Hey folks! This is the first Cosmos Quarterly.
Last week we ran a special-edition community call: two hours, built entirely from questions you sent via the forum, Telegram, and DM. We got a lot of them. A sample of what landed in the list:
“Why is the roadmap taking 2 years to develop?” “How does ATOM profit from Skip: Go fees?” “Why isn’t the IBC attestation service launched on the Hub as a decentralized neutral notary?” “Which metrics measure active Hub users and ecosystem growth?” Among many others.
Reading them all together, something became obvious. Most questions were trying to understand something bigger: how Cosmos Labs actually works now, what our different priorities are, and why.
The company changed a lot over the past two years, and more so in the last 4 months. While you’ve seen a lot of the work, you haven’t heard the story of these changes and how our work is structured today.
The short of it: the team is bigger, and Cosmos Labs now works in three dedicated pillars: ecosystem, open source, enterprise. Each with its own team. Progress is not single-tracked, but multi-tracked, with independent goals and resources. All updates per track below.
That’s why this first Quarterly is different from the ones that follow. We believe a bigger update is due, and I’m going to tell that story properly today: Where we came from, why the strategy changed when it did, what the three pillars are today, and what each team is actually for. It’s long. It’s meant to be (once). I’d rather over-explain once than keep answering the same question in fragments every month.
- We did answer a ton more questions about the team, the roadmap, and launches in the Community Call and the recap, so please tune in for the full picture!
Treat this post as the reference. It’s the canonical explanation of how Cosmos Labs is structured and why it got that way, and every future Cosmos Quarterly will link back here rather than retell it. If someone asks you what the three pillars are or why the roadmap process is the way it is, this is the post to send them. If any of it stops being true, we’ll update it here and say what changed.
At the halfway point, this post switches into the format every future Quarterly will use: the news, pillar by pillar, and what each team is working on. From next quarter on, you get that second half! The actual, recurring, quarterly update. The Thursday Hub Weekly continues exactly as it is.
For those new to my name: I’m Nico, CBO at Cosmos Labs. For those who do know me, hey!
I’m leading the Ecosystem pillar, with @RoboMcGobo and the directors who joined us through the newly formed Cosmos Labs Korea subsidiary. We’ve been on the other side of the phone as we started to bring more direct, frequent comms with the community. Since the changes on the team, you’ve seen us take a build-in-public, blunt and direct approach, and we’re keeping that pattern that today, since most folks in the community welcomed it.
From now on, we’ll be bringing the news from all fronts at CL to you through these updates.
PART ONE — The Recap
How we got here: three theses in two years
The most common question we received, in a dozen different phrasings, was some version of: What are Cosmos Labs’ goals? Why enterprise? Why has the Hub roadmap taken two years?
From our perspective, it wasn’t one single roadmap. It was three separate theses, tested in sequence, and each revision happened when and because the data said it should.
Let’s take a step back.
Three years ago, Cosmos development was scattered. Many teams. Many grants. No single owner for a vision across stack, Hub, ecosystem.
End of 2024: Skip joined the ICF, announced that December. Consolidating contributions to the stack, the Hub, and the products: Cosmos Labs.
One team. Three jobs to unify: ecosystem, open source, enterprise. As things started, the main priority was finding a guiding vision, so we started working through hypotheses across the Hub and the stack, learning who actually used Cosmos, and for what. We ended up working across multiple theses in the Hub and the stack.
The first thesis: the Hub as a platform. Build Eureka. Bridge to Ethereum. Bring DeFi home to the Hub. We shipped Eureka in April. We announced a DEX with Stride. We planned EVM on the Hub.
Then, the numbers came in. The problem wasn’t the volume; it was the cost of building the on-chain smart contract ecosystem we wanted to see. Incentivizing an app ecosystem from scratch is enormously expensive. The figures were huge. And it wasn’t buying the Hub anything unique: nothing others couldn’t copy, and in several cases were already doing better.
We could have kept putting money and effort into a losing path, or stopped and rethought it. We stopped. Today, we saw all contenders there arrive at a dead end against Robinhood, Base, and Solana, and we trust it was the right decision.
