The Cosmos Consensus Council and the path to delivering ABCI++

Our plan for delivering ABCI++

The Tendermint Core project is one which, relative to other software in the space, is long in the tooth. While Tendermint remains the industry standard in consensus engines, its journey has seen many iterations of the core development team. This lack of continuity has led to subsequent knowledge loss, the latest playing a key role in the discontinued v0.35 release.

In response to this, a group of experienced Tendermint Core contributors, from across the Cosmos Ecosystem, have formed the Cosmos Consensus Council. The Council’s objective is to accelerate development, guide product direction and provide continuity for Tendermint Core, working alongside both users and core contributors.

The immediate focus of the Council is the delivery of the much anticipated ABCI++. This is a collection of ergonomic changes to the interface between the application and Tendermint Core that will give the application far greater control of how the consensus engine conducts state machine replication. More information of what exactly ABCI++ does and what it unlocks will be released in a subsequent blog post.

The new release structure will start with getting the lowest risk pieces of ABCI++ into the hands of users first. PrepareProposal and ProcessProposal methods will be delivered on top of v0.34 as the next release. We aim to begin integrating this release with the Cosmos SDK within the next couple of weeks. This will be followed by FinalizeBlock and the vote extension logic.

Our goal is to fully deliver ABCI++ by the end of 2022, while focusing on quality of life improvements, performance and stability. As part of this, we have decided to discontinue support of v0.35. Features from v0.35, such as the improvements to state sync and the storage engine, will slowly be assessed and ported into upcoming releases.

Follow the latest developments of Tendermint Core on GitHub.

The Cosmos Consensus Council is a community initiative, formed and coordinated by contributors of Tendermint Core from across the Cosmos Ecosystem. While the council makes recommendations on the product roadmap and helps coordinate development efforts, it is not associated or led by the Interchain Foundation or Interchain GmbH.

The Cosmos Consensus Council and the path to delivering ABCI++ was originally published in Cosmos Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.