IBC is becoming an LF Decentralized Trust Project

Cosmos is contributing the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) to Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT), bringing the protocol into a neutral governance environment that supports open collaboration and its continued development as a leading open standard for digital ledger interoperability. In this post, we look at the community behind IBC's growth, what the contribution to LFDT means for its development and governance, and how we envision its future.

As global financial markets and institutions adopt digital ledger technology for tokenization, payments, and asset issuance, interoperability becomes increasingly important. It provides a path to exchange data, assets, and information; access liquidity; and deliver new customer and user experiences.

However, global connectivity across markets, networks, and institutions is challenging because they use different technology, operate under different regulatory and legal requirements, and participate in different ecosystems. This lack of connectivity increases cost and risk, limits collaboration, and constrains the flow of value.

At Cosmos, we have long believed open source technology is the solution to this challenge. Independent systems deserve to communicate freely, giving people and companies the flexibility to innovate while participating in a more connected financial system. Contributing IBC to LFDT reflects our long-standing commitment to open source development and our belief that the community should shape IBC's future.

This belief has guided IBC's development. Today, it is the leading open-source interoperability protocol that enables independent digital ledgers to exchange assets and data securely. Over five years of production use across 200+ networks, IBC has grown into an established interoperability protocol, processing more than $50 billion in transaction volume. Its development and adoption reflect the work of a broad community of developers, maintainers, infrastructure providers, and organizations building with the technology.

As IBC's applications expand, we believe more organizations across the industry should be able to participate in its development. Contributing the protocol to LFDT presents an opportunity to accelerate its growth, reach a wider community of developers and organizations, and support its adoption across new industries and ecosystems. It builds on the community's work that brought IBC to where it is today and creates new opportunities for the people and organizations who will shape its future.

The adoption and growth of IBC

IBC’s development began in 2019 with the goal of enabling independent blockchains to communicate, and the first transaction over IBC happened on April 2, 2021. Today, its success reflects both the developers who contributed open-source code and the broader community that used the protocol daily and built businesses around it, driving users and activity across the ecosystem.

Originally developed for the Cosmos ecosystem, IBC has since expanded to support other ledger environments, including Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperledger Besu. By 2023, 107 chains were IBC-enabled, representing 102% year-over-year growth, while 124 developers contributed to its open-source repositories that year. By 2025, 229 networks were on the public IBC network.

These businesses saw IBC as more than a way to connect their blockchains and transfer value. They recognized opportunities to build applications, introduce new economic features, and develop use cases across different networks, including finance, Web3, supply chains, IoT, and AI, helping transform it into a global ecosystem of connected networks, applications, and infrastructure providers. Its open-source nature has also supported adoption beyond Web3, including by financial institutions, governments, and other organizations. This growth has positioned IBC as a candidate to become a leading open standard for digital ledger interoperability.

Why IBC is joining LF Decentralized Trust

Realizing IBC’s potential as an open interoperability standard requires expanded technical capabilities, a neutral governance framework, and access to a global developer and user community. Contributing IBC to the Linux Foundation’s LF Decentralized Trust provides all three.

The Linux Foundation is one of the world’s largest organizations that stewards open source technology. It provides an established framework for community-driven governance, legal support, growth assistance, and access to a global network of developers and contributors. Under its stewardship, some of the world's most widely used technologies are developed, including Node.js, Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, Hyperledger, and Model Context Protocol (MCP). The LF Decentralized Trust is a specialized group under the Linux Foundation umbrella that stewards the open development of decentralized technologies.

Becoming an LFDT project connects IBC to a wide community of banks, financial institutions, technology companies, and governments that rely on open-source infrastructure. Access to this community creates opportunities to expand adoption, attract new contributors, and develop interoperability solutions for a wider range of applications. It also gives organizations outside the existing IBC ecosystem a neutral environment in which to adopt the protocol and participate in its development.

What will change for the IBC community?

The LFDT will hold IBC’s protocol governance under a public project charter and contribution guidelines while the trademark will be held by the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust and be subject to their Trademark policy. The code will remain free and open source.

Developers and organizations that use IBC will continue to access IBC's open source code and contribute improvements through established development processes such as the IBC contribution flow. These existing users will benefit from LFDT's neutral governance environment, which makes participation in protocol development accessible to a wider range of organizations and individuals.

Cosmos will remain involved in IBC's development as a maintainer and contributor, supporting the protocol's technical development and maintenance while collaborating with other maintainers on its future direction. There will be two additional code maintainers, Datachain and OpenZeppelin. We are grateful to these teams for their commitment to maintain IBC.

LFDT governance creates opportunities for contributors with different expertise and experience to help address new technical requirements and improve existing implementations. Read more about becoming a contributor on the LF Decentralized Trust blog.

Gratitude for the open source community

IBC has been free and open source since its inception. We are grateful to the open source community for their contributions, innovation, and expansion of the protocol.

