of the key growth engines in the Cosmos Network, powering applications in Cosmos chains such as Neutron, Mantra, Osmosis and Injective. All told, it has been downloaded more than 1.79 million times and more than 15,700 CosmWasm smart contracts have been deployed in the past year. These smart contracts interacted with more than 5.2 million accounts and generated $5.7 million in fees.
While no one denies CosmWasm’s important role in the Cosmos ecosystem, the Interchain Foundation says its priorities now lie elsewhere. It is particularly focused on improving support for multiple, popular VMs, which will allow market makers, administrators, DeFi protocols, and others to explore the Cosmos ecosystem, which is why it should devote more resources to these initiatives.
As a result, it has chosen to sacrifice funding for CosmWasm, although it says it remains “deeply committed to supporting long-term maintenance, enhanced security and continued development of the project.”
A call to action
In a blog post, Atom Accelerator argues that CosmWasm is much more than just a smart contract platform, as it plays a key role in supporting the development of high-quality, cross-chain dApps in the broader Cosmos ecosystem.
The main thrust of Atom’s argument is that the Cosmos Network needs more applications than app chains to continue growing, because these are much easier to build, and CosmWasm is by far the most popular and reliable platform to build them.
The Interchain Foundation will still donate $700,000 to Confio. This money will be paid out during the first half of next year and will mainly be used for maintenance and support of IBC Eureka. However, that amount represents only a quarter of the money it provided to CosmWasm in 2024, and even with the $500,000 contributed by Atom Accelerator and Neutron, it still needs much more.
Therefore, it makes sense that the CosmWasm community leverages the support of a coalition of blockchains that benefit most from it. Atom Accelerator itself notes that it may be unreasonable to expect the Interchain Foundation to continue funding CosmWasm’s development alone, especially when so many other projects are flourishing because of its existence.
The fact is that without CosmWasm, most Cosmos projects would not be where they are today, and so in this time of need, the time has come for them to step up and show their appreciation. And there’s no better way to do that than by contributing to the financing needed to secure the company’s long-term future.