Injective USDC timing, IBC to Solana and L2s, Gauntlet’s phase-one findings, the growth-phase roadmap, and five hackathon winners
The following is a recap of the July 1, 2026 Cosmos Hub monthly community call, hosted as a Twitter Space and co-hosted by Zerk from Mad Scientists. A recap will also go up on the Cosmos Hub X account, and the space itself was recorded for anyone who would rather listen than read.
These monthly calls walk through what has happened across the Cosmos Hub and the surrounding ecosystem over the previous month and open the floor to community questions. Together with the monthly validator calls and the weekly written updates, they make up the regular rhythm for sharing progress on the Hub and ATOM roadmap as it takes shape.
Injective USDC
Work on migrating Cosmos’s canonical USDC to Injective is progressing, in collaboration with the Injective and dYdX teams. The goal is to give Injective USDC the same experience people have with Noble USDC today: the one-click Skip Go flow that moves USDC from any chain to any other. Delivering that same one-click flow requires an Injective chain upgrade, which is currently scheduled for September.
To avoid waiting on that upgrade before any of the benefits start accruing, one option being explored is an interim two-click flow during the July to September window. It would not have the same quality of user experience as the current one-click flow via Noble, and it would be temporary, but it would let Injective USDC start moving into Cosmos chains sooner, which begins driving TVL and, in turn, revenue for ATOM. Once the September upgrade lands, that flow would migrate to the full one-click experience as quickly as possible. More detail will follow as the timeline firms up.
On dYdX, nothing changes from a USDC perspective. dYdX is and will likely remain the largest user of USDC until the Hub scales out its own DeFi, and the migration is moving full steam ahead there and on other chains.
The open USD standard (OUSD) announced the day before the call also came up. Stablecoin competition with USDC and Circle is a healthy development for the industry. Circle has gone relatively unchallenged in US and European markets while Tether has largely dominated in APAC markets, and more competition should push everyone toward more interesting products. There is a lot of potential overlap between OUSD and the Cosmos stack, and many of the names attached to the announcement overlap with the sectors the Hub is already targeting. What that integration could look like is not yet defined, but some form of open USD support may end up being a natural fit for Cosmos.
IBC to Solana and L2s
A previously shared timeline for IBC connections to Solana and L2s, tweeted a couple of months ago, was not met, and it is worth being upfront about why. A working production IBC-to-L2 solution exists and is live today. When it was shared with some of the initial teams lined up to use it, though, we received important feedback from them on the developer experience that we thought should be addressed before going live. One of those teams is a large CBDC initiative built on the Cosmos stack and IBC that is expected to be a significant go-to-market partner, so rather than ship publicly and settle, the decision was to hold back and sharpen the developer experience first. The same applies to the Solana solution.
There is not a concrete new timeline to share yet, but one is expected shortly. Getting both live is the top priority for the IBC team right now, because it matters not only for IBC Eureka on the Hub but also for the CBDC partners waiting to build on it.
The importance of IBC for these partners comes back to having no trusted counterparty. In the institutional bridging space today, integrating something like CCIP can cost several hundred thousand dollars and runs on an external development timeline, which is not scalable for business-to-business use cases. Open, trustless solutions are the ones that will win over the long term, and IBC is really the only relevant option in that category. Beyond the technology itself, the aim is to get SOL into the Cosmos ecosystem and, ideally, to push ATOM out into Solana, where a number of former Cosmos builders are now active and could have a fresh reason to re-engage with ATOM.
ATOM tokenomics: Gauntlet phase one
As you may remember from our tokenomics forum post, the engagement with Gauntlet was structured in two phases. The first focused on research: understanding what ATOM looks like today, how concentrated the supply is, and where buy and sell pressure come from. The second focuses on using those findings to adjust ATOM’s design to lean into its strengths and address its weaknesses. Phase one is now complete. The report arrived the day before the call and is under review, with a plan to share it with the community around early next week.
A few early findings are worth previewing, pending the published report. ATOM-denominated sell pressure is overwhelmingly skewed toward centralized exchanges. The sales impact of staking rewards, by contrast, turned out to be smaller than many had assumed, though still higher than on comparable networks. That points to some room to address inflation, but carefully: staking rewards are a big part of why people participate in ATOM in the first place, and any reduction has to be weighed against that, ideally supplemented by revenue coming in from other sources.
The centralized-exchange picture goes beyond retail buying and selling. A large share of the validator commissions being sold traces back to just a few sources, with Coinbase currently controlling around 20% of ATOM stake, Upbit around 7%, and Binance holding a 4% share. There are several possible ways to address that concentration, it is an area under close review, and it is one the community has expressed particular interest in.
Inflation is not the only lever. On the demand side, the recent Robinhood listing makes staking the obvious next step, and there are many similarly situated exchanges, brokerages, and wallets with large customer bases that do not yet support ATOM or ATOM staking. Pursuing staking partnerships while momentum is strong works both the supply and demand sides at once, and is one of the clearer near-term ways to improve the tokenomic picture. Phase two will build on the phase-one findings to propose concrete design changes.
