Since the acquisition is being financed in ATOM, should we run the same liability analysis on the Hub?
My understanding is that the Hub’s burn rate expressed as a percentage of revenue outweighs Stride’s by easily 100x.
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Tbh the simply fact of try to adapt tradify valuation methods and GAAPs meassure in crypto is ridiculous and for sure silly in the eyes of any proffesional.
Even being a deep value investor myself with a long career I would never try to do it.
This is crypto, a world where a PNG can reach 80B market cap.
Sure, every investment is the present value of future cash flow, Audited balance sheet is mandatory for any M&A and you can tell any shit you want to look clever, trust me, you dont doing that.
There is one truth, market cap is that it is, is what the product worth in order to acquire it, and not a single stride investor would accept less because is the price you can dump on market whenever you want. Only core devs trying to find exit liquidity would accept that stupid move.
So you either accept it, or move on. Regardless of the accounts you want to show to enhance your ego.
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Yes, Atom is a liability as well. Thats why it trades as such when the dollar pumps. The average man hour cost in the entire eco system is 300 dollars per hour, and no cash is generated. Even Bitcoin is a liability, unless you get a favorable ruling by the financial accounting services board. (Which it has) Which allows a firm, LP, Scorp, Endowment, Trust, to mark up or mark down the asset and thus not inherit the volatility on their balance sheet, thus making quarterly reports much more clear for investors, and thus making the asset attractive to hold on the balance sheet.
But just like bankruptcy court, you have a hierarchy of assets and their values. When it comes to intangible assets like Atom which produce no cash, you start with back testing and pen testing the liquidity to define the value of said asset. Atom is the only asset which can discharge debt, its why every team seeks to be financed by ATOM. It is thus positioned better in the hierarchy of intangible assets which are distressed. What ever gets you access to dollars the fastest with out too much slippage maintains the seat at the top of said Hierarchy when we have to discuss the risk profile that exist in intangible assets. Atom has bids on a CEX while all these other assets can only get a bid via using retail to socialize the loss in a “lp pool”. Another important aspect to entertain, even if its paradoxical to our goals for a decentralized ethos.
You have no idea what your talking about. Its clear. You are a risk taker, and not a risk manager. You are trading distressed intangible assets, which must be marked down on a balance sheet.
If you want your asset to actually hit a wider market such as endowments, pensions, trust, Scrops, ect. You might want to learn accoutning. After all, thats what ledgers are for (:.
GAAP works just fine. Everyone who uses it, is not down -80% on average
Your use to EBITDA which is just bullshit earnings. This stuff is fun and nice. I like it as well. We all did. It was easy money, when central banks artificially suppressed the cost of capital for 15 years.
Immo if the hub support quicksilver it can get the same valuation. Let buy quicksilver and improve it. Let put the 450k atom on qck and enable unstacking of liquid staked asset and see what happen 
hay current Stride price can be 0,01 $ - you idea is nonsense. Whails and others can do it in 1 minutes. It is absolutely unfair.
Hub can buy Stride on Osmosis, in Team, in Treajury, from Whails - thay all have Stride for 0,0000001. All those to buy it for 2.5 $ and wait for better times should compensate this.
Hay, lets look Atom balance sheets according to GAAP, FASBA, and the real friends and family rate (FNF) that early funders got.
Atom was 14 - now 6.9 $ super projekt in my bag now…
Stride is much better then you thought.
what good would two chains be when hub validators cant effectively direct one? is this for a fork?
This idea was a cool slap for stride holders, i don’t know how i feel about the situation (if I’m not looking my $STRD bag). The Hub’s and stridezone’s health is reciprocal. Imho, this idea presented on Cosmoverse, coming from the dev team, already done its thing.
Further the discussion, $STRD will be dumped further (the rabbit is kinda out of the hat now) imho and that would be great opportunity for an acquisition by the hub. Marketcap is irrelevant if Stridezone burn all their reserves belongs to the team/treasury, staking rewards etc. That would be an expensive codebase for Cosmos though, which is printing $1m per year right now.
