Delegations, USDC integration, and ecosystem roadmap
The following is a recap of the May 13, 2026 Cosmos Hub validator call. These calls occur once per month, and recaps like this one will be posted on the Cosmos Hub forums following the call.
This was the first validator call. The intent of these calls is to open a live feedback channel with validators and replace ad hoc updates with a predictable cadence. Each call going forward will follow the same shape: a brief set of ecosystem updates, a “topic of the month” segment on whatever is most consequential at the time, and an open Q&A. The call sits inside a broader push to move Cosmos Labs out of a chaotic operating period and into something more stable, with communication being the first thing to fix.
Delegations
There are two delegation tracks running in parallel, and both moved this week.
The default delegations announced in February are now half allocated. The remaining half should land by end of week, with early next week as the worst case. The delay came from an ICF custodian whose compliance process was stricter than the first custodian’s. Cosmos Labs spent the gap working with that custodian to avoid pushing a KYC requirement onto every validator. The final agreement was signed on the day of the call, which clears the path for the remainder of the allocation.
The ecosystem delegations program also went live yesterday, and the application is up in the validator channel. This is a separate bucket of stake earmarked for concrete initiatives that move the Cosmos Hub or the broader ecosystem forward, and the evaluation bar is deliberately high. Anything allocated out of this bucket reduces every default delegation pro rata, so the program has to stay competitive with the baseline or it undermines itself. Proposals are open-ended: technical contributions, community initiatives, marketing, business development. The requirement is that the work is substantive, well-scoped, and visibly moves the needle.
The first RFP under this program is for IBC transfer volume APIs. Map of Zones has wound down a chunk of its infrastructure, and several downstream consumers including DeFiLlama have broken IBC data as a result. Backfilling that gap is fairly urgent. Applications will be evaluated over the next week, assuming quality submissions come in.
ATOM tokenomics work with Gauntlet
The Gauntlet engagement kicked off in early April and has been running on a biweekly cadence. The first stretch was spent on plumbing: setting up data pipelines, refining the cohort behavior and sell pressure attribution methodology, and starting on what an emissions schedule optimized for economic security would look like. That last piece matters because it tells us how much flexibility exists to reduce inflation or redirect emissions toward other uses, for example a validator universal income or other community-facing programs, without dropping below the network’s security floor.
One early finding is worth flagging, with the caveat that the data window is still short. Looking at rolling seven-day windows over the prior thirty days, roughly 36,000 ATOM per day is being sold out of emissions. That is about 22% of daily emissions, and a much smaller share of overall daily ATOM volume than was previously assumed. If the pattern holds up, it suggests emissions have a smaller direct impact on sell pressure than the consensus view, which would in turn affect how aggressive any inflation cut needs to be. A more detailed writeup on this goes up on the Cosmos Hub forum tomorrow.
IBCv2 and Eureka
IBCv2 is live to Ethereum mainnet, with multiple channels already open between the Cosmos Hub and other chains for Eureka assets. New channels are being added as demand surfaces.
The next stage is IBCv2 support for Ethereum L2s, expected within the next couple of weeks. After that lands, Cosmos Labs will decide on the timing for bringing it to the Hub. The stage after that is IBCv2 to Solana. Demand there is high, partly because the current bridge surface between Cosmos and Solana is thin (CCTP is essentially the only meaningful option today), and the Solana integration is being lined up for a more substantial rollout.
Testnet program and ICF delegation requirements
Hypha runs the Cosmos Hub testnet program. Community pool funding for that program ran out earlier this year, and rather than let the program drift, testnet participation is becoming a requirement for ICF delegations.
This will phase in over two quarters. Starting with the Q2 delegation round, with a target of roughly June 15, validators seeking delegations need to be onboarded to the testnet program and running a Cosmos Hub testnet node. Starting in Q3, with a target of roughly September 15, actual participation will be tracked. Hypha runs testnet ceremonies (typically upgrades) where validators earn points for showing up on time and completing the upgrade successfully. The threshold is expected to land around six points per quarter, which works out to roughly one upgrade per month. A direct link to the Hypha program will be shared in the validator channel after the call.
Topic of the month: Injective USDC
The biggest piece of news this week is the announced transition of Cosmos’s canonical USDC from Noble to Injective. The context is straightforward. Noble has decided to leave Cosmos. Noble USDC will remain live and stable for some time, but Circle is expected to eventually deprecate support for it. Migrating ahead of that timeline lets us preserve USDC stability in the ecosystem while building in a direct benefit to ATOM, which the Noble integration never had.
Injective USDC is live on Injective mainnet today, and agreements with both Injective and dYdX are signed. The remaining work is integration: making Injective USDC IBC-transferable, wiring CCTP v2 from Injective into the Skip relayer, and setting Injective USDC as the default USDC in Skip Go. The user-facing flow should match the existing Noble experience. A user sending funds from Ethereum to dYdX should land on dYdX in one step, with the routing handled automatically. Dan is leading the Skip Go integration on the Cosmos Labs side.
