Hive's Hard Fork 25 is just around the corner, and likely to go live around the end of the month. I have not followed closely, so don't have much to say about the changes being implemented in HF25, but I would like to float the following for consideration for a future Hard Fork upgrade.
IBC is an "Inter-Blockchain communications" protocol for building an "internet of blockchains" style of interconnectivity between sovereign chains. In english, what that means is that separate chains can talk to each other, share information and - importantly - move tokens between the chains. Think of IBC as the blockchain equivalent to the internets ICP/TCCP protocol. Follow this link for the IBC website.
I saw a great explanation in this article titled "Why IBC is a big deal and why you should know about it.
- The countries are zones (previously isolated blockchains).
- The people travelling are the data that the blockchains want to send to one another.
- The airplanes are the IBC, facilitating the transport of the data.
- The airport is the Hub, coordinating the comings and goings of data between one flight to another, until the data reaches its destination.
So, IBC is simply a standardized way for separate blockchains to communicate. It has been developed by the Cosmos eco-system, and has currently been enabled by a number of Cosmos SDK based chains, including Cosmos itself (ATOM) Crypto.com (CRO), Akash (AKT) along with a number of others to follow, including Thorchain (RUNE).
The first cross-chain Dex utilizing IBC as its primary mechanism will be launching in just 2 days, Osmosis, and it will enable DEX trading and LPing for all IBC enabled chains. In the future, it will also carry Erc20 tokens via a peg bridge that is another component of the Cosmos eco-system.
The point is, IBC is not just for Cosmos chains. It is my understanding that any blockchain with fast or instant finality can enable IBC. What this means is that most POS or dPOS (like HIVE) chains can be upgraded to include IBC and thus connected to all the other IBC chains.
If your blockchain is built with the Cosmos SDK, check out the [integration guide]. For other programming languages, check out the IBC implementation list. If an IBC implementation does not yet exist for your blockchain framework, please know that the Interchain Foundation may award you a grant to make one.
According to this, the developers that work on IBC integration for HIVE may be able to apply for a grant from the "Interchain Foundation" to help fund the development. This quote comes from the FAQ section of the IBC website
The benefits for HIVE could be significant. Enabling HIVE to have its native tokens, HIVE and HBD, able to participate in a Dex environment, with no wrapping needed, in a completely trustless manner, would be a huge deal. Osmosis is launching in 2 days, and is aiming to be a highly flexible AMM protocol, modeled loosely on the Balancer protocol. Pooling Hive and HBD into liquidity pools would greatly expand the appeal of both tokens. Particularly, HBD, as "stable coins" are quite attractive in AMM networks would gain an interesting new use case.
Other Dex's will follow, with Gravity Dex coming a few weeks after Osmosis (which for comparison will be similar to Uniswap), as well as Sifchain and ultimately Thorchain. Yes, once Thorchain enables IBC, then if HIVE does also, it could be pooled with RUNE and available in the premier cross-chain Dex protocol. The implications of this are significant, and could propel HIVE into a different league in terms of availability and visibility in an otherwise crowded marketplace.
IBC is not just for token transfer, it is a communication protocol. Other projects with IBC could greatly benefit HIVE - including a new smart contract platform called JUNO, launching soon. The use cases and benefits for HIVE from linking to this rapidly growing eco-system can't even been fully understood yet, with use cases likely to appear that don't even exist at this stage.
HIVE could also be beneficial to the COSMOS eco-system, giving it links to the best (IMHO) decentralized social blockchain. The mutual benefits for both HIVE and Cosmos are hard to pinpoint, but likely to be significant in my opinion. Connecting a social blockchain to the "internet of blockchains" just makes sense in my head.
Technically, this upgrade is not easy as I understand it. I have no knowledge of how complex it would be, but I's imagine it would require extensive development time and resources. I guess it would come down to 
This post is just a feeler, to see if there is any community interest in this, and if HIVE's developer community would be interested/capable of enabling this upgrade. I'd love to here from everyone, but particularly from witnesses and HIVE dev's. Also, if you are reading this from Twitter or reddit, as part of the Cosmos eco-system, your feedback would also be greatly appreciated. I will share interesting replies from those platforms back as comments on this post, or you could easily create a HIVE account and make a comment on this post yourself.
I'd be particularly interested in the opinions of the witnesses, and HIVE developers. I won't tag specific ones, (aside from the Blocktrades tag above). Hopefully the relevant people will see this post.
Thanks for reading, please click the links through the article to get more information, and imagine the benefits that could flow to the HIVE eco-system from linking to Cosmos.
Cheers,
JK.
I have shared this post on Twitter, and in the HIVE and Cosmos reddit channels for visibility.
