Seeing a lot of talk about Terra lately, which runs on Cosmos.
Given that Cosmos limits the validator set to 100, do people really expect a system limited to such a tiny number of validators to successfully secure hundreds of billions or trillions in the long run?
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This is a really good question, and something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Tendermint is perhaps the simplest possible form of PoS - theres nothing special about it that constrains it to a smaller validator set vs other PoS systems including eth 2.0
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Cosmos chains take a DPoS flavor on top of Tendermint, and the philosophy is to prioritize decentralization among a small set of delegates to achieve max efficiency in on-chain governance and responsiveness to events
All PoS systems have theoretical limits on how far the validator set can scale per shard before performance starts to degrade significantly - so the only options are to scale vertically (increase hardware specs) or horizontally (segregating state machines in shards)
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In some sense, the hub and spoke design of Cosmos / IBC is intended to horizontally scale in "branded shards" - each cosmos state machine has a sovereign set of rules, but they all speak a common language to sync important state via IBC
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