The negotiated benefit to ATOM is the part worth understanding clearly. Circle pays issuance incentives to USDC issuers on each chain, which is effectively a share of the yield Circle earns on the treasuries backing USDC. We negotiated to share a portion of those incentives with the Cosmos Hub for every dollar of USDC issued on Injective and sent into a Cosmos chain. For most destinations, the split sends 50% of issuance incentives to the Cosmos Hub. For dYdX the Hub’s share is 33%, because dYdX is also receiving part of the revenue. The Hub’s share will be used to buy back ATOM and route it to the community pool. Injective’s support is guaranteed for four years, which removes the risk of another rushed migration on the near horizon.
The natural follow-on question is what the community pool then does with the bought-back ATOM, and that is deliberately left to governance. Options on the table include burning it, distributing it to stakers, using it for ecosystem grants, pairing it with USDC as liquidity on a future Hub-native DEX, holding it as USDC and running treasury strategies, or staking it back to validators through a structured program. None of those decisions need to be made yet. The mechanism just needs to deliver the buybacks; the destination is governance-mutable.
It is worth addressing why we did not put native USDC on the Cosmos Hub directly. We did evaluate this, and the economics did not justify it. Circle charges around five million dollars for a first-year USDC integration and roughly two million per year to maintain it after that. Funding those costs would in practice require selling ATOM, either from the community pool or from the ICF treasury, which is exactly the kind of sell pressure we are trying to remove from the system. Buybacks at the volumes we expect would not offset the annual operating cost, so the integration would run at a net loss to ATOM every year. The Injective structure inverts that. Injective covers the integration cost, the Hub receives roughly half of what it would have received from a native integration, and no ATOM sale is required. The mechanism is profitable to ATOM from day one and scales directly with USDC growth in the ecosystem.
Rollout begins now. Skip Go scoping and the buyback mechanism work both start this month and run in parallel through June and July, with a target of shipping before Q3. Q3 will be focused on the dYdX migration: working with dYdX, Circle, and Injective to make the user-side migration as close to one-click or automatic as possible. After dYdX, attention turns to the rest of the ecosystem, starting with the higher-TVL chains (Osmosis, Terra, larger Injective-ecosystem chains). The ask for validators is to start raising awareness with the chains they validate. There is no short-term urgency, but every chain currently on Noble USDC will eventually need to migrate, and we would rather move them on a schedule we control than under Circle’s eventual deprecation timeline.
Q&A themes
The Q&A surfaced a few topics that are worth pulling out of the call and into the recap, because they reflect direction rather than one-off answers.
On the Hub DEX question, one possible design is an orderbook, conceptually closer to Duality than to a CLAMM. The idea would be to capture institutional order flow through professional market makers while letting community-run DEXes plug into the order book as additional liquidity sources. That structure shares order flow across both depth and breadth, which raises volumes on the venue overall and creates a credible platform for third-party applications to build on top of. It is also one of the clearer paths to direct ATOM revenue.
On lending. There is no active Hub-native lending market effort right now, but conversations with third-party lending protocols are ongoing. Neptune on Injective is one example. They recently integrated stATOM and have bootstrapped some liquidity, which makes looping strategies more viable. Neptune is built on CosmWasm and could deploy on the Hub if there is enough support to warrant it, but it is not an immediate priority while the DEX and USDC integration are absorbing build capacity.
On x402, AI agents, and agentic commerce. This is interesting territory but still early. Current x402 efforts are largely siloed and single-chain. Cross-chain agentic commerce over IBC is a more differentiated angle, and once IBCv2 to Ethereum mainnet and L2s is broadly live, Cosmos has a real opening there. EVM-side AI agent standards can be brought into Cosmos EVM directly without needing to reimplement them as SDK modules. Wallet infrastructure for agents is probably the most concrete near-term opportunity, since agents need a way to pay for things and on-chain wallets fit that need better than bank accounts or credit cards. Separately, conversations with NEAR are ongoing about either integrating their intents work into the Hub or building a Cosmos-native version. More product research is needed on the underlying use cases
On migrating protocols to the Hub. The preferred mode of support is liquidity, platform access, and order flow, rather than direct migration grants. The DEX build is part of that thesis. Once a venue exists for institutional order flow, third-party protocols already in Cosmos have a much more obvious reason to deploy on the Hub, and the support relationship becomes easier to structure.
Next steps
The next validator call will occur on June 10 at 9:00 AM ET. If you are an active set validator and haven’t joined the validator channel yet, please message @totalspud or @robomcgobo on telegram for an invite.