It’s clear that Stridezone do not need to get bought by the hub, but that would be great for the hub (do we need it really, i can not answer this yet, stridezone was my prime example for appchain vision).
I am an enduser, that’s my 0.02 $ATOM which nobody would/should cares anyway.
I’m divided on this, but mostly a bit upset about how it was announced.
Firstly, I completely understand the idea of wanting to merge this project with the Cosmos Hub. Philosophically, the idea is elegant and entirely aligned with the vision and role of the hub in its ecosystem. Deep down, I agree with it.
Then there’s the way it’s being done. Making the announcement during the Cosmoverse was quite poorly timed, abrupt, and without consultation. You might say it’s just an idea and that consultation will come later. However, we all know the impact such announcements can have.
Announcing a contemplation of a merger between Stride and the hub is, in a way, telling those who invested in Stride for the product’s robustness and the team’s efforts that, ultimately, vision matters more than the effort they’ve put into supporting the project thus far, and they won’t be rewarded for it.
In my opinion, it’s a mistake on the part of the team that doesn’t quite grasp who the STRD holders are. Most of them are people who were disappointed by ATOM’s results, its inflationary nature, and its lack of leadership and a well-driven product—everything that STRD offers. Announcing that their STRD will be replaced by ATOMs is akin to saying, “You were disappointed with ATOM and came to us, well, you’ll get ATOMs.”
Just my perspective.
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A few thoughts:
When the proposal was announced, STRD FDV was at around 80m, which is obviously way too high based on revenue multiples. However Stride TVL has been growing fast, and is expected to even grow faster with LSM, TIA & DYDX, so it is clear that the STRD token is valued on growth potential rather than current cashflow.
The fact that STRD token is now down >15% from the announcement, makes that deal “cheaper” for the the Hub, but increasingly unlikely to pass on the Stride side, as more and more STRD holders are underwater with their position.
I conclude from this, that right now is not the right time for the buy out. For the above reasons AND for one reason stated a few times before: It would harm the chances of being the defacto LST of Celestia and Dydx, due to other players being able to incentivize their LST with their own token.
However, I think in the long run, the idea to enshrine LSTs is generally great for the Hub. Therefore I believe, the actual merger/buyout, should be delayed by at least 12 months, which would potentially allow for:
- Stride becoming the main LST for Celestia & DYDX
- STRD valuation getting closer to it’s “real valuation”, as TVL/revenue is likely going to grow (much) faster than the STRD token price
- lower need for minting ATOM (if at all), as it would buy the HUB some time to further fill the community pool by e.g. increasing the comm-pool tax
(Disclaimer: I am both ATOM and STRD holder and I believe AT CURRENT PRICES this is a BAD DEAL FOR BOTH SIDES)
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Appreciate the patience! We’re also all traveling back from Cosmoverse. But this forum thread has been very instructive to find out what are the biggest questions & concerns, and upcoming forum posts & twitter spaces will be a lot better targeted as a result
Importantly, it was decided to use Cosmoverse as an opportunity to put the idea out there (which in itself has several benefits for both sides) and maximize exposure, but I think everyone involved is aware that we have a long road ahead and not planning to rush this process.
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I don’t have a fetish or a bias for liabilities. Fiduciary simply does not allow that. We must create risk composites. I explained the risk profile for both assets. If you are radicalized agent for stride that is fine. I got a FNF rate, so I don’t mind all the free guerrilla marketers who will die on the altar of the coins future opportunity cost horizon.
Again, it is a hierarchy of risk. Which ever asset can discharge the debt with the least resistance, is the most attractive asset. Just ask Ethan, he loves this topic! There is no reason to deal with Bay area cost. The Bay area has been decentralized globally, and globalism flattens price. Google, and these other large firms do not even produce real earnings. So please leave out the best of the best cope. Its not 2005 any more, or 1990. Too big to fail tech firms who act more as govt contractors/ ticks do not host the best of the best. The Bay area actually produces a ton of entitlement. Real Network state organization will eat this with time. Nomic is a great reality of such.
