Modules

The Cosmos SDK can be thought of as the Ruby-on-Rails of blockchain development. It comes with a core that provides the basic functionalities every blockchain application needs, like a boilerplate implementation of the ABCI to communicate with the underlying consensus engine, a multistore to persist state, a server to form a full-node and interfaces to handle queries.

On top of this core, the Cosmos SDK enables developers to build modules that implement the business logic of their application. In other words, SDK modules implement the bulk of the logic of applications, while the core does the wiring and enables modules to be composed together. The end goal is to build a robust ecosystem of open-source Cosmos SDK modules, making it increasingly easier to build complex blockchain applications.

Cosmos SDK modules can be seen as little state-machines within the state-machine. They generally define a subset of the state using one or more KVStores in the main multistore, as well as a subset of message types. These messages are routed by one of the main components of Cosmos SDK core, BaseApp, to a module Protobuf Msg service that defines them.

As a result of this architecture, DApps and smart contracts are added to our blockchain as modules whether they are for generic functionalities such as staking, accounts and token management, or specific use cases that require specialized logic.