Polkadot Vs. COSMOS Vs. Octopus Network Vs. NEAR Protocol: Fat Hubs Are Better Than Hub Minimalism

One is that the code of the hub is simplified, so the security and reliability go higher. The other is that the hub will dedicate its limited capacity to process cross-chain transactions, thereby reducing the cost of cross-chain transactions.

The designers of Cosmos followed the End-to-End Arguments  of the Internet architecture design. the function in question can completely and correctly be implemented only with the knowledge and help of the application standing at the endpoints of the communication system.

Hub Minimalism is the design philosophy of the Cosmos Network.

Take a look at the real-world blockchain interconnection topology, and you can easily find that Ethereum is at the center of the Hub-and-Spoke network, with bridges connecting all important blockchains.

The motivation for doing that is not because Ethereum is minimal, but precisely because Ethereum is maximized and accommodates the most application layer protocols and the largest volume of crypto assets. This makes Ethereum “the de facto hub ” of the blockchain Internet — a fat hub.

Polkadot has always been compared with Cosmos. Although the term is not used, Polkadot also practices Hub Minimalism.

The minimalized Polkadot Relay means that decentralized applications including DeFi can only be hosted by parachains. The development of DeFi protocols on Polkadot relies on the composability between parachains, which is presently challenged by two hurdles.

Octopus Network is the third noteworthy multi-chain network after Cosmos and Polkadot. Its goal is to launch and run a large number of Web3.0 applications in the form of application-specific blockchains, aka appchains, which are safe and efficient. The core difference between the three multi-chain networks lies in the way the sub-chain (zone/parachain/appchain) obtains security.

Currently, in the Cosmos Network, a zone is an independent Tendermint consensus blockchain, and the security comes from its own PoS. (Should Cosmos successfully implement its Interchain Shared Security  model, this may expand sometime in the future.)

Polkadot is a heterogeneous sharded blockchain. Parachains are not blockchains with independent consensus, but shards. The Relay Chain does all the validation and guarantees that every parachain has the same level of security.

An appchain can determine its own security level by adjusting the block rewards that it pays to validators.