As the Cosmos ecosystem prepares for one of its most important upgrades yet, Range is proud to announce that we will support IBC Eureka transactions from Day 1 across both the IBC Explorer and our Cross-Chain Explorer.

IBC Eureka is a Cosmos Hub product built atop the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol v2, designed to significantly improve cross-chain interoperability by simplifying how IBC is integrated into new chains.

IBC Eureka went live on the Cosmos Hub yesterday, but the first connection with Eureka - between the Cosmos Hub and Ethereum - is expected to go live in the next 1-2 weeks. 

Let’s dive in…

What is IBC?

The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol is the foundational interoperability layer in the Cosmos ecosystem. It enables secure, trust-minimized communication and token transfers between sovereign blockchains, known as appchains. IBC is used daily across the Cosmos ecosystem, for everything from transferring tokens to syncing state across chains and enabling complex cross-chain applications.

In the past 30 days, there were 1.9 million IBC transactions, with a volume exceeding $2 billion USD.

Unlike traditional bridges – many of which rely on external validators or multi-sig schemes – IBC operates without external trust assumptions. It uses light clients to verify consensus proofs between chains, making it one of today's most secure and decentralized interoperability protocols.

Light clients are compact, resource-efficient components that verify a blockchain’s consensus state using only a small subset of block headers and validator sets. In IBC, each participating chain runs a light client for its counterparty chain, allowing it to verify whether a message or packet was legitimately created independently. This design eliminates the need for centralized relayers or third-party consensus, ensuring that only valid, cryptographically proven data is transmitted between chains. However, developing light clients for new chains and ecosystems has been a big friction point till now.

Since its launch in April 2021, the IBC protocol has powered billions of dollars in cross-chain asset transfers, primarily between chains built with the Cosmos SDK. While attempts to adopt IBC in other ecosystems have been made (e.g. Picasso connecting Cosmos with Solana and Polkadot), onboarding new ecosystems or customizing cross-chain logic required significant engineering work. 

That’s where IBC v2 and IBC Eureka come in.

What is IBC v2?

IBC v2 is a significant overhaul of the IBC protocol, introducing key simplifications and improvements that make IBC integration roughly 10x easier, especially for chains that are not using the Cosmos SDK, such as EVM-based or Substrate-based chains.

Key improvements of IBC v2 include:

• Simplified Integration: By removing complex components such as connection and handshake protocols, Eureka reduces the resources and time required to implement IBC on new ecosystems. This simplification is expected to lower the barrier to entry for new chains seeking to connect with IBC.
  
  

• Easier Functionality Extensions: Modular middleware is now formally supported, allowing developers to extend IBC’s functionality without altering the core protocol logic - again, significantly simplifying integration.
  
  

• Performance Improvements: Optimizations in packet relay and processing are set to make transactions nearly instantaneous. Additionally, changes to light client algorithms will require less data for state verification, further improving transaction speeds and potentially reducing transaction costs.

You can learn more about the architecture of IBC Eureka here.

While IBC v1 has proven its resilience and security, adoption has largely remained within Cosmos SDK chains. Eureka changes that. 

By reducing the barriers to implementation, IBC v2 opens the door for new ecosystems to adopt IBC – without the need to significantly overhaul their codebase or implement complex compatibility layers. This is especially important for EVM chains (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base), substrate-based chains (Polkadot, Kusama), Move-based ecosystems (Sui, Aptos), and others. 

The result? IBC becomes more than just a Cosmos standard – it becomes the interoperability standard across Web3.

However, there will still be some implementation friction, from creating individual connections to each of the hundreds of existing chains, to ensuring adequate infrastructure is in place to service them.

This is where the Cosmos Hub’s IBC Eureka offering comes in.

IBC Eureka and the Cosmos Hub

IBC v2 went live on the Cosmos Hub on 26 March 2025. This makes the Hub one of the first chains to establish connections that use the simplified handshake process and other enhancements introduced by IBC v2. 

