Great to see this initiative.
My gut instinct says the questions being asked (to be answered by research) are incredibly important.
There is nearly an infinite amount of granular data mining that can be done from multiple vectors (sentiment, onchain, user interviews) but the data being gathered is only as useful as the questions attempting to be answered.
Some fundamental questions that could be asked (and I want to re-iterate this should probably be narrowed down to like, 5 of the most important questions).
1. What is ATOM supposed to do?
2. How does the Cosmos Hub actually make money today?
3. How should ATOM holders get paid from that money?
More staking rewards? Burns? Treasury? Something else?
4. How much inflation do we really need to keep the chain secure?
If security fails, everything fails.
5. When Cosmos gets more real revenue, how do we safely reduce inflation?
6. How are people actually using ATOM today?
Not theories. Actual user behavior.
7. What would make people want to use ATOM more?
8. Does this new token model survive bad markets, crashes, and low fees?
9. How do we know if the new tokenomics is working?
We need simple metrics the community can track.
TL;DR:
The research only matters if it answers the right questions. We can mine endless data, but it’s useless without a clear understanding of what we’re trying to solve. The focus should be narrowed to a handful of fundamentals: what ATOM is for, how the Hub earns revenue, how that revenue should flow to ATOM holders, what level of inflation is needed for security, how and when inflation can be reduced, how ATOM is actually used today, what would drive real demand, whether the model survives stress, and how we track success.
Everything else is noise.
Cheers 