Binary Builders - RPGF nomination

Nomination for the Namada RPGF Program

I’d like to submit a nomination for our organization to the RPGF program. As a representative of Binary Builders, we believe that our contributions in the areas below demonstrate our commitment to advancing the interchain ecosystem that Namada will offer privacy for.

Who are Binary Builders?

Binary Builders is a new entity in Cosmos. The team was previously at Interchain Gmbh, and at the start of 2023, the Cosmos SDK and Builders Program teams united to form Binary Builders. Binary is building public goods, which are at the core of our mission to sustainably grow our vibrant interchain ecosystem.

Past

Two members of Binary Builders are Marko and Alex (bez). In 2019, Tendermint was a single person, Anton (melekes). At this time, Marko joined the Tendermint team and began defining a future for Tendermint, alongside contributing and cleaning up the repository. Marko organised the project for a total of 6 months and was an engineer on the project for another 1.5 years. We can see the amount of contributions Marko and Alex have achieved on the contribution graphs on github. Marko and Bez also maintained the various libraries used by Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK at the time. This contribution is important to note as Tendermint is an integral part of the technology stack, as it is a fundamental building block for secure and reliable blockchain networks. Therefore, the contributions made by Marko and Bez in maintaining and improving Tendermint and related libraries have had a significant impact on the development of the Cosmos ecosystem and, by extension, on Namada.

Present

As mentioned above, Binary Builders consists of two teams currently, the Builders Program team and the Cosmos SDK team.

Starting with the Builders Program, we can identify some crucial areas where the builders program will impact Namada. The Builders Program core focus is to bring new teams into the ecosystem and to assist them in launching. There is a knowledge hub being built that provides years of experience, condensed into a single location for teams to build from start to finish. Currently there are 20+ teams participating in the Builders Program. These teams are not limited to only those that use the Cosmos SDK, but also those that are using any part of the Interchain stack (Cometbft/Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, IBC, Cosmwasm and more). The Builders Program aims to continue bringing in more teams to the Interchain.

In 2022, members of Binary Builders began full-time work on the Cosmos SDK. The SDK is a critical framework for developing state machines in a composable manner, and has played a pivotal role in the development and adoption of the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol. As users of the Cosmos SDK are expected to make extensive use of Namada’s features to expand their use cases, the privacy-preserving blockchain value proposition of Namada is well-placed to be leveraged. Furthermore, the Cosmos SDK has inspired the components of Namada’s application, enabling seamless interoperability with other blockchains through the IBC protocol.

Future

As the Web3 ecosystem evolves, we are seeing the interchain ecosystem evolving as well. We are actively refactoring and rewriting sections of the Cosmos SDK to enable more use cases. As mentioned above, we have begun researching the cross-language and virtual machine boundaries to support a new audience of users. One area we are seeing the most interest in is Zero Knowledge technology, so we are researching how to better support cross-language application writing within the Cosmos SDK.

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