Hard cut: the platform strategy was suspended, and EVM on the Hub was deprioritized. We took action as soon as the data showed it wasn’t a great path to follow. We did, however, still release Cosmos EVM, the SDK variant to build EVM chains on Cosmos, in high demand by enterprise and used by Ripple, Stable, Cronos, Injective, TAC, Mantra, Mezo, Babylon, among other networks and incoming CBDCs.
Meanwhile, another of our three theses was clearly starting to win: enterprise applications of the stack. Interest in blockchain solutions, proprietary L1 and L2 ledgers, and payment infrastructure was rising fast among multinationals and financial institutions. Until then, the enterprise pillar hadn’t really run at all; product clarity was progressing. We tried different markets, and financial institutions came up as the clear winning market. We saw the rise of Figure, Injective, Ondo, and leaders like Wells Fargo choosing to pursue work with the Cosmos stack.
Mid-2025: the thesis held. Institutions are coming on-chain, and Cosmos technology is built for exactly that. The pattern held across all of Web3.
We also learned something hard along the way: without a major enterprise play, there wasn’t much we could do in the short term that would make us stand out. So we rebuilt the company around it. Enterprise became the bet, the bet on a business strong enough to sustain and grow the open source and ecosystem work, and to make the whole operation more durable over time.
During this time, the Hub didn’t disappear in any of this. But at the time, it was sharing resources with the enterprise bet, and both were demanding attention, so we partnered with other contributors such as Hypha to prioritize maintenance on the Hub and deprecation of legacy features like ICS.
The pressing opportunity was on the enterprise front, so we communicated it, focused, and accelerated our work there.
From One Team and Three Fronts, to Three Teams and Three Fronts
Focus worked. By February, we had a strong enterprise team, a pipeline, live bids, upgrades landing in the stack. We were iterating enterprise products, stack deployments, consortia, tokenization, looking for the wedge.
But February 2026 also showed the cost of focus. The other two pillars (ecosystem, open-source) needed real work, each for its own reasons, and one team still covered both in the gaps. This team was pulled from one front to another, month by month. An enterprise customer lands, and everyone swings there. A significant stack feature arrives, and resources go there. This was a real structural problem for us.
All pillars matter for Cosmos to succeed, and we needed to recalibrate our approach. So in April, we restructured. Each pillar now has its own dedicated team inside Cosmos Labs, including one whose only job is the Hub. Each team has its own budget, resourcing, and priorities.
And we didn’t just draw boxes; we resourced teams heavily. In June, we acquired Mintscan and formed Cosmos Labs Korea: 15+ people joining the Ecosystem team. It was already in motion as part of our laid-out plan to bring stability to the Hub, and it helped us ensure each pillar has a fully functioning team of non-shared resources.
On the team joining: if you’ve used Cosmos, you’ve used their work. Mintscan is how most of this ecosystem reads any chain- the explorer people open without thinking about it, kept running reliably for years, across dozens of networks. It’s a team that has been building Cosmos infrastructure for as long as most networks have been in Cosmos. Fifteen-plus of them: engineers, customer success engineers, strategic directors, and leaders. They know the Korean market, which is one of the most active on-chain markets in the world and where ATOM has strong origins.
Una Yu (“Grace”) leads them, with the directors who joined alongside her. They are, straightforwardly, the biggest injection of strategy, resources, and firepower the ecosystem side of this company has ever had, and all of that capability is now pointed at the Hub and the ecosystem around it, full time. I am thrilled to be working and collaborating with them.
Iterate to Win
On our end, each of these explorations taught us something, and each change was the honest response to what we learned, getting us better results after each iteration. And I think we’re genuinely better for it:
Enterprise has a strong pipeline on tokenization products, and clear verticals it’s attacking. Open Source is pushing the stack to new heights and working with governments and banks to take IBC where it hasn’t been before. The Hub is mid-roadmapping, in public, with a team that exists only for it. More on this below, as we dive into each pillar.
So: yes, two years. Two years with three theses, and each cut was us refusing to keep spending on a thesis the data had killed. We said this, and I’ll reiterate it: iteration is how you find something that wins. Not so far from us, NEAR ran through thesis after thesis before Intents took off, and that willingness to move made them a category leader.