Cosmos Hub and ATOM roadmap
The roadmap continues to follow the chaos-to-stability-to-growth path laid out in public a couple of months ago. The most notable recent step was the acquisition of Mintscan and the onboarding of its team into Cosmos Labs, which marks the kickoff of the stability phase; that team is onboarding now, and infrastructure is being consolidated. With that underway, attention is turning to growth and to defining the next chapter of the Cosmos Hub and ATOM roadmap.
Several problem areas are under research as candidates the Hub is well positioned to solve, with the important caveat that this is genuinely early-stage exploration. The Hub is looking at multiple opportunities at once, and none of this should be read as final. That said, RWAs and interoperability are among the most promising directions. Something like 95% of the real-world assets issued today sit unused outside the chain they were issued on; large issuance initiatives from the likes of BlackRock, Securitize, and Franklin Templeton have driven impressive TVL, but the assets themselves largely just sit there, held back by both regulatory and interoperability barriers. The Hub looks uniquely positioned to help unlock actual usage of those assets.
A related and particularly interesting problem is the lack of a reliable price oracle for tokenized stocks outside market hours, which matters for perpetuals. Different chains handle this differently. On highly liquid venues like Hyperliquid the exchange effectively becomes the after-hours oracle, as seen with SpaceX shares, where after-hours trading concentrated there set a price that spot markets snapped to at the next open. Injective, by contrast, is understood to disable its markets after hours. This is still a high-level, theoretical area, but there is an opportunity to build a more reliable after-hours oracle drawing on futures and other markets that are more liquid still, an area that would fit well with existing experience given the Skip team’s work deploying the Slinky oracle.
Another example is squaring DeFi access with traditional shareholder protections. On-chain tokenized stocks today generally force a choice between capitalizing on DeFi opportunities and retaining shareholder rights like voting and dividends, largely because of transfer-agent restrictions and jurisdictional KYC requirements. Working with a transfer agent that has IBC capability could offer the best of both worlds: access to DeFi opportunities across IBC while preserving the same regulatory protections a traditional shareholder would have. That could unlock a significant amount of institutional capital. That work is in the middle of legal research right now. Agentic commerce is another area flagged as an unexplored strength worth a closer look.
The Cosmos ecosystem already has real strengths to build on here: Figure was the first to issue genuine share-class-based tokenized stocks on a blockchain rather than a wrapper, and Ondo is taking its own approach to RWA trading. Progress on all of this will be shared regularly through the monthly community and validator calls and the weekly written updates, so the roadmap takes shape in public.
Mad Easy Hackathon results
The recent Mad Scientists hackathon has wrapped, with all five winners now announced, and it produced a strong and varied set of submissions. A striking number of the projects were built with AI coding tools and arrived fully working, with live websites, wired-up wallet connections, and playable builds end to end. Many of the teams have since reached out about continuing on Hub mainnet, which is exactly the outcome the hackathon was aiming for.
The first-place project, from Kaku, is Mad Votes, a Cosmos Hub governance predictions market that lets people take positions on governance outcomes, a natural fit for a chain whose governance generates as much drama as the Hub’s. Beyond the entertainment, it opens up genuine financial use cases, such as hedging a position that depends on how a given proposal resolves. The team plans to bring it to mainnet.
The second-place project, from SubZero, is an IBC-02 game in which players move a platform to catch IBC packets moving between chains. Feedback on the call touched on difficulty scaling, which was fixed within hours, and on sustainability. Rather than relying on donated prize pools, one idea raised was a small entry fee that rolls non-winning entries into the pool; the builder countered with a design in which playing requires staked ATOM and validators can sponsor prize pools that only their delegators can win, a mechanism that gives validators a viral way to grow their stake.
The third-place project, from Tony, is Cosmos Arcade, a set of multiplayer PvP games played for ATOM stakes, including a competitive Pac-Man-style game and a 3D shooter called Void Arena. It was reportedly vibe-coded in a day or two, which speaks to how far the tooling has come. The full set of submissions can be browsed on the Mad Scientists hackathon showcase page, with projects highlighted throughout the week. There may be another hackathon down the line, potentially themed around building tooling for the Hub roadmap once it is more solidified.
Q&A
With time left at the end, the floor opened to questions, and a couple surfaced from the ATOM community Telegram channels. One asked about a potential hard cap on ATOM supply; nothing is off the table, and while it is not something being actively pursued right now, it is likely to come up as part of phase two of the tokenomics work. Another asked about the status of a dual-VM approach versus a Hub EVM, whether on the Hub itself or a sidechain; that is slated for detailed discussion in next month’s validator and community call, with updates shared on the forum in the meantime.
Next steps
The Gauntlet phase-one report is expected to go out to the community early next week. The dual-VM and Hub EVM question will be taken up in more detail on next month’s validator and community calls. Progress on the roadmap will continue to be shared through the monthly calls and the weekly written updates. And there may be another hackathon in the months ahead, with submissions from this one available to explore on the Mad Scientists showcase page.
Thanks to everyone who joined, and to Mad Scientists for co-hosting and for putting the hackathon together.