Delegations, sell-pressure data, the Mintscan acquisition, and a Hub liquidity layer
The following is a recap of the June 10, 2026 Cosmos Hub validator call. These calls occur once per month, and recaps like this one are posted on the Cosmos Hub forums following each call.
This was the second validator call, and it followed the same shape as the first: a set of ecosystem updates, a topic of the month, and an open Q&A. This month’s topic was what a liquidity layer on the Cosmos Hub could look like. Nothing in that section is final. The designs are being shared early to gather validator feedback before any build decisions are made.
Delegation program
The Q2 delegation cycle kicks off on Monday, June 15. The criteria are the same as last cycle (governance participation, uptime, and so on); a refresher is available on the Interchain Foundation’s Medium blog, or in the validator channel on request. The target is a full redelegation in place by July 1, with the usual caveat that ICF processes have a habit of running a little longer than planned. From here on out this runs on a quarterly cadence.
The one hard requirement worth repeating: any validator that wants to participate must be onboarded to the Cosmos Hub testnet program, administered by Hypha, by June 15. Meeting every other criterion will not matter if you are not on the testnet by that date. One final reminder is going out across validator channels in the next couple of days. The background here is that the testnet used to be incentivized, first by the community pool and then by Cosmos Labs, and that incentive has now been rolled into the delegation program so that ICF delegations flow to the most active validators in the set. Starting with the following cycle, around September 15, actual participation will be tracked, with a threshold of roughly six points per quarter (about one upgrade ceremony per month).
On the ecosystem growth tranche: the RFP for IBC analytics APIs went out last month and a healthy batch of applications is now under review. The program got a late enough start that selections will not make it into this cycle’s adjustment. Rather than make anyone wait a full quarter, the plan is to coordinate a mid-cycle adjustment with the ICF so that selected proposals receive their delegations as soon as review completes. Applications remain open on a rolling basis, right up until that adjustment is made.
Tokenomics: a full quarter of sell-pressure data
Gauntlet’s Phase 1 sell-pressure analysis now covers a full quarter of on-chain data, sixteen weeks spanning January through April. The headline numbers: roughly 25.5M weighted ATOM of sell pressure over the window, with about 95% of it successfully attributed to identified cohorts. That attribution rate matters, because it means the dataset is high-fidelity enough to draw real conclusions from.
The biggest conclusion is concentration. 92% of sell pressure comes from just six cohorts, and the overwhelming majority of that comes from three: whales (wallets holding 100K to 1M ATOM), exchanges, and high-net-worth or small-fund holders (10K to 100K ATOM). Whales alone account for roughly 30%, and within that cohort a single wallet routed about 3.2M weighted ATOM to exchanges over the quarter.
Just as notable is what is not driving sell pressure. Validator commissions accounted for roughly 31,000 weighted ATOM over the full quarter, about 0.1% of total ATOM sales. The community has long assumed that staking rewards and validator commissions were major sources of sell pressure; this is now a second dataset pointing the other way, and it is a good one to reference the next time that assumption comes up. The full forum post covers the methodology and route-level detail.
Gauntlet delivered an updated dataset including actual wallet addresses the day before the call. There was not time to fold it into this update, but a follow-up post with address-level data is planned for next week, for anyone in the community who wants to dig in and do some sleuthing.
Mintscan acquisition
The big headline from last week: Cosmos Labs has acquired the Mintscan product suite, and the Mintscan team is joining the Cosmos Labs ecosystem team via a new subsidiary in Korea. They will be working directly with the ecosystem team on Cosmos Hub engineering and roadmap, with onboarding beginning in about a week.
Their first priority is already set: integrating Injective USDC into Skip Go so the migration off Noble USDC can begin. In parallel, Hub mainnet maintenance is moving in-house. Hypha currently maintains the Hub, and over the next couple of months they will help with a handoff before refocusing entirely on running the testnet as a public good. Longer term, the plan is to consolidate infrastructure across Skip Go, IBC Eureka, and Mintscan. All three have very similar infrastructure needs, and consolidating them should free up meaningful costs that can be redeployed toward the Hub. Beyond stabilization, the expanded team gives us more capacity to accelerate the Hub roadmap itself: the native liquidity layer discussed below, expanded IBC Eureka connectivity to Ethereum L2s and Solana, and privacy primitives, with the roadmap continuing to be built in dialogue with the community over the coming two months.
