What is Gno?

Gnoland is a blockchain L1 project started in 2020 by Jae Kwon, co-founder of Cosmos and Tendermint. Its goal is to create a decentralized, secure and scalable smart contract platform for people to create important applications, especially against censorship.

Gnoland is created from a Tendermint fork, which is called New Tendermint. It also comes with Gno Lang, an interpreted golang-like language to write Realms (Smart Contracts on Gno).

Offering good tech, free for everyone and making it a mission for this technology [...] to create good software that is scalable, secure and simple and intuitive. _ Jae Kwon (cryptocito interview)

New Tendermint

This project started with a fork of Tendermint, which you can find here. Jae Kwon is now CEO of NewTendermint Inc. which takes the name from the former Tendermint project, now called Ignite.

The goal of New Tendermint is to create a simpler version of the Tendermint framework, and use Gno as the toolbox for new Cosmos projects.

This is still early stage and we should expect a lot of new communication in the future.

Gnolang

Gnolang is the language used to write Smart Contracts, called Realms, on Gnoland. You can see it as an interpreted version of Golang: developers upload their realm sources on-chain and the GnoVM executes its AST interpretation.

This way Gnoland pushes for full transparency, because it forces developers to push their sources, and not compiled bytecode.

Gnolang will also introduce multi-threading in smart contract development (like go routines and channels).

Validators

There will be an active validator set of 334 validators, selected among contributors and active community members. The goal being to decentralize the validator set between a diversified set of actors.

Realms

Each Realm can expose a public Render(path string) string function that must render valid markdown for each path passed as parameter. This is used to make Realms renderable easily and more interactive.

To develop Realms, developers have access to the gnodev cli toolsuite, that gives easy to use command to test and build the realms.

Realms can use gno packages from the gno standard lib (random, maths, avl, etc.) or from the community.

The state of the Realm is stored in its packages variables.

Roadmap

Phase 1 (done)

The goal of this phase was to create the first Gnoland testnet, test1.gno.land, with the first Realms and user interactions. This testnet was hosted on a single node and is now deprecated.

Phase 2 (done)

The second phase of the project includes the first $GNOT distribution and a new token unit: the ugnot. Its goal is also to bootstrap the ecosystem, especially:

improve the /r/boards realm, with features like pagination or edit button, to make it easier for the community to communicate on-chain. This phase also includes creating and animating new boards for bounties for example.
create good documentation for developers and users

Phase 3 (wip)

Launch a new testnet, test3.gno.land and new features like:

new gno.land website
official blog on r/gnoland//blog
add namespace support and move existing realms to this format (example: gno.land/r/demo/boards)

Phase 4

Launch a new testnet, test4.gno.land, with:

Game of Realms content ready
Official namespace support
Discord Community faucet
Generic transaction Exec

Long Term

In the long run, a Core Mission DAO will be launched to manage the gno.land domain and coordinate the validators and developers.

Next doc: Tokenomics