HotCoffee understands. Its not a crypto project, it is a firm, with a burn rate. The market cap means nothing if the liability/burn rate is higher than the cash the firm produces. Their burn rate/ and liability is far higher than any cash they produce.
How do we know Stride is a Firm like Nature of the Firm and not like a real decentralized Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm structure?
- Stride has bank accounts
- Stride is a registred entity
- Stride has non anon devs
- Stride has cash liabilities and failure to meet those can lead to civil damages
Its a regular firm, as described in Nature Of The Firm. It is far from a crypto project, an analogue machine that needs little CAPEX/OPEX to maintain itself from any ‘direct entity’.
Which means we must look at their balance sheet, and their burn rate and apply the basic functions of GAAP to wash away any opaqueness and define risk. 70m$ is laughable. I can dump a tiny percent of the supply, and ruin the valuation model right now. Lets not bring it to hostile take over style plays boys.
We need to be careful here what narratives we choose to have faith in. Or, lets try not to engage our selves in faith markets, that would be preferable. Total 2 and Total 3 index are down an average of 80% or so. There is not one project which can prove with any measurable efficacy that any stack, app, this or that creates favorable price action and advantage. (ETh, Matic, Roll ups), you can go on and on. It is 100% speculative thesis, sold by devs who want to derisk their lifestyle. Be weary of those who say they know the future trend of the industry, When the entire industry trades the same from an asset class POV. Not one project has broken correlation to m2 expansion, and the reality is that because these trade similar to emerging markets, they will always trade reflexivity opposite of the dollar. It means you can pick almost any project, and get the same return. Even a meme coin!
“Disclosures and complete due diligence is the foundation of any “m&a” transaction.
It’s moronic to discuss de/merits of a deal with incomplete information.”
All of the above is completely premature and unwarranted pontificating.
Disclosures are the foundation of any “m&a” transaction. Then due diligence.
It’s moronic to discuss de/merits of a deal with incomplete information.
Cosmos Hub community should possess all material information about Stride before having any of the conversation above.
Cart before horse, again.
I’d like to know if there was a private sale of Stride token and if you participated.
Before getting into FAQs, we’d like to say that we appreciate all of your feedback. The level of engagement and care shows that we’ve built something special together. We don’t take that for granted.
This idea is still just that — an idea. We’re not 100% convinced it’s the right idea, and would never try to push it through without broad consensus. Engaging with the idea in an open-minded way requires a bit of trust that the Stride team is acting in good faith.
We opted for an open, transparent process to involve the community in shaping the idea, presenting it once Stride contributors had internal consensus but before discussing it with many other members of the community. This required a bit of trust in the community to act in good faith, and we think it’s the right path.
The only thing we ask is that you approach the idea with an open mind. We’d like to address some common concerns we’ve seen that we think can be easily cleared up, so that we can refocus the discussion on the broader concept.
Also: we’re also working on a Swiss booklet, to give a balanced view of both sides of the core issues, adding to it as we get more feedback. The Swiss booklet will be published by Thursday October 12th. We’re planning on hosting multiple spaces to hear all opinions this week. And we’ll keep engaging on the forum.
Our thoughts on common questions and concerns we’ve seen so far:
1. What’s the cartel up to this time?
This is genuinely an open, transparent process. The path forward is up to the Stride community first, and Cosmos Hub community second.
Stride contributors could have written a full paper on the concept with a clear specific vision, but it’s such a big step that it would have been pointless without getting broad input first. Instead, we tried to keep it simple, to get people thinking about the high level concept without too much bias.
The idea didn’t come from a bar or drunken night. Informal systems floated the idea by the core team a few weeks ago, and we debated the pros / cons at length. Core contributors are broadly in favor of this idea, but it is not up to us. In fact, Stride contributors employed by Stride Labs will not be voting.
