Discussion: Mesh Security can help in scaling Cosmos

[giunatale]

I have written a Medium post (as it was too long to be contained in an issue) about Mesh Security and why in my opinion is different from any of the current versions of Interchain Security (and more akin to ICS2B from the ATOM One document) and should be explored further.

https://giunatale.medium.com/how-mesh-security-can-help-in-scaling-cosmos-f6e54b2c5273

I see Mesh Security as a new form of Interchain Security, not focused on cross-chain validation. This is because Mesh Security - at least the way I see it - is not about Validation as a Service, but about Delegation as a Service.

The sharing of security is achieved by allowing the bonded tokens on the producer chain to be double staked also on the consumer chain, and this stake delegated to one of the validators there. This means that on a consumer chain the validator set is independent from the validator set of the producer chain, and perhaps it would even be preferable if they are completely disjoint (by this I mean no overlap with sybil identities).

In my opinion, while seemingly in competition with the current Interchain Security versions, Mesh Security is actually a different approach that could be implemented in parallel and exploited even by the Cosmos Hub. Actually, given the substantial security capital allocated to the Cosmos Hub through staking, this could be an interesting "reuse" of this capital that however strictly retains its role of securing the Cosmos Hub.

I think exploring the implementation of Mesh Security - in general - as a novel shared security mechanism is worth doing. On top of that, I think working on a pure Cosmos SDK implementation of Mesh Security might also be worthy of exploration.

Evaluation of how this could be used directly - or indirectly (maybe through ICS1?) - by the Cosmos Hub is however up for debate. As I said, I argue that Mesh Security could perfectly work in tandem with any cross-chain validation implementation of Interchain Security.
To be honest after a more in depth analysis to me it seems like it could even be a more sophisticated (and secure) version of the Interchain Allocator proposed in the ATOM 2.0 paper.
At the same time, it could be an alternative and competitor to liquid staking as a form of re-use of staked capital.