Enabling Hermes to support more diverse relaying use-cases

[seanchen1991]

Background

Hermes' user base is shifting away from relayer operators towards relayer developers. This is in large part because more non-Cosmos chains are onboarding into the Interchain ecosystem: all these different chains have different relaying use-cases.

In order to cater to these users, Hermes' architecture needs to be opened up such that it can be extended in a flexible and modular fashion to fit different use-cases and relaying strategies. To that end, the Hermes architecture is evolving from a relayer binary into a relay framework in order to enable this. In addition to flexibility and composability, the relayer framework will also expose presets to cater towards common relaying use-cases. This way, users will have a batteries-included option if their relaying use-case is not unique or does not require bespoke features/components.

Q1 Tasks

These are the concrete tasks that we aim to complete by Q1 in order to meet the objectives promised to the ICF:

• Reach minimal feature parity between Hermes v1.5 and current relayer #2926

Ongoing Tasks

The following are ongoing tasks that we're making progress on in Q1 but that will also carry over into Q2 and beyond:

• Add more documentation and tutorials for relayer-next hermes-sdk#29

[seanchen1991]

Closing this issue as we'll be keeping track of OKRs directly in the Hermes project board instead of in issues.