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5 Conclusion
We have demonstrated a secure, performant, and flexible protocol for connecting two blockchains with complete finality using a secure, reliable messaging queue. The algorithm and semantics of all data types have been defined above, which provides a solid basis for reasoning about correctness and efficiency of the algorithm.
The observant reader may note that while we have defined a message queue protocol, we have not yet defined how to use that to transfer value within the Cosmos ecosystem. We will shortly release a separate paper on Cosmos IBC that defines the application logic used for direct value transfer as well as routing over the Cosmos hub. That paper builds upon the IBC protocol defined here and provides a first example of how to reason about application logic and global invariants in the context of IBC.
There is a reference implementation of the Cosmos IBC protocol as part of the Cosmos SDK, written in go and freely usable under the Apache license. For those wish to write an implementation of IBC in another language, or who want to analyze the specification further, the following appendixes define the exact message formats and binary encoding.