Cosmos Targets Enterprise Adoption With PoA and Privacy Features in 2026

• Cosmos Labs is changing its solutions suite to include PoA and privacy.
• These new products will complement the Interchain Foundation and other moves it made in 2025.

Cosmos recently released an updated roadmap for 2026. This development path includes plans for more mainstream adoption to feature a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) solution and privacy products. The goal for the chain is to make performance better and more interoperable for easy adoption.

Cosmos’ Plans for Enterprise Functionality and Privacy

The Cosmos Labs engineering team shared the Cosmos Stack Roadmap through Q3 2026 in a recent article.

The team revealed plans to focus on enterprise functionality. As a result, they developed a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) solution that does not require forking the Cosmos SDK or launching a “stake” token. They are also researching flexible privacy solutions to integrate into the stack.

The engineering team recognizes that current solutions for proof of authority have limitations. They usually require “hacking” the default proof-of-stake system, including governance and distribution, adding more complexity to applications. To address this challenge, the team has developed native PoA into the Cosmos stack.

They also developed an internal module designed to meet certain requirements. These include offering a migration path from PoA to PoS and providing distribution functionality to authorized validators based on validator power.

Privacy solutions are another key focus of Cosmos Labs this year. Cosmos emphasizes that programmable confidentiality and privacy are key features required for enterprises.

The goal is to develop a native blockchain solution that can easily adapt to the environments and needs of enterprises. The team views ZK UTXO models as the most promising path to transaction-level privacy that meets regulatory requirements like selective disclosure and auditability.

Their decision is based on 2025 results from researching privacy technologies across TEE, ZK, and FHE approaches within and outside the Cosmos ecosystem.  The result showed TEEs have security concerns for persistent data, while FHE remains impractical at scale. Still, they are a light step toward solving transaction-level privacy.

For 2026, the goal is private transfers that work with the stack and particularly Cosmos EVM. This will allow enterprises to build compliant financial applications more easily.

Cosmos 2025 Performance

Cosmos is well known as one of the most battle-tested blockchain stacks in production. More than 200 chains have built on Cosmos over the past seven years. This is more than any other ecosystem, giving Cosmos a strong foundation and a clear opportunity to lead on performance.

Cosmos said it treats performance as its highest priority to ensure the platform remains a choice for global, consumer-grade financial applications.

Last year, the development team introduced the Cosmos Stack as an internal innovation alongside the Interchain Foundation.

As a result of this change, v0.53 of the Cosmos SDK was launched to fuel the product’s growth. Thus far, the team has made new changes to this release with the sole aim of serving the users in the community. 

In all, there has been an SDK upgrade in many major chains. These include Babylon, MANTRA, Cosmos Hub, Warden, and Crypto.com.

LayerEdge is one of the biggest partners of the Cosmos community, as noted in our earlier post. The Cosmos architecture allowed LayerEdge to connect with over 115 IBC chains and bridge trust across networks natively.