Cosmos Hub explores diversified security models, leading a new trend in Blockchain security.

Recently, the product leader of Informal Systems' Cosmos Hub initiated a discussion on the consumer chain joining mechanism in the community forum, which has garnered widespread attention. In the context of fierce competition in inter-chain security solutions, Cosmos Hub is actively exploring the use of consumer chains to accelerate its layout in this field.

Cosmos Hub previously introduced a "shared security" mechanism through the V9 Lambda upgrade, allowing it to rent its security to consumer chains such as Neutron and Stride, while also enhancing the value capture capability of ATOM. However, shared security also has some limitations, such as requiring prior approval through governance, and each validator needs to run separate nodes for each consumer chain, increasing costs.

To address these challenges, two new consumer chain joining proposals have been put forward: a fully permissionless transaction-based proposal and a selective joining proposal that requires lightweight permission.

The permissionless solution based on transactions allows developers to initiate consumer chains by simply submitting transactions, while validators can freely choose to join. This approach is simple and open, but requires developers to actively communicate with validators to increase participation.

The selective onboarding program requires developers to submit governance proposals to launch the chain, and validators decide whether to participate through voting. This method leverages the existing governance mechanism but also raises the threshold for launching new chains.

In addition, a "Top-N" scheme has been proposed, requiring that the top n% of concentrated validators must run the consumer chain, while other validators can choose to join or exit.

These new solutions only require partial participation from Cosmos Hub validators to operate, theoretically having lower security than replicated security, but the level of security varies for each solution.

As early as May last year, a comparison was made of three main inter-chain security solutions: copy safety, selective joining safety, and mesh safety. Copy safety provides the strongest security assurances but faces performance and cost issues; selective joining safety is more flexible but carries the risk of security fluctuations; mesh safety allows for bi-directional enhanced security across chains, and has recently received significant attention.

In the future, Cosmos Hub may adopt a diversified security strategy, including existing replication security, permissionless joining schemes, lightweight permissioned schemes, or Top-N schemes, among others. This diversified security model will not only meet the security needs of different chains but also provide more value capture opportunities for ATOM, promoting the overall development of the ecosystem.