To reduce the friction for chains and ecosystems when adopting IBC, the Cosmos Hub has built “IBC Eureka” - a product offering on top of the IBC v2 protocol. 

With Eureka, any given chain is expected to create a single IBC connection with the Cosmos Hub, to access every other chain connected to the Hub, effectively making the Hub into a router chain. This means high-value chains like Neutron, Osmosis, dYdX, and Noble can all connect to Ethereum, Solana and others without requiring any additional work. 

In other words, all token transfers between chains connected to the Cosmos Hub will flow through the Cosmos Hub, potentially hundreds of millions of USD per month just on the Ethereum <> dYdX route. Learn more about this vision here. 

While the IBC Protocol itself continues to remain open source and free for anyone to adopt into their blockchain, the team at the Interchain Foundation is expending significant resources to integrate IBC with key ecosystems, instead of just leaving it to the counter-party ecosystem to adopt.

The first connection to use IBC Eureka, expected to be between the Cosmos Hub and Ethereum, is set to go live in the next 1-2 weeks (mid-April 2025), with plans to connect with Solana and Ethereum L2s in the near future. 

What does IBC Eureka mean for users?

• Simple, one-click asset routing to any chain - no third-party bridges, asset conversions, or bridge risks.

• Cheaper cross-chain transactions, as low as just $2 for ETH transactions

• Extremely fast transactions - instant in Cosmos, mere seconds with ETH L2s, and under 30s for transactions with Ethereum mainnet.

• Since new chains need to connect only with the Cosmos Hub, every new chain can be connected to every other chain on launch day.

Range: Full Support for IBC Eureka from Day One

At Range, we provide cross-chain observability, risk intelligence, and security tools across ecosystems. That includes real-time visibility into IBC transfers across 21 of the highest value IBC-connected chains.

When IBC Eureka connections go live in April, Range will support both IBC Eureka and IBC v2 transactions across all our products from day one. Our platform is fully equipped to ingest and visualize Eureka-specific updates, including new Interchain Standards (ICS), enhanced relayer metadata, and protocol-level changes introduced in the upgrade.

During the migration period (from IBC v1 to v2), we may distinguish transactions on our products with the “IBC v2” label, but plan to deprecate any such label in the future once v2 has been adopted widely.

You can track and analyze IBC transactions on:

• IBC Explorer: Real-time tracking of all IBC transactions across 21 chains, and soon, IBC<>ETH transactions too.
  
  

• Cross-Chain Explorer: Unified view of cross-chain and cross-ecosystem transactions over IBC and five other bridging protocols, covering 51+ chains.

• The Range Platform: Our real-time monitoring and alerts platforms, which help secure over $19.5 billion in assets daily
  
  

• Range Trail: Our cross-chain forensic wallet monitoring tool, which protocol teams use to respond to incidents and identify stolen funds in security hacks.
  
  

• IBC Rate Limit Contracts: These contracts secure every transaction across Cosmos’s Osmosis and Neutron chains, limiting the potential damage caused by a hack. 
  
  

• Risk API: Our proprietary system that scores wallets and transactions based on many risk factors, allowing dApps to block suspicious, risky, or non-compliant transactions. 
  
  

• Range API: IBC Eureka transactions and transaction data will be available across all endpoints on the Range API, meaning the applications you have built on top of our APIs will ingest IBC v2 data from day one!

IBC v2 and IBC Eureka are a strategic leap forward for cross-chain connectivity. With faster onboarding, lower integration costs, and continued trust minimization, IBC is poised to become the de facto standard for secure blockchain interoperability.

Range is proud to support this transition. By enabling day-one observability for Eureka, we’re helping developers, analysts, and security teams make sense of complex cross-chain systems – before, during, and after launch.

Explore IBC transactions on ibc.range.org or get in touch to learn how Range can support your chain’s security, monitoring and intelligence stack.