Glossary
Interchain Accounts (ICA)
An IBC-based mechanism letting one Cosmos chain own and control an account on another chain — sign transactions remotely without holding the destination's signing keys.
Interchain Accounts let chain A register an account on chain B via IBC and send transactions to it. Chain A's governance, a contract, or any module can issue commands to the remote account, which chain B executes as if the account itself were signing.
The pattern is the basis of cross-chain DAO operations (controlling a treasury on a remote chain), liquid staking (Stride uses ICA to delegate stake on host chains), and trust-minimized cross-chain orchestration without bridges. Quicksilver, Stride, and Osmosis all use ICA heavily.