The three pillars, explained: Ecosystem, Open-source, Enterprise
So, let’s look at today. Cosmos Labs organizes everything it does around three things Cosmos needs to succeed.
A first-class open source stack. IBC, the SDK, CometBFT, Cosmos EVM. It secures billions in assets and is highly respected around the world. Utilized by central banks, top 50 protocols, and financial institutions.
A sustainable commercial future. Commercializing Cosmos Labs technology in enterprise and institutional finance. These products drive benefit back to the other two pillars: more resources for the work Cosmos Labs does in the ecosystem, more keystone institutional customers building ledgers on the Cosmos stack, and an increase in overall use of the stack and the Hub, which benefits everyone building on either.
A growing ecosystem. Helping build the Hub into a product that brings new on-chain opportunities to the world, including improving the infrastructure that keeps it alive: Skip:Go, Mintscan, Eureka, with ATOM as the utility token facilitating, driving, and rewarding that activity.
Three pillars and, since April, three teams:
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The Ecosystem team. All things Hub and ecosystem.
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The Foundations team. All things open-source stack and technologies.
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The Incubations team. All things enterprise products built on Cosmos technology.
Note: on naming, so nothing trips you up later. These teams have internal names that we use day to day. Ecosystem is just Ecosystem. Open Source is run by a team called Foundations, plural. Don’t mix that up with the Foundation, the ICF, as in the Interchain Foundation, that owns Cosmos Labs. Two different things. And Enterprise is run by Incubations, because they incubate the products. We’ll keep only the topics to avoid confusion.
These Three Pillars Compound by Winning in Their Own Games
This is the part I’d rather be direct: not everything these pillars at CL do is for the Hub.
Each pillar has its own goal, and that’s deliberately good, because each one has to win in a very different place:
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Open Source has to make the stack the unavoidable choice for building a ledger, and put IBC everywhere.
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Incubations has to win institutions with products built on the stack, solving problems only it can solve, tokenization inside banking, for one.
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Ecosystem has to help build and grow the ecosystem around the Hub, powered by ATOM.
That’s the real complexity of Cosmos Labs: three pillars of work, and we genuinely need to care about all three fronts, because they feed each other. Open source gives us reputation and trust. Enterprise brings new ledgers and tokenization. The Hub innovates and builds new on-chain markets. If one fails, the rest suffer.
So, not everything we do is for the Hub. But the work of every pillar is fundamental to it, and to the growth of Cosmos:
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On the open source front: IBC everywhere, and more ledgers on the stack, opens the market for the Hub to actually be a hub, something to build on top of those markets, over IBC.
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On enterprise: more tokenization on our technology means more markets over IBC, more value flow, more potential customers for the Hub, and more potential sources of revenue off-chain.
This design is better than what we had. A pillar that has to win its own game plays all-out. We lived the other version, where one team defended three fronts and made slow progress on all of them.
We don’t want the Hub’s timing to be governed by other roadmaps. And now, with the Ecosystem team and the newly formed Cosmos Labs Korea subsidiary, it isn’t.
The Ecosystem pillar exists only for the Hub. Full team, one budget, one job.
Routing the other pillars’ work back to the Hub - the integration points, the ATOM utility, everything beyond each pillar’s own goal - is the ecosystem team’s responsibility. Enterprise and Open Source chase their goals; we chase ours, and we’re accountable for watching what happens over there and bringing the opportunities back. Their wins are our resources, and vice versa.
What this means for ATOM
ATOM sits at the heart of the Cosmos Hub; it’s what secures the network through staking, powers governance, and underpins activity across the wider ecosystem. That role isn’t dependent on any single company. It’s sustained by all of you: the broad and growing base of validators, developers, and contributor teams, including Cosmos Labs, all building toward the same thing: a stronger, more active, more widely used Hub.
The work described here is our contribution to that shared effort, and our commitment to continuing to contribute to it. As the ecosystem as a whole grows more capable and more widely adopted, that strength shows up directly in the Hub’s activity and in ATOM’s role at the center of it.
