Introduction

On May 22, 2025, Maghnus Mareneck, co-CEO of Interchain Labs, revealed that the Colombian government is collaborating with a banking consortium to test a CBDC aimed at cross-border payment scenarios on the Cosmos network, and has chosen a private, permissioned node model and IBC Eureka technology stack. [Source: news.bitcoin.com]

No DAO, no on-chain governance, only permissioned nodes and distributed ledgers. Who would have thought that Cosmos, known as “decentralized Legos,” would become the ideal partner for Central Bank Digital Money?

Cosmos: Building Blocks for Chains, a Perfectly Fitting Power Coat

Cosmos is not a public chain, but a complete set of “chain creation + chain communication” toolbox, specifically designed for multi-chain architectures. Compared to the standardized and open Ethereum, Cosmos’s flexibility and controllability provide Central Banks with an ideal template for “custom sovereign ledgers.”

Cosmos SDK: Assemble Sovereign Chains Like Lego

Cosmos SDK is a modular development framework that allows Central Banks to assemble as needed:

• Join account permissions and KYC module
• Shut down the smart contract virtual machine to eliminate “uncontrollable” contract deployment.
• Add regulatory plugins such as regulatory audits and targeted payments.

Tendermint BFT: Taking turns as the “Central Bank”

Cosmos uses Tendermint consensus, which does not rely on mining through computing power, but instead relies on authorized validators taking turns to produce blocks. The node members are controllable, with extremely low latency and strong block confirmation, making it naturally suited for the real-time payment scenarios of Central Bank Digital Money.

IBC: The “TCP/IP” between chains

IBC is the cross-chain communication protocol of Cosmos:

• Support proof of status and asset cross-chain
• Each Zone chain is independent and exchanges certification data packets when necessary.
• Achieve chain-level whitelisting and packet inspection, “controllable interoperability” rather than chaotic interoperability.

With this protocol and the ICS-20 standard, tokens such as ATOM and OSMO can circulate freely between multiple Zones in the Cosmos ecosystem without the need for bridging.

Hub-and-Zone: Refuse to Reinvent the Wheel L2

The architecture of Cosmos is based on “Hub and Zone”:

• Cosmos Hub is the earliest chain in the ecosystem, but it is not the “commander-in-chief”.
• Zone refers to each independent chain, such as Osmosis and Juno, each having its own ledger and validators.
• They communicate with each other through IBC without the need for Hub relay.

Each Zone is a “pluggable, self-operated” sovereign chain that is interconnected but does not have to obey.

Colombian Path: The Sovereign Calculations Behind Technology Selection

The CBDC chain of Colombia is actually a Zone that uses Cosmos technology.

• Not reliant on Cosmos Hub
• Not directly interoperable with other DeFi ecosystems.
• It is a closed permissioned chain that only borrows from the three major components: Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, and IBC.

For the Central Bank of Colombia, this is not a “idealism” of decentralization, but a “pragmatic” choice.

The Fork between Cosmos and mBridge: Trade-offs of Cost, Efficiency, and Control

In the selection of infrastructure for Central Bank Digital Money, Cosmos perhaps did not expect to become one of the options.

Currently, the leading route is still the mBridge, which is dominated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and has numerous cooperating countries—a consortium blockchain network that connects the CBDC networks of various countries (including 5 members such as Central Banks and international organizations, as well as over 32 observer members). Each member country’s Central Bank establishes an Operator Node here, which has the implication of a joint Central Bank, and allows licensed commercial banks or other clearing and settlement institutions from various countries to run nodes for currency exchange.

The author compares mBridge, Cosmos, and mainstream cross-chain bridges as follows:

Why did Colombia choose not to go with mBridge and instead turn to Cosmos?

On one hand, mBridge is a product of great power competition, with a slow pace of technological updates and high access thresholds; on the other hand, Cosmos provides “out-of-the-box” technical components that allow for the construction of a local permissioned chain without complex negotiations or diplomatic coordination, while also reserving the possibility for future interoperability through IBC.

This is more in line with the current practical demands of Latin American economies:

• The budget is limited, and construction needs to be fast.
• Do not want to rely completely on alliances led by specific major countries.
• Hope to find a balance between compliance control and blockchain innovation.

If the pilot in Colombia goes smoothly, Cosmos may become a new path for small and medium-sized economies to build sovereign Digital Money. A controllable, cost-acceptable, and technology-independent road could potentially be replicated by more sovereign countries in South America, Africa, and even Southeast Asia. This is a typical victory of “technological pragmatism.”

Conclusion

What Cosmos provides is a kind of technological “neutrality” and “customizability”: it does not preset governance answers, nor does it reject centralized deployment.

Colombia has not joined Web3; it has merely borrowed from Cosmos. There are no open nodes, no on-chain governance, and no connection to the public chain ecosystem—this Cosmos-based CBDC chain resembles more of a “sovereign currency machine” that has been streamlined and modified.

However, the “cooling adaptation” of this Web3 technology in real-world scenarios is also a kind of acknowledgment of its engineering value.

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