Skip

Skip Protocol is a cross-chain infrastructure company that started in the Cosmos ecosystem building MEV tooling and evolved into a leading provider of multi-chain interoperability and oracle infrastructure, culminating in its acquisition by the Interchain Foundation in December 2024.

Origins and Founding

Skip Protocol was founded in July 2022 by Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck, following their first-place finish at the Jump Crypto Hackerhouse in Chicago. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Jump Crypto, Galaxy, Robot Ventures, and Lightspeed Faction. The founding thesis was that the Cosmos ecosystem — which consists of dozens of application-specific blockchains — was poorly served by existing MEV infrastructure and that block construction could be made both more profitable for validators and fairer for users.

Original Mission: Sovereign MEV

Skip's earliest work centered on bringing structured MEV to Cosmos chains, distinguishing between "good MEV" (arbitrage and liquidations that improve market efficiency) and "bad MEV" (sandwich attacks and frontrunning that extract value from ordinary users). Rather than fighting MEV entirely, Skip built tools to surface and redistribute it to validators and their delegators — a model it called "sovereign MEV."

The core early product was the Block SDK, an open-source set of Cosmos SDK and ABCI++ primitives that allow individual chains to customize how their blocks are constructed. The Block SDK turns a monolithic block into configurable "lanes," each with its own transaction ordering rules and fee logic. Ready-made lanes include one for in-protocol MEV recapture and another for oracle data injection. Chains could adopt the Block SDK to run their own auction for blockspace rather than leaving that value to external searchers or validators operating off-chain.

ProtoRev was built with Osmosis as one of Skip's flagship MEV recapture modules — an on-chain mechanism that detects and captures cyclic arbitrage opportunities within the same block rather than letting them leak to competing bots. Skip also shipped MEV Satellite, an analytics dashboard and Python library for tracking and classifying MEV activity across Cosmos chains.

Skip:Connect — On-Chain Oracle Infrastructure

As Skip expanded its role in the Cosmos validator stack, it built Skip:Connect (also known as the oracle sidecar), a native oracle system embedded directly in the Cosmos validator process. Rather than relying on third-party oracle networks, Skip:Connect allows any Cosmos chain to stream real-time price data and remote chain state from multiple providers, delivered with sub-millisecond latency as part of the consensus process itself. This approach reduces the trust surface and removes the latency round-trip to an external oracle contract.

Skip:Connect is used to enhance IBC bridging by giving light clients access to accurate price proofs and external chain states without requiring separate oracle transactions, improving the security and speed of cross-chain transfers.

Skip:Go — Cross-Chain Interoperability API

The most widely integrated Skip product is the Skip:Go API, an end-to-end interoperability platform that developers use to create seamless cross-chain token transfer and swap experiences. The core mechanism is route composition: rather than supporting only direct chain-to-chain hops, Skip:Go can combine multiple underlying bridging and swapping operations into a single multi-hop route that connects any two chains and any two tokens in one user-facing transaction.

The API integrates across a wide range of bridge and messaging protocols — including IBC, CCTP, Hyperlane, IBC Eureka, Stargate, GoFast, and Axelar — giving applications access to the most cost-effective or fastest path for a given transfer without having to maintain integrations with each underlying protocol. Developers can integrate through three methods: a REST API for granular control, a TypeScript client library, or an embeddable Skip:Go Widget that can be dropped into any front-end with a single code snippet.

Solana is explicitly supported as a source and destination in Skip:Go routing, and Solana connectivity is being further expanded as part of the IBC Eureka rollout.

IBC Eureka and the Interchain Foundation

In December 2024, the Interchain Foundation (ICF) — the non-profit steward of the Cosmos ecosystem — announced it was acquiring Skip Protocol, rebranding it as Interchain Inc. The deal was framed as a response to Cosmos's long-standing organizational fragmentation. ICF President Josh Cincinnati described it as "a seismic shift" to centralize product development across the Cosmos stack.

Under the ICF umbrella, the team took ownership of IBC v2, called IBC Eureka — a major simplification of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol that added native Ethereum support when it launched in Q1 2025. IBC Eureka is composed of three layers: IBC v2 at the protocol level, Skip:Go as the user-facing routing and execution interface, and the Cosmos Hub as the trust anchor and fee-sharing layer. Solana connectivity via IBC Eureka was announced as a near-term roadmap item following the Ethereum launch.

In September 2025, the engineering team was rebranded again as Cosmos Labs, taking on broader responsibility for product, protocol, and growth work across the entire Cosmos stack, including the Cosmos SDK v2 and CometBFT performance improvements.

Ecosystem Role and Solana Relevance

Skip's relevance to the Solana ecosystem is primarily through Skip:Go, which surfaces Solana as a source and destination for cross-chain transfers to and from the 115+ chains in the Cosmos/IBC network. Applications on Solana that need to bridge assets into Cosmos-native DeFi venues, or protocols on Cosmos chains that want to onboard capital from Solana users, can use the Skip:Go API or Widget to handle routing without building bespoke bridge integrations.

The expanding IBC Eureka network — with Solana support on the roadmap after the Ethereum and Layer 2 rollouts — represents a potential step toward making Solana natively reachable from the full IBC surface area, rather than only through wrapped or custodial bridge architectures.

Team and Current State

Skip was co-founded by Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck, both of whom remained with Interchain Inc. following the acquisition. The organization now operates under the Interchain Foundation, with the engineering team functioning as Cosmos Labs. The skip.build website, Skip:Go API, and associated documentation remain active and in production use as of mid-2026. No audit reports for the Skip:Go smart contracts or Block SDK were identified in publicly available sources during research.