An Introduction to Juno
Just a few days ago we had a very insightful community interview with Jake Hartnell and Immasssi of Juno and it made sense to cover the information we gleaned from it. Let me start off with a little background. Juno is an interoperable smart contract hub which automatically executes, controls or documents a procedure of relevant events and actions according to the terms of such contract or agreement to be valid & usable across multiple sovereign networks. Juno is currently in development with a Smart Contracts competition starting soon, we might just see this launching as early as July with an initial distribution supply going straight to ATOM stakers.
Immasssi is an experienced Cosmos validator, validating mutiple chains in the Cosmos Ecosystem, he is also a long time proponent of the Cosmos Ecosystem, helping with marketing, including the Prop34/Prop46 initiatives. He helped build a small team of volunteer developers to begin coding Juno in the beginning of 2021.
Jake Hartnell is a business development professional with a Masters of Information Management and Science degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information, and is one of the driving forces behind the technicals of the Juno Network.
Why Off-Chain Smart Contracts?
Earlier this year, a group of Atom supporters saw a need and decided to fill it! This group of advocates included validators, developers and ecosystem enthusiasts that all came together with the belief that the Cosmos needed to have an off-chain smart-contracts chain to keep congestion off the hub, to advance cross-chain smart contracts and to retain the hub’s neutrality. Thus a new star was born, Juno, a Smart-Contracts-focused sister hub for the Cosmos Hub.
As one of the co-founders of the Juno Network, Immasssi, explains, “There was/is a shared vision around offloading smart contracts to a sister Hub ideally to preserve the neutrality of the Cosmos Hub. So the idea is to have a dedicated smart contract zone that can specifically focus on smart contracts while at the same time providing utility to the cosmos Hub. So the plan is to make an early IBC connection to the cosmos hub and later in the year utilize shared security.
Other key ideas were around having this new sister hub in the hands/governed by atom holders. Specifically in the hands of staked holders that support the hub and participate in onchain governance. This directly ties into the Juno distribution model which we can get into in a minute.”
Shared Security
The Juno hub intended to use the Cosmos model of shared security from the get-go, but unfortunately the high demand for Cosmos Smart Contracts was pressing and the shared security feature of the hub is still heavily in development. In the future, the Juno Chain intends to use a hybrid system of shared security where on-chain validator security is enhanced by shared security.
Interconnectivity
The Juno Hub hopes to be the Inter-Chain Smart Contracts platform, this means that any smart contracts functionality built elsewhere can be easily replicated (and improved) within the Cosmos ecosystem to be used from one chain to the next using Juno. Jake explains, “So IBC in smart contracts is really cool for the simple reason that you can write a smart contract that interacts with and controls assets on other chains.
That opens up a lot of exciting possibilities, especially with regards to DeFi in the Cosmos ecosystem. For example, you can imagine a simple cross-chain contract that takes out a loan on Kava, which is used to provide liquidity on Osmosis or Gravity Dex.”
It’s even mentioned that with the upcoming EVM module which will likely be integrated with Juno, a whole range of new possibilities opens up. As Immasssi describes, “Everything that is currently built on Ethereum will be built on Juno. Initially the Juno Hub will only support Cosmwasm 1.0 at launch but yes the plan is to bring the EVM asap so that Ethereum developers can bring over their contracts to Juno and therefore to the Cosmos ecosystem.
I’m most excited about seeing a live network that launches with the scalability & interoperability topics covered. The most painful thing in the space currently is to see great innovations on Ethereum but no usage due to the scalability limitations (massive fees). Juno not only covers that but the network and contracts will be interoperable with other chains in the cosmos ecosystem. This is very exciting.”
Applications for Juno
The amount of possibilities that Juno is best suited for is limitless. Immassi states that he hopes that the open world of Juno will leave “developers [to] tackle a wide array of dApps on Juno and eventually deploy them on the Mainnet ranging from gaming to DeFi. The community pool will initially have a lot of resources with a total of 20 million Juno at launch. This is more than any Cosmos SDK based chain. It will be up to everyone to use this as primary means to fund promising tools & infrastructure to facilitate easy onboarding of new developers into the ecosystem that want to deploy smart contracts.
This should be the ultimate focus early on. There is a massive shortage of good developers in the space. Our job should be to create an attractive environment for them to get started.”