Other updates
Hypha has a community-spend proposal live for ongoing maintenance of the public testnet: roughly $202K USDC from the community pool to operate it from August 2026 through July 2027. It is a direct USDC draw, so no ATOM selling is required to fund it. Given that testnet participation is now wired into the delegation program, Cosmos Labs sees clear value here and has commented in support, though as always, validators should vote however they see best. The proposal goes on chain June 23.
And a late addition from the day before the call: ATOM is now live on Robinhood. This is a meaningful new distribution surface, the first major US consumer broker listing since Coinbase, and it reaches a large retail segment that does not trade on Coinbase and is not eligible for the Asian exchanges. As a follow-up, we are checking in with Robinhood about what a staking integration would take.
Topic of the month: a Hub liquidity layer
This discussion is deliberately early. It sits downstream of the ATOM product roadmap work that is still in flight, but it feels very likely that the Hub will need a liquidity layer, and the trade-offs deserve to be thought through now rather than after a build decision is already made. Two design directions were presented.
The first, and the one we currently lean toward, is a native orderbook with third-party DEX plugins. The benchmark here is Duality on Neutron: a native orderbook with an Astroport integration that lets AMM LPs provide liquidity directly into the book. On the Hub, the likely shape would be professional market makers under agreement providing depth on the five to seven major pairs, with independent AMMs free to deploy permissionlessly alongside them, whether that looks like an Astroport-style deployment or vault structures similar to Neutron’s supervaults. The reasoning is that banks and institutions will not trade on AMMs, because of counterparty and price-impact risk, so an orderbook is the prerequisite for any institutional go-to-market. At the same time, a pure AMM model cannot keep compliant capital separate from non-KYC capital, while this hybrid can: institutions and their market makers follow whatever compliance procedures they need, retail deploys permissionlessly, and any AMM plugged into the book shares in the institutional order flow. That last part addresses the incentive and market-depth problems in one stroke. The trade-offs are real, though. It is technically complex, it very likely relies on the EVM on the Hub, it requires a committed builder partner or in-house resources, and someone, whether the ICF or the community pool, has to fund the market makers.
The second direction is an intents network, either standalone or supplementing a lighter-weight venue. Intents let solvers fill trades directly without a DEX at all: a trader signals they want to trade 1,000 USDC for 500 ATOM, and a solver fills it. This is much simpler to deploy, it handles the compliance question neatly (work only with KYC’d solvers where required, while retail trades with anyone), and it is cross-chain native by design, which fits the Hub’s IBC thesis and synergizes well with Skip Go. There are also ongoing conversations with the NEAR team about deploying their intents framework on the Hub. The trade-offs cut the other way: fee capture in an intents model is hard, which weakens direct revenue to ATOM, institutional adoption is unproven since banks expect orderbook venues with named counterparties, and the Hub risks becoming a routing layer rather than a settlement venue. It is also fair to note that intents have not seen heavy adoption even on NEAR.
Whichever way the design lands, four commitments hold. The product has to serve institutional and retail audiences both; we are not picking one over the other. Fees benefit the Hub, most likely through a taker-fee model on Hub order flow, routed to the community pool, ATOM buybacks, or both. Liquidity gets bootstrapped through professional market makers, not ATOM emissions; incentive programs have repeatedly shown they attract mercenary capital rather than durable liquidity. And the build has to be justified by real use cases: post-netting clearing-house settlement, forex, tokenized-deposit fungibility, and a single fungibility layer across stablecoins to support on/off-ramp aggregation.
The explicit ask for validators: tell us which direction you would weight more heavily and why, and flag any designs you have seen on other chains that we should be studying. Many of you validate across dozens of networks and have seen mechanisms we have not. The validator channel is the place for that feedback.
Q&A themes
On ecosystem growth delegation timing, applications are reviewed on a rolling basis and there is no hard deadline ahead of the mid-cycle adjustment. If you have a proposal, submit it; it will be considered right up until the adjustment is made.
On lending, a validator raised the need for a lending market with ATOM at the center. The short answer is agreement: lending is downstream of the liquidity layer question, but it is critical for ATOM, particularly with Mars winding down and leaving few strong lending venues for the asset. Community lending markets on other chains, like Neptune on Injective, have made efforts to pick up some of that demand, but the Hub ultimately needs something native. It is one of the things the liquidity layer decision is blocking, and one of the more exciting things on the other side of it.
Next steps
The next validator call will occur on July 8 at 9:00 AM ET. If you are an active set validator and have not yet joined the channel, message @totalspud or @robomcgobo on Telegram for an invite.