At the end of the day, it’s up to governance.
2. What even is the idea?
The idea is this: all STRD is converted to ATOM. Anyone who previously held STRD now holds ATOM. Stride is its own appchain / satellite chain, and the Stride team keeps working on Stride. 100% of Stride’s revenue would go to the Hub.
3. What would happen to Stride if a merge happened?
The Stride brand, discord, Firestride chats, community, core contributors would remain.
Stride would become the most decentralized liquid staking protocol in Cosmos, and likely all of crypto (ATOM governance is more decentralized than LDO governance).
The core value prop to Stride is leveraging the Hub’s decentralized governance, protocols like dYdX, Celestia, etc. As an added benefit, Stride would be fully aligned with the Cosmos Hub and have resources from other core Cosmos Hub contributor teams at their disposal. Stride would also be in a stronger position to secure large amounts of POL to support liquid staking growth.
4. Is this exit liquidity?
No, because there would be vesting with KPIs for the core team. The team only gets paid if they continue shipping aggressively. And the vest would likely be longer than the team’s current vest! And contributors are not optimizing for STRD liquidity right now; not as important as stATOM liquidity.
VCs would have vesting, too.
Given the KPIs, the Hub would be buying a dedicated team.
Keep in mind, Stride contributors have always focused on the ecosystem, not STRD. And this may be the best thing to do for the ecosystem.
Like many Cosmos community members, Stride contributors feel intense urgency about Cosmos, the hour is late. After the dYdX and Celestia mainnet, Cosmos Hub might not be the clear leader in terms of market cap. From the Stride contributor perspective, if ATOM does not succeed, Stride is less likely to succeed.
5. Would there be a huge mint?
Unclear. The tax could be used. Depends on ATOM tokenomics. Based on the current STRD marketcap, even if there were a mint, it would be a single digit percentage of ATOM supply.
6. Would the whole STRD supply be converted?
Probably not, because much is currently unallocated (or allocated to incentives).
7. What about incentives going forward?
Stride protocol has been scaling back incentives for a long time. With ATOM taken care of, incentives would only maybe be needed for stTIA / stDYDX / stSEI. Stride protocol still has a large unspent incentive pool, which, if converted to ATOM even partially, could be enough to support incentives required for expansion to new Cosmos chains.
8. How would Stride rewards go to Cosmos Hub?
Either streamed to ATOM, or to the community pool. Unclear, both would be good for different reasons. This question needs to be solved as part of ICS’s design regardless.
9. Would Stride support other chains like Osmosis, dYdX, Celestia?
Other chains may be more comfortable liquid staking if Stride is more decentralized. From a protocol’s perspective, once a liquid staking provider has a significant % of stake, it must be very decentralized with checks and balances. As an example, see the current discussion happening around Lido’s dominance on Ethereum.
10. Okay - but why even do this?
Despite its flaws, the Cosmos Hub is very special. It pioneered proof of stake, the appchain thesis, trustless bridging, liquid staking, and shared security. The token that drew Stride contributors into Cosmos was ATOM. It has created something bigger than itself — the best decentralized applications in the world can be built on Cosmos.
Simply put, many Cosmos chains currently depend on ATOM’s success. Over 75% of Stride’s revenue is ATOM. ATOM is the token with the most volume on Osmosis. ATOM secures Neutron. So Osmosis, Stride, and Neutron need the Cosmos Hub today. And it is the view of many people that ICS isn’t a compelling enough narrative for ATOM. We need to raise the stakes!
The reason we’re here is to build permissionless, open systems. This idea is about decentralization, and about ATOM’s secret power - decentralized governance. To give stakers and protocols more confidence in Stride protocol.
It would also give ATOM a future. For ATOM to be a top 3 token (where we think it belongs), it needs a strong narrative and to be fully decentralized. We think the narrative here could be it, and having a few more development teams would make the Hub more decentralized.
And if STRD gets converted to ATOM, current Stride holders share in ATOM’s upside.
