Quick Take

• The Cosmos community will vote on Oct. 31 to approve proposed changes to the network’s Hub.
• Cosmos developers have proposed some new functionalities for the Hub, including interchain security.

The developers of Cosmos will organize a community vote on Oct. 31 on a crucial proposal that aims to introduce a new security model for the network's central blockchain, which is called the Hub. The governance vote had been planned for Oct. 24, but was postponed.

Cosmos is an interoperability network whose ecosystem contains several chains. These chains can interact with one another using the Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol via the Cosmos Hub.

Cosmos' developers released a whitepaper document in September proposing new functionalities for the Cosmos Hub, including a mechanism called interchain security.  This mechanism would allow application-specific chains in the Cosmos ecosystem to rely on Hub validators for security. In other words, interchain security is meant to allow certain Cosmos chains to secure themselves using the Cosmos Hub.

The whitepaper also proposed a change to the Cosmos Hub’s native token, ATOM, to make it a collateral asset of choice on the entire network, which is being called ATOM 2.0. This will be put to a vote also. If the changes are approved, they will mark the transition of the Cosmos Hub into an infrastructure service platform, according to its developers.