The new structure also means the Ecosystem team is a core contributor to the Cosmos Hub, building products that grow the use of the Hub and integrate ATOM utility, without competing against the goals of other pillars.
That’s all on the company update side! And that’s the part we will only tell once in these Cosmos Quarterlies. (No more essays this week, I promise). Bookmark it. From here down you will see the format you’ll get every quarter: the quarterly update, per pillar of work. If any questions come about all-things-above, we’ll just link to this post for the first section.
PART TWO — Cosmos Quarterly 1 – Q2/26
All right, let’s dive into the first Cosmos Quarterly update, across all pillars!
At a glance, this quarter:
Ecosystem. The team was formed, with the Mintscan acquisition and the resulting formation of Cosmos Labs Korea. The Hub’s roadmap process is running: audit → problems → solutions, in public, with theses appearing. Gauntlet’s Phase 1 tokenomics analysis published in full. The USDC integration entered rollout. The Hydro-unblocking upgrade cleared testnet.
Open Source. The 2026.1 release family took networks past 2,000 TPS with sub-second blocks. Post-quantum and improved IBC developer experience for new connections. The team is also working and evaluating different EVM confidentiality options.
Enterprise. The tokenized deposits solution is now public. Core banking integration work underway. One delivery partner announced (Peersyst). And a lot of time in payments and banking rooms: Nacha, Consensus, Digital Asset Week, Point Zero, TokenizeThis.
Partnerships. CBWeb3, a tokenized finance initiative in Latin America, with LNET, Peersyst, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank.
Structural. The April restructure into three pillars. This is the first stretch where all three have run at once, with dedicated resources.
Note on teammates. Each pillar has a dozen people in it. I will name leads here for brevity, not because the work is theirs alone; it isn’t; none of what follows would exist without the rest of the team. For a full picture, our LinkedIn page is best.
Ecosystem: the Hub got a team of its own, and a roadmap process in public
Who we are.
I (Nico) guide this pillar, with Grace leading Cosmos Labs Korea, our subsidiary, with the directors working in strategy and product development together with +15 more teammates. @RoboMcGobo is in ecosystem products, and the roadmap process you’ve been watching; @dan_bryan is on validator relations and the delegation program; @cryptoassassin runs infrastructure and tooling; @totalspud runs support, programs, and comms.
Recent Progress and Current Priorities:
Cosmos Labs New Ecosystem Team, With Its Korean Subsidiary
The Mintscan acquisition closed in June: 15+ new team members who are engineers, customer success engineers, and technical and strategic leaders joined Cosmos Labs as a new subsidiary in Korea. This acquisition brings powerful new technical resources and leadership to the Ecosystem team.
The roadmap.
We are running 3 phases to complete the roadmap. First, audit the ecosystem’s resources, strengths, and gaps. Then, identify the real problems living in those gaps, and why they happen. Last, design solutions in the open and let them get battle-tested. The audit is complete, the problem phase wrapped, and we are in the solutions phase. We evidenced 3 problem spaces we believe the Hub can solve:
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Real-world assets. Finance and RWA chains are the heaviest IBC users today, but tokenized assets get stranded on their issuance chains, compliance frameworks don’t travel with the asset, and distribution is largely absent.
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Interoperability. No ecosystem handles this better than Cosmos, and the gaps that remain are real: cross-chain privacy is close to nonexistent, and cross-chain trust keeps failing expensively.
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Payments. The youngest of the three, with early signals from intra-company flows and the Korean market.
Most of the team meets in Korea the first week of August to push the solutions phase forward. We will develop hypotheses to prioritize and test for the roadmap. Updates after.
Community and validator calls for technical roadmap feedback.
The roadmap work is divided between the product roadmap, above, and the technical roadmap. We have made progress in the latter without waiting for the product front, because every version of the roadmap has shared components: EVM, USDC, the liquidity layer, privacy, and expanding ATOM staking access through institutional custodians. We gathered a lot of great feedback from validators and the community in our bi-weekly discussions, and they are helping frame the shape of these decisions.
Tokenomics.
Gauntlet’s Phase 1 analysis was published in full, unredacted, and the methodology has been argued in public ever since, including a direct response from the researchers to the community’s entity-attribution review.