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No With Veto from Stride community.
Good from Atom? Of course. You exchange a worthless token for a gem.
Good for Stride holders? Never.
I am overwhelmed at the amount of thoughtful discussion this post has seen so far. To see this amount of passionate discourse during a checks notes bear market is simply astounding.
A few disclaimers and bias acknowledgements before I share my thoughts:
- I am a contractor for Stride Labs
- I had no knowledge of this idea prior to it being announced at Cosmoverse
- I own STRD; I do not own any ATOM
- I have spoken with the core devs since the announcement
- My opinion on the matter hasn’t changed since our brief conversation
The reason I fell down the Cosmos rabbit hole wasn’t because of ATOM, it was because of a thoughtful blog post I came across titled “The Inevitability of UNIchain”. The piece dove into the logical reasons why any crypto protocol/app that finds product market fit (PMF) would eventually pivot to launching their own chain, otherwise they continue to leak value away, primarily via MEV or txn costs for settlement / data availability (DA), depending on the architecture. Moreover, with proof of stake networks, it is clear that having a Liquid Staking Token is one of the most advantageous tools one can have in unlocking liquidity and diminishing the opportunity cost for stakers (see Lido on Ethereum).
I firmly believe that an appchain future is inevitable, and we are seeing it play out in real time right before us. Many posts above have mentioned dYdX and Celestia as chief examples, and their highly anticipated success post launch will only continue to inspire other teams to come build app chains using the Cosmos SDK. Notably both teams have taken an approach not to “align” (I hate this word lol) themselves all that well with ATOM, or the Cosmos Hub in general; the Bera Chain team is doing the same. Take a moment to ask yourself why these newly funded chains with tens of millions of venture capital dollars have gone out of their way to distance themselves from the Cosmos Hub. In my opinion, they did this because they’re confident in their individual ability to deliver value in the Cosmos, and they appreciate sovereignty. Nothing wrong with that.
The Hub has the Lindy Effect, and with the careful integration of consumer chains that are actually capable of accruing value back to The Hub via fees, there is clearly a sizable market for essentially incubating newer chains that don’t have to leak token emissions, which can be quite costly to the network. Stretch this out over a long enough period of time, coupled with tokenomic revamps to lower inflation, etc, and you’ve got quite a nice core function for The Hub.
As for a potential merge, I am not in favor. I am thankful for all of the support The Hub community has given thus far, and from the trajectory Stride is on, it will surely be the biggest revenue driver for ATOM stakers out of all consumer chains. Additionally, as you can see from Patrick’s post above, this doesn’t make much financial sense when constructing a potential valuation model on what an appropriate price point would be for a full token conversion; especially when accounting for current market valuations, and current liquidity conditions.
The logistics of a potential merge would likely take many several months for a plethora of reasons, sucking away precious time and resources that would be better off directed towards continued building, execution, and growth. Also, from the posts above, people seem to like Stride for the sole purpose it serves as an individual app chain. The Cosmos SDK and IBC contributors have provided builders with a very powerful set of tools to craft highly customizable blockchains with native interoperability. In a world of fragmented rollups, and massively successful fat protocols at the base layer of Ethereum (MakerDAO, Uniswap, Aave) their end game will all point towards owning the full stack, and there is no better place to do that than here in the Cosmos.
All this to say, the community support from the Stride side has me more fired up than ever to keep building and growing the protocol. We should all of course keep an open mindset and remain patient with each other during this period of discussion; thoughtful dialogue and mutual respect are rights we all deserve here. Whatever the outcome may be, I believe Stride is already on the trajectory for being a massive success, benefiting all the chains in the ecosystem, and The Hub alike. Lido is looking quite lonely up at the top, surely they’d appreciate some company.
For context: this was typed and posted Friday (10/6), but only approved today by the mod for today (10/8)
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I can’t agree more. Forgive me for the conspiracy theory. I can’t find any other reason to do this except to help seed investors achieve the purpose of exiting liquidity.
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