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sdk-design.md

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Cosmos SDK design overview

The Cosmos SDK is a framework that facilitates the development of secure state-machines on top of Tendermint. At its core, the SDK is a boilerplate implementation of the ABCI in Golang. It comes with a multistore to persist data and a router to handle transactions.

Here is a simplified view of how transactions are handled by an application built on top of the Cosmos SDK when transferred from Tendermint via DeliverTx:

  1. Decode transactions received from the Tendermint consensus engine (remember that Tendermint only deals with []bytes).
  2. Extract messages from transactions and do basic sanity checks.
  3. Route each message to the appropriate module so that it can be processed.
  4. Commit state changes.

The application also enables you to generate transactions, encode them and pass them to the underlying Tendermint engine to broadcast them.

baseapp

baseApp is the boilerplate implementation of the ABCI of the Cosmos SDK. It comes with a router to route transactions to their respective module. The main app.go file of your application will define your custom app type that will embed baseapp. This way, your custom app type will automatically inherit all the ABCI methods of baseapp. See an example of this in the SDK application tutorial.

The goal of baseapp is to provide a secure interface between the store and the extensible state machine while defining as little about the state machine as possible (staying true to the ABCI).

For more on baseapp, please click here.

Multistore

The Cosmos SDK provides a multistore for persisting state. The multistore allows developers to declare any number of KVStores. These KVStores only accept the []byte type as value and therefore any custom structure needs to be marshalled using go-amino before being stored.

The multistore abstraction is used to divide the state in distinct compartments, each managed by its own module. For more on the multistore, click here

Modules

The power of the Cosmos SDK lies in its modularity. SDK applications are built by aggregating a collection of interoperable modules. Each module defines a subset of the state and contains its own message/transaction processor, while the SDK is responsible for routing each message to its respective module.

Here is a simplified view of how a transaction is processed by the application of each full-node when it is received in a valid block:

                                      +
                                      |
                                      |  Transaction relayed from the full-node's Tendermint engine 
                                      |  to the node's application via DeliverTx
                                      |  
                                      |
                                      |
                +---------------------v--------------------------+
                |                 APPLICATION                    |
                |                                                |
                |     Using baseapp's methods: Decode the Tx,    |
                |     extract and route the message(s)           |
                |                                                |
                +---------------------+--------------------------+
                                      |
                                      |
                                      |
                                      +---------------------------+
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |  Message routed to the correct
                                                                  |  module to be processed
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
+----------------+  +---------------+  +----------------+  +------v----------+
|                |  |               |  |                |  |                 |
|  AUTH MODULE   |  |  BANK MODULE  |  | STAKING MODULE |  |   GOV MODULE    |
|                |  |               |  |                |  |                 |
|                |  |               |  |                |  | Handles message,|
|                |  |               |  |                |  | Updates state   |
|                |  |               |  |                |  |                 |
+----------------+  +---------------+  +----------------+  +------+----------+
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                                                  |
                                       +--------------------------+
                                       |
                                       | Return result to Tendermint
                                       | (0=Ok, 1=Err)
                                       v

Each module can be seen as a little state-machine. Developers need to define the subset of the state handled by the module, as well as custom message types that modify the state (Note: messages are extracted from transactions using baseapp). In general, each module declares its own KVStore in the multistore to persist the subset of the state it defines. Most developers will need to access other 3rd party modules when building their own modules. Given that the Cosmos-SDK is an open framework, some of the modules may be malicious, which means there is a need for security principles to reason about inter-module interactions. These principles are based on object-capabilities. In practice, this means that instead of having each module keep an access control list for other modules, each module implements special objects called keepers that can be passed to other modules to grant a pre-defined set of capabilities.

SDK modules are defined in the x/ folder of the SDK. Some core modules include:

  • x/auth: Used to manage accounts and signatures.
  • x/bank: Used to enable tokens and token transfers.
  • x/staking + x/slashing: Used to build Proof-Of-Stake blockchains.

In addition to the already existing modules in x/, that anyone can use in their app, the SDK lets you build your own custom modules. You can check an example of that in the tutorial.

Next, learn more about the security model of the Cosmos SDK, ocap