Cosmos Resource List

This file contains a list of material that will help you get a good understanding of Cosmos and blockchain technology. Resources followed by an asterisk (*) are especially important for Cosmos Hackathons.

Introductory Material

• What is Cosmos*: An introduction to the Cosmos/Tendermint ecosystem.
• Bitcoin Whitepaper*: Whitepaper of Bitcoin.
• Ethereum Whitepaper*: Whitepaper of Ethereum.
• Cosmos Whitepaper*: Whitepaper of the Cosmos project.
• Why Application-specific Blockchains make sense: Cosmos blockchains vs Smart contracts.
• Many Chains One Ecosystem: A video introduction to Cosmos by Sunny Aggarwal.

Blockchain-related essential knowledge

• Public Key Cryptography*.
• Hash functions*.
• Merkling in Ethereum: A good intro to merkle trees and merkle proofs.

Cosmos-SDK

• SDK Intro*: Overview of the Cosmos-SDK.
• SDK Tutorial*: A simple tutorial to learn the SDK.
• SDK Documentation*: Documentation of the Cosmos-SDK.
• SDK Specifications: Specifications of the Cosmos-SDK + some modules.

Tendermint + ABCI

• Tendermint Thesis: A good primer on Tendermint and BFT consensus.
• Tendermint Documentation: Documentation of the Tendermint Consensus Engine.
• Tendermint ABCI: Documentation of the Application-Blockchain Interface (ABCI).
• Tendermint Video Explainer: Explanation of Tendermint by Christopher Goes.
• Tendermint Specification: Formal specification of the Tendermint's consensus algorithm.
• Tendermint's first Audit: A summary of the first Tendermint's audit by Jepsen.
• Ethan Buchman's Tendermint podcast: Software Engineering Daily podcast with Ethan Buchman about Tendermint and consensus in general.

Proof-of-Stake

• Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake FaQ: Must read to learn about Proof-of-Stake.
• Introduction to Proof-of-Stake by Bitmex.
• Vitalik's blog post on weak subjectivity: A good piece to understand the importance of weak subjectivity in PoS systems.
• Cosmos Proof-of-Stake specification: Specification of the staking module of the Cosmos-SDK.

Interoperability

• Interoperability and Cosmos Podcast: A podcast about interoperability with Sunny Aggarwal.
• Cosmos IBC specification: Specification of the Inter-Blockchain communication protocol (https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk/tree/develop/docs/spec/ibc).

Blockchain governance

• Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future: A cool blog post on blockchain governance.
• Cosmos Governance Specification: Specification of the governance module of the Cosmos-SDK.

Advanced reading

• What are Zk-SNARKs.
• What are Zk-STARKs.