Building the ATOM wars stack

What are the ATOM wars?

The Cosmos ecosystem is unique because it is a functional, economically growing blockchain ecosystem that isn’t aligned with any single leadership team.

The downside of this structure is that sub groups of ATOM body politic don’t have the ability to bet on a governance asset that represents any single point of view. Instead, ATOM respresents misalignment in a way that dissuades developers, partners etc from interacting with our ecosystem,

What we need is a software stack that enables

  1. Deposits of ATOM, LSM shares and ATOM LSTs that mints Governance tokens.

  2. A protocol controlled value mechanism that is under the control over the governance token that can do things with ATOMs and other tokens.

What could this software stack look like?

I think you basically need primitives for work with governance, interchain accounts, LSM shares and Interchain Queries. Forking the stride codebase might be a good starting point but I can see opportunities to build ATOM war stack on CosmWasm, Agoric and Evmos.

I think the ATOM war stack would create a lot of atom scarcity and create new Schelling points for Cosmos holders to rally around. It would be like the Curve wars ++.

A subgoal here would to build something that the ATOM ONE folks could use to launch their project.

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Trying to grok this. The TL;Dr seems to be that we want the Cosmos ecosystem to find ways to rally around Atom, improve cohesion and make it work for all?

This is, of course, the age old Cosmos dilemma of Atom just being one of many assets, and it’s on a perpetual journey to find it’s moat.

As an Atom holder, I love this sentiment as I think Atom should play a big role in Cosmos as a whole other than simply liquidity, but guess I’m not clear on the tech aspect facilitating this and weaving it in to the culture of sovereignty.

I very much welcome the initiative for building more advanced components for coordination. But one ask, if you don’t mind, could we move away from the term “war”? Many people in the world actually experience war right now and I think this is not a term to use lightly. No healthy competition or dispute needs to be called like that. You are proposing an initiative of creativity, collaboration and creation, not destruction.

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This just sounds like warring city states to me.

The stack probably looks a lot like DAO DAO: https://daodao.zone/

Just need a contract for item #1 in your list, the rest already works (governance, Interchain accounts, PWA app with notifications, etc.). : )

I see a couple of potential mechanisms for #1 that could leverage some existing or in progress contracts:

  1. Augmented Bonding Curves, whereby new tokens are minted (and burned) off of a bonding curve based on ATOM or LSM shares. The “Augmented” component contains features for funding a DAOs treasury such as entry and exit fees, vesting of governance tokens, and different life cycle phases; this article is a good write up and much of it is being implemented here.
  2. Molach DAOs, complete with rage quit. Allowing for people to trustlessly pool funds, and pull out with their share of the treasury if they don’t like how things are going.
  3. A Lock-drop style contract where by LSTs are locked for a configurable time period to earn governance tokens.

With DAO DAO on Neutron, there is nothing preventing experimentation on such things starting now.

What else would you like to see? Funny enough, we’ve been talking about doing a “DAO Wars” game for a while.

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The term ATOM wars are reference to the Curve wars in tokenomics.

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Yeah I agree with you that DAODAO is basically minting a customizable minting function to fulfill these requirements.

I think that could be very cool.

I don’t think ragequit is the right mechanism if you want to create a political party.

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My hope for this thread is that if we spec out what this looks like. Someone will realize you can make money building this.

It probably has a revenue profile similar to Stride.

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The ATOM Wars is really exciting. It shows how the Cosmos ecosystem is growing in smart ways.

A points on who would use this and why.

  1. Cosmos LSTs are capital efficient: the assumption is that Cosmos LSTs want more utility and yield from their tokens. By adding more uses and benefits to their tokens, and the tokens should be more desirable.
  2. Boosting ATOM Buy pressure: When other Cosmos chains start buying more ATOM, it’s like a wave of demand that lifts the whole ecosystem. It’s not just good for ATOM, it’s good for everyone in the Cosmos network. This buying pressure is like a vote of confidence from the community.
  3. Using Yield and Liquidity as a Marketing Tool: Here’s where it gets really interesting. By buying and locking up ATOM, and getting more ATOM in return, Cosmos L1s can build not just profits but also attention. It’s like using your investments to shout out how great you LST is. This isn’t just about making money; it’s about making the Cosmos stand out in the crowded blockchain world.

This is a very smart strategy on how to grow ATOM utility. But the real magic is it’s not just about ATOM growth, it’s about growing together and making the whole ecosystem stronger. Great idea!

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I was hoping that all the Cosmos Cults will meet once a year for a reunion (since they all have in common the usage of Cosmos technology) but I guess not. Don’t even have enough tolerance to discuss what they have in common in the Cosmos Hub. It’s kind of disappointing to see Jae progress from a potential Big Tent leader to his own desert Cult (Atom One) over the past 2-3 years. You would think success would have elevated him but instead it is diminishing him. Well that’s the thing about success - it turns us into who we really are!

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There’s some debt to be paid with people who are convinced Atom is simply useless and undesirable. The narrative shift will take a while, but I think almost everyone in Cosmos wants to see Atom succeed, and it doing so would benefit everyone.

Lock up the Atom and make it too compelling to ignore for all parts of the ecosystem who need it’s liquidity and community mindshare. Every protocol should want a piece of the pie.

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