Meter Launches Supernova Core to Advance Scalability for Cosmos SDK

Palo Alto, CA, January 16th, 2025, Chainwire

Meter, a layer 1 blockchain pioneered in consensus and cross chain infrastructure, announced the availability and open source of Supernova Core, a Cosmos SDK-compatible consensus framework. Supernova Core is designed to replace CometBFT, addressing performance and scalability challenges to enhance both decentralization and performance for developers building on the Cosmos ecosystem.

Supernova Core leverages advanced consensus algorithms and cryptographic techniques like HotStuff and BLS to expand blockchain development. Fully compatible with the Cosmos SDK, Supernova Core offers a seamless transition for developers seeking to integrate high-performance consensus solutions, without abandoning familiar tools and frameworks. The consensus engine inside Supernova Core has been operational on the Meter mainnet for over four years, supporting a network of more than 300 validators and handling peak transaction loads of up to 8 million transactions per day. Its extensive operations showcase its established reliability, efficiency, and resilience, even under adverse conditions.

Current Cosmos SDK-based blockchains face numerous challenges, including limited scalability, as existing consensus mechanisms struggle to maintain throughput as validator counts grow. Performance bottlenecks arise from inefficient network designs and the overhead of validator consensus messages, which impedes scalability. Additionally, difficulties integrating Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) functionality limit opportunities for cross-chain development.

“With Supernova Core, we are empowering the community to overcome the limitations of existing Cosmos SDK consensus mechanisms,” said Xiaohan Zhu, CoFounder of Meter. “By introducing innovations like BLS signature aggregation, more efficient network communication layer and the latest advancements in consensus protocols, Supernova Core enables developers to reach new heights of scalability and performance.”

Supernova Core addresses these issues with BLS signature aggregation to reduce communication overhead and enable scaling beyond 150 validators. Its optimized peer-to-peer (P2P) network design enhances message efficiency and reliability through a layered network architecture. Advanced consensus mechanisms, built on the HotStuff protocol, deliver rapid transaction finality, higher throughput, and scalability with linear communication overhead. With full EVM compatibility option, Ethereum-native tools and smart contracts integrate easily into Cosmos-based chains.

Supernova Core’s architecture decouples transaction ordering from state processing, providing the foundation for high-performance, decentralized L2 solutions. This innovation ensures censorship resistance and fairness while achieving the speed and performance of centralized alternatives. Supernova Core is currently available for open source review and will be ready for testnet deployment very soon. Future updates will include support for parallel EVM execution and an optimized database tailored for Ethereum-style key/value store access patterns, further enhancing performance and developer experience.

The Github repo for Supernova Core can be found at https://github.com/meterio/supernovacore

About Meter

Meter is a high performance smart contract platform with Freedom and Fairness as the first principle. Highly decentralized, censorship- and MEV-resistant, and lightning fast, its native metastable coin completes Satoshi’s vision of a sound money independent of the fiat system.