Interchain Labs: A Short-term Roadmap Update for the Stack

In Q3 2025, Interchain Labs was rebranded to Cosmos Labs. Visit Cosmos Labs at https://cosmoslabs.io/.

It has been nearly two months since Interchain Lab’s debut as the newest part of the Interchain Foundation. During this time, the team has been committed to learning from the community, customers, and users of Cosmos and the Interchain Stack to evaluate how to further its development and expansion!

We’ve made important changes to the Interchain Stack’s short-term roadmap based on the feedback from customers and users. This article recaps our changed approach to development and the specific changes to the upcoming releases.

Our New Philosophy

Interchain Labs was constructed with a new product philosophy in mind: to have a customer-first mindset and take a pragmatic approach to building what our customers need and what makes the product experience better. We spent January talking to dozens of users and customers of the Interchain Stack to understand their challenges, pain points, and wish lists for Stack improvements and new features.

From that feedback, we learned:

• You want to be able to use IBC to connect to Ethereum as soon as possible and with as little friction as possible. This is coming soon in IBC Eureka.
• You were excited about specific parts of Cosmos SDK v2, especially database performance improvements.
• You have major issues with Cosmos SDK upgrades. Upgrades have taken too long in the past, and the effort involved in upgrading often exceeded the benefits of the new features.
• Generally, you want more clarity around what you’re getting from new releases and longer-term support for existing releases.

Overall, we’re deeply grateful for the feedback and excited to receive it! We share everyone’s anticipation for IBC expansion, and by highlighting the challenges associated with Cosmos SDK upgrades, you’re helping us ensure that we can make future upgrades more seamless.

Updated Interchain Stack Short-term Roadmap

After taking all of this feedback into account, we’ve decided to adjust the Interchain Stack’s plans with the aim of providing simpler, faster access to the improvements you care most about. This includes acceleration of some existing plans, as well as new updates/features for various components of the Interchain Stack, such as Cosmos SDK, IBC, CometBFT, CosmWasm, and the Cosmos Hub.

Cosmos SDK Changes

Connect to Ethereum with IBC Eureka without a Cosmos SDK upgrade: You no longer have to upgrade the Cosmos SDK to v0.52 to gain access to IBC Eureka — the new version of IBC extends connectivity (starting with token transfers) to Ethereum mainnet and beyond! The first release of Eureka will be compatible with Cosmos SDK v0.50 and CometBFT v0.38, so you can connect to Ethereum without a massive chain upgrade.

Cosmos SDK v0.53 — A new release with the features planned for v0.52, without the API-breaking changes of v0.52

The purpose of this new release is to accelerate the adoption of the new features originally planned for v0.52 by minimizing the effort to upgrade for developers. This release will be called v0.53, and we won’t be cutting a production tag of v0.52.

The new release will include:

• x/epochs — Cron-job-like functionality for scheduling regular on-chain actions via hooks at configurable intervals
• x/protocolpool — An upgrade to community pool that improves pool visibility (better fund tracking & querying),governance, and functionality (e.g. enables continuous fund streaming for protocol service providers)
• Unordered transactions — Timestamp-based transactions that enable flexible and rapid transaction creation and execution schemes without the complexity of nonce management (This similar to how Solana works)
• Systems testing — testing harness that sets up a multi-node blockchain locally for use in tests.

In addition, we heard from customers that there are other features and updates you’re interested in for the Cosmos SDK roadmap:

• Performance improvements — especially IAVL v2.
• Stabilization of module-level APIs so that you can upgrade the Cosmos SDK without re-writing your modules
• Programmable accounts & account abstraction (This was originally planned for v0.52 with x/accounts, but we’re delaying release due to concerns many users had over needing to use x/auth, x/accounts, and x/groups simultaneously
• Node extensibility (especially RPC services)

We’d like feedback on these technical priorities from existing customers to help us prioritize these. Please let us know your thoughts! Reach out to us on X, or join the #cosmos-tech Slack channel to give feedback synchronously. You can also follow Cosmos Tech updates in our Telegram announcements channel.

IBC Changes

Our primary focus regarding IBC is expanding the protocol to support more ecosystems, beginning with connectivity between Cosmos and Ethereum in the initial release of IBC Eureka.

IBC Eureka will be released towards the end of Q1 in ibc-go v10, it will include:

• Ethereum connectivity for token transfers backed by ZK light client security.
• Simplified protocol design — Eureka vastly reduces the complexity of IBC, eliminates the 4-step channel handshake, and makes implementing the protocol in new languages / VMs much easier.
• Simplified timeouts — Timeout height is removed, and timeouts are supported using timestamps only, making them much easier to reason about
• Encoding flexibility — Protobuf is no longer required. Applications can use whatever encoding is convenient for their environment
• Enhanced upgradability — Application versions will be specified in an IBC packet instead of a connection, so developers can upgrade applications with minimal coordination

Ethereum will be the first non-Cosmos chain with IBC Eureka support. We will expand to additional chains and ecosystems as soon as possible, likely moving to Solana and Ethereum L2s next.

We want to minimize the overhead on chains when upgrading to Eureka, so we’ve made it compatible Cosmos SDK v0.50. In line with simplifying IBC, we are retracting ibc-go v9 and ICS20 v2 and focusing on making the upgrade from v8 to v10 (the first Eureka compatible ibc-go release) as easy as possible.

Additionally, we will remove the fee middleware module (ICS-29) in ibc-go v10 due to poor usability.

CometBFT Changes

We’ve received feedback that faster block times and better reliability under load should be urgently prioritized. We are working to add Comet v1.0 support, which includes some significant block latency improvements, to an upcoming Cosmos SDK release as soon as possible. Afterward, we will continue to prioritize latency until we believe Comet is no longer a bottleneck for block latency.

CosmWasm Changes

The most common feedback around CosmWasm has been regarding its security. Specifically, we’ve heard improving security is much more important than adding new features at this point, and understandably so! As such, our top priority for CosmWasm is to ensure it’s as secure as possible. A comprehensive audit of the entire CW stack is now in progress, and we’ll keep everyone updated.

Cosmos Hub

We are hard at work on a robust roadmap for the Cosmos Hub. We plan to publish a separate post about this in the immediate future, and are looking forward to discussing the roadmap with the Cosmos Hub community.

Looking ahead

As the Cosmos ecosystem continues to expand, we look forward to continuing this synergistic relationship with the community, shaping the roadmap around feedback. Keeping our philosophy of pragmatism and user-focused development will help us –and Cosmos– adapt, build faster, and create a greater impact.

This article was cross-posted on the Interchain Foundation X.