Introduction
The Cosmos stack is the most widely-adopted and battle-tested Layer 1 blockchain technology stack, in production with 200+ chains today. It is performant, customizable, and EVM-compatible, offering engineers full end-to-end control of their blockchain infrastructure and implementation.
The stack is modular by design — leverage pre-existing core components and integrate custom features and logic for your use case, compliance needs, governance, consensus, and performance requirements. This documentation explains the open-source stack components: Cosmos SDK, Cosmos EVM, IBC, and CometBFT.
Get Started with the Cosmos Stack
Explore the modular components that make up the Cosmos stack. Each component is optional, provides specific functionality and can be customized for your use case.
About the Stack
Cosmos SDK
The Cosmos SDK is a modular, open-source blockchain SDK for building secure, high-performance Layer 1 chains with full customizability. Developers can use the Cosmos SDK to easily and quickly spin up custom blockchains that can natively interoperate via a native integration with the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol.
The Cosmos SDK is tailored for building secure, sovereign application-specific blockchains. Developers building with the Cosmos SDK can use predefined modules that cover standard blockchain functionality or create custom modules for their specific use case. This composable architecture enables robust customization. The SDK provides abstractions for permissioning, governance, state management, account abstraction, tokenization processes, application logic, and more.
Cosmos EVM
Cosmos EVM is a plug-and-play solution that adds EVM compatibility and customizability to Cosmos SDK chains. It provides complete Ethereum capabilities: Solidity smart contracts, Ethereum JSON-RPC, native support for the EVM wallet/token/user experience, and access to the entire Ethereum developer ecosystem. Its precompiles and extensions allow developers to leverage modules like IBC within the EVM and get native ERC-20 support for tokens on Cosmos. It can run any valid smart contract from Ethereum and also implement new features that are not yet available on the standard Ethereum VM.
IBC Protocol
The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) is a blockchain interoperability solution that allows blockchains to talk to each other. Blockchains that speak IBC can transfer any kind of data encoded in bytes—including tokens, messages, and arbitrary application logic. IBC is secure, permissionless, and designed to connect sovereign blockchains into a single interoperable network.
CometBFT
CometBFT is the most widely-adopted, battle-tested consensus engine in blockchain. It is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine—written in any programming language—and securely replicates it on many machines.
CometBFT is highly performant and achieves speeds of up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS). Its flagship feature, ABCI++, enables developers to add programmability and customization to every step of the consensus engine. Developers can use CometBFT for BFT state machine replication of applications written in any programming language and development environment. It is a fork of Tendermint.
Maintainers and Contributors
Cosmos Labs maintains the core components of the stack: Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, IBC, Cosmos EVM, and various developer tools and frameworks. In addition to developing and maintaining the Cosmos Stack, Cosmos Labs provides advisory and engineering services for blockchain solutions.
Cosmos Labs is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Interchain Foundation, the Swiss nonprofit responsible for treasury management, funding public goods, and supporting governance for Cosmos.
The Cosmos Stack is supported by a global community of open-source contributors.
Get in Touch with Cosmos Labs →