{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0027","slug":"cosmos","title":"Cosmos: A Network of Distributed Ledgers","authors":"Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman","year":2016,"date_label":"2016","publisher":"Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Interoperability","topics":["Interoperability"],"source_url":"https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos/blob/master/WHITEPAPER.md","source_label":"Cosmos white paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2016 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"The Cosmos paper: independent zones running a BFT consensus, connected by a hub, speaking a packet protocol that later became IBC. Unlike Polkadot's shared-security vision, zones here are sovereign. They choose their own validator sets.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/cosmos","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/cosmos","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/cosmos","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Cosmos study","href":"/whitepaper/cosmos"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Tendermint","href":"/whitepaper/tendermint"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Polkadot","href":"/whitepaper/polkadot"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"THORChain","href":"/whitepaper/thorchain"}]}