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From the published report: the largest cohorts in the analysis hold roughly 80 million ATOM, most of it staked, roughly 16% of supply and 19% of staked supply, and their sell pressure arrives in spikes, not a steady drip.
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Centralized exchanges are by far the most consistent net-selling cohort.
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The theory that independent validator commissions and individual staking rewards drive sell pressure did not survive the data. Stake is sticky, and a potential asset for our strategy.
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Phase 2 is kicking off next, moving from analysis to mechanism design and breaking out exchange-operated validator flow from user flow. Anything that becomes a proposal routes through governance. A public dashboard built on the Phase 1 data is in the works.
On Hub updates, fees, and USDC migration.
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The USDC integration is in rollout, two-click migration targeted for August, one-click in September, and carries a programmatic mechanism that accrues to ATOM once it’s switched on.
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The small Hub upgrade that unblocks Hydro’s migration cleared the public testnet; the governance proposal is targeted for this week, with mainnet in the two-to-three-week range after that.
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On Skip:Go: there’s a fee option that would be straightforward to enable. It has stayed off because bridging is largely commoditized, and a fee that pushes volume away from IBC would be self-defeating. Now that Skip: Go sits with this team, aligning this to the roadmap is our job and will be evaluated.
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The ecosystem growth delegation program opened public applications in June, now with a testnet-participation requirement, so delegations reward validators who help test what ships. As for the regular delegation program, this quarter’s revised list of eligible validators will be announced in the coming weeks.
What we’re working on right now.
Besides wrapping the above roadmap/USDC workstreams… The ecosystem page is in progress, and so is the community sandbox for app testing, which will most likely live on the Hub’s public testnet program that Hypha now operates, funded by the community pool through Prop #1043 earlier this quarter.
Open Source: performance, post-quantum security, and one-step IBC
Who they are.
Internally, the Foundations team. Alex Johnson and Gio Vitali lead it. They maintain IBC, the Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, and Cosmos EVM, the battle-tested Cosmos stack.
Recent Progress and Current Priorities:
The 2026.1 release family was announced in May. It included CometBFT v0.39.0, Cosmos SDK v0.54.2 and ibc-go v11.0.0, libp2p networking and adaptive sync, CometBFT v0.39.2, SDK v0.54.3 and Cosmos EVM v0.7.0, which is where Krakatoa’s app-owned mempool landed and roughly tripled EVM throughput. Sub-second blocks, and the same upgrades carry to both EVM and non-EVM SDK chains. Release notes and upgrade guides are on docs.cosmos.network.
Interoperability releases.
Ibc-go v11.1.0 upstreamed packet-forward middleware into ibc-go. v11.2.0, in July, added rate-limiting middleware. Consolidating this middleware into one place is unglamorous, and it is exactly the kind of thing that makes the stack cheaper to maintain for everyone using it. ibc-go v11 also included ICS27-GMP, for cross-chain contract calls over IBC v2, and an experimental attestation light client for connecting chains that have no native light client protocol.
Post-quantum security.
The July release will bring post-quantum consensus keys and a v1.0.0 of a key management system. It also ships zero-downtime validator key rotation, which validators have wanted for a long time. Technical write-up to follow in the coming weeks.
What the team is working on now:
Two things are moving up the priority list this quarter to reduce IBC integration friction and bring confidentiality options. IBC integrations take nine-plus manual transactions today; we are working on collapsing that into a single abstracted step. This release unblocks us from finalizing the already worked-on new integrations to IBC, Besu, L2s, and later on Solana.
Concerning confidentiality, the team is testing different implementations, including the use of open-source zero-knowledge contracts such as Zeto to showcase confidential institutional payments on Cosmos EVM; we’re looking for the best balance between confidentiality and auditability for ledger participants/users. On the security side, the bug bounty program will be relaunched on ImmuneFi this month.
Enterprise: tokenization products
Who they are.
Internally, the Incubations team. Mag Mareneck (Co-CEO) and Eran Barak (CCO) lead the work. Ian Kane was hired as Head of Partnerships. Barry Plunkett (Co-CEO) sits transversally across the pillars and coordinates between them.
Recent Progress and