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Informal Systems is a research & development worker-owned cooperative founded in 2019 with over 50 employees, specialized in creating and securing the infrastructure for the Interchain, a network of interconnected blockchains.
In the blockchain context, they are particularly focused on the Cosmos Hub, the largest blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, and it’s worth noting that the founder and CEO Ethan Buchman is also one of the founders of the Cosmos blockchain project itself, as well as vice president of the Interchain Foundation Council.
Informal Systems’ projects include developing languages and tools for formal verification and testing of distributed systems protocols, ensuring their reliability and correctness; despite their focus on the Interchain, the knowledge and tools they develop are meant to benefit all kinds of organizations worldwide; they provide consulting services. The latest project they are working on is an Open Clearing Protocol called Cycles.
In the words of Ethan Buchman, the grand mission of Informal Systems is to transform the quality standards of three key institutions of society: how we build and deploy software, how we issue and distribute money and how we own and govern organizations.
Informal Systems is on CER as it gathered a significant number of world class experts working on making Commons infrastructure as the Interchain more robust, distributed and democratic, generating open source knowledge and tools that will be useful for millions of organizations in the process.
The group is structured as a worker cooperative and it’s explicitly focusing on the advancement of Collaborative Finance, which we believe will be an important paradigm shift beyond both the fiat system and the cryptocurrencies space as we have known it so far.