More than 500 individual contributors have supported IBC's development over the last five years. Early milestones included the February 2021 release, which enabled IBC on the Cosmos Hub, followed by the launch of Osmosis, one of the first IBC-native exchange products. Together, these contributions turned the protocol's code spec into technology developers and businesses could use.

IBC's success comes from years of collaboration among developers, researchers, infrastructure providers, businesses, and users. We want to recognize some of the teams whose contributions to the protocol helped bring IBC to life, expand its capabilities, and make it useful to people and organizations across different networks.

• Agoric contributed to IBC's early design, helping establish the foundations for exchanging different types of data and messages between independent networks.
• Bianjie and IRISnet helped establish the first live IBC connection with the Cosmos Hub and contributed to standards for transferring NFTs between networks.
• Binary Builders and Strangelove contributed software improvements to the Cosmos stack, helping teams build more reliable applications and move assets across multiple networks.
• Chainapsis contributed to Interchain Accounts and developed Keplr, helping users interact with IBC-connected networks and enabling applications to operate across them.
• Chorus One and Omnity Network contributed to technology that made it easier to connect networks with different underlying architectures, expanding the range of systems that could use IBC.
• Confio helped bring IBC functionality to smart contracts and contributed tools that allowed developers to build more sophisticated applications across networks.
• Datachain, Succinct, Union, and Althea helped extend IBC connectivity to Ethereum, supporting secure communication between previously separate ecosystems. Datachain also partnered with Progmat to launch Project Pax to develop cross-border stablecoin transfers using Swift's existing messaging interfaces.
• Informal Systems and Iqlusion helped strengthen IBC's security and reliability through protocol research, testing, and software development. 
• Osmosis contributed to IBC's security through responsible disclosure and built products on the IBC network, demonstrating the importance of community collaboration in protecting shared infrastructure.

We also recognize the teams behind networks that have found innovative ways to use IBC, developing new applications and expanding what interoperability can make possible. We thank all these teams, alongside the many other contributors, businesses, and individuals who have built with IBC, supported its development, and used IBC-powered products. This community's continued involvement has helped IBC evolve into an open standard that can connect financial markets everywhere.

The Future of IBC and Open Interoperability

We envision a global financial system where independent digital ledgers and financial networks can exchange assets and data as freely as people share data on the internet. Networks are one of the greatest tools for human flourishing, and we believe IBC is the open standard that will make it happen.

Realizing this vision requires more than technology alone: it requires a community. Developers, businesses, financial institutions, and technology providers must collaborate to drive the financial industry towards a shared standard for interoperability. Together, their work can build secure, reliable frameworks that reduce fragmentation and broaden access to global financial infrastructure. The result is a financial system that serves more people, more effectively.

Cosmos will continue contributing to IBC's development and maintenance during this new chapter. We are excited to see how new perspectives, use cases, and collaborations will shape the protocol's future under LFDT and help bring open interoperability to more parts of the global financial system.

We invite developers, financial institutions, infrastructure providers, and everyone working toward a more connected financial system to help shape IBC's next chapter. Explore LF Decentralized Trust and join the community advancing IBC as an open interoperability standard.

Community FAQ

As an IBC user, will I stop being able to access or use IBC?

IBC users will continue to have access to IBC’s free and open source code. End users will continue to access their IBC-powered services. Any businesses, blockchains, or products built on IBC’s open core will remain accessible, operational, and pursuable without restrictions.

Are you giving IBC away?

IBC's code has been public and freely licensed since day one. Anyone can already use it, fork it, and build on it at no cost. It has never been closed source or “owned” by a single team. IBC flourished because of its openness and the innovation people built on it. The contribution is just a change in the governing body that fosters IBC’s development. In this case, it means a larger group of maintainers will help steward the standard and its adoption.

A similar example is Hedera, which contributed its full codebase to LFDT as Hiero in 2024. Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum client contributed by ConsenSys, has been an LFDT project since 2019. The core creators and contributors remain active maintainers today, supported by a wide participants and governance.

What happens with the ICF and Cosmos Labs’s involvement with IBC?

Cosmos Labs remains a primary maintainer of the protocol. We continue to steward its roadmap (now in collaboration with other maintainers) and spend engineering resources on developing it.

What is the future of IBC’s development?

The maintainers will follow a governance process to determine the roadmap. You can read more here.

Why is IBC joining LFDT beneficial for Cosmos?

IBC joining the LFDT clears the path to it becoming the global open standard for blockchain interoperability. Many world-leading organizations are part of the Linux Foundation as members or use technologies it stewards. IBC's success depends on visibility to a wide net of potential users and builders; the Linux Foundation has the largest community of open source builders in the world. Over time, this means that more companies and communities will start using IBC, creating opportunity for everyone.