Overview

Heimdall is the heart of the Matic system. It manages validators, block producer selection, spans, the state-sync mechanism between Ethereum and Matic and other essentials aspects of the system.

It uses the Cosmos-SDK and a forked version of Tendermint, called Peppermint. Peppermint source: https://github.com/maticnetwork/tendermint/tree/peppermint

Heimdall removes some of the modules from Cosmos-SDK, but mostly it uses a customised version of it - but follows the same pattern.