Cosmos is a decentralized network of independent parallel blockchains that can interoperate with each other in an efficient and fast way. The whitepaper was published in 2016 by Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman and the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) took place the following year, raising over $17 million. The main objective of Cosmos is to create solutions for problems such as scalability, usability, and sovereignty in the DeFi space.

The first blockchain launched on Cosmos is Cosmos Hub that aims to interconnect other blockchains in the ecosystem and a new token economy. Every blockchain (called zone) in the system works independently, in a parallel way, so that tokens can be swapped freely.

Zones are powered by Tendermint core which consists of two main technical components: a blockchain consensus engine and a generic application interface. The Tendermint consensus is a Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) algorithm that is used to scale public Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains and ensure that the same transactions are recorded on every machine in the same order. On the other hand, the Application BlockChain Interface (ABCI) serves to connect applications, enabling transactions to be processed in any programming language.

Another component of the Cosmos project is the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol that serves to improve the interoperability of different chains and layers. It is used to support scalable and secure interaction, enabling any transaction to occur in any pair of blockchains.

ATOM is the native token of the Cosmos protocol. Staking ATOM tokens allows users to vote, validate, and delegate to other validators.