Jake goes on to say that, “While it was fairly straight forward to pull off [Juno], the harder part is building a community. We need to create an ecosystem of people who know how to write smart contracts in Rust! To do this we’re running a Hack Juno event with ~%1 of the Juno supply available as rewards for those who write useful smart contracts or documentation.
We’re also looking to financially support crucial parts of the ecosystem as well of development of Juno itself through the community pool.”
Competition
The Juno Network is hosting a competition to incentivize people (us, the community) to write up some Smart Contracts, as well as some write-ups on how-to write these smarts contracts. Jake explains it,
“We’re having a Hack Juno competition to incentivize people to write Cosmos Smart contracts … There is an extremely large amount of rewards, and we hope it will kick off a Cosmos Smart Contract community much like Game of Stakes created a community of validators.
Many chains are opting to use the CosmWasm module (including my main project Stargaze), and while Juno is a chain that will specialized for Smart Contracts we hope that educating more people will benefit the entire Cosmos Ecosystem.
So learn to write Smart Contracts! It will be an extremely useful skill and it’s a good chance to earn some Juno. Hack Juno will be launching soon, but you can start working on it today! Approximately, 1% of Juno supply will be given out as rewards to the most useful community contributions.
There are 3 ways to earn points:
Write smart contracts
Make educational docs, videos, stack overflow responses, blog posts, etc.
Build other useful tools
This repo will be a good one to watch: https://github.com/CosmosContracts/hack-juno”
Distribution of Juno
Juno is stake-dropping straight to ATOM stakers. Read more about it in this quote from Immasssi:
“A 1:1 stakedrop is distributed to $ATOM holders, giving 100% of the $JUNO supply to staked $ATOM balances that had their assets bonded at the time of the Stargate snapshot on Feb. 18th 6:00 PM UTC.
Addresses that qualify will be included in the JUNO genesis block at launch. Exchange validators that failed to vote on prop #37 (Stargate upgrade) will be excluded from the genesis allocation. Including delegators bonding ATOM to those exchange validators.
Additionally any unbonded ATOM at the time of the snapshot will be excluded. A whale cap was voted in by the community, effectively hard-capping $ATOM accounts at 50 thousand $ATOM in order to ensure a less top heavy distribution.
10% of the supply difference to be allocated to a multisig committee address for the funding of a core-development efforts. The remaining 90% of the excess supply to be allocated in the following ways (20 million $Juno community pool, Smart contract competition 2.373.341,66 million to be managed/distributed by the multi-sig committee. The remaining difference will not be included in the genesis file (burned). “
Wen mainnet?
The mainnet for Juno is likely to launch shortly after the upcoming CosmWasm 1.0 update, which is going to be the highly up-to-date, and highly stable golden-standard of CosmWasm that is expected to be released at the end of June. We might just see Juno launch alongside the Gravity DeX on July 6th. As Jake explains,
“As for launch date, we’re waiting on a stable 1.0 CosmWasm release which should happen soon. The reason being, we want to deploy a fully functional chain and we also don’t want to break any smart contracts with an upgrade. The 1.0 CosmWasm release will have a stable API that will be supported for a long time.”
How To Get Involved With Juno
There’s alot of opportunity for growth, funding, learning and development on Juno. From Jake,
“The great thing about writing smart contracts in Rust is that you can use all the existing Rust tooling. VS Code has some pretty great Rust tooling! One of the great things about the Cosmos Ecosystem is the sheer amount of modules available for integration. Moreover, tools like Starport make it super simple to create a new chain. We’ve also benefited immensely from the work of the Confio team on the CosmWasm module. Thanks to all these community efforts, Juno is fully working today. “
Anyone wanting to learn more about smart contracts should reach out in the Discord: https://discord.gg/cRkUv6rfrr
- Documentation: https://docs.cosmwasm.com/
- Awesome CosmWasm: https://github.com/cosmwasm/cawesome-wasm
- Production Grade Smart Contracts: https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm-plus
- Example Smart Contracts: https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm-examples
- Testnet information: https://github.com/CosmWasm/testnets
- RPC, LCD, Faucet and block-explorer information under subdirs: https://github.com/CosmWasm/testnets/tree/master/musselnet
- Workshops: https://docs.cosmwasm.com/learn/videos-workshops.html
You can find the full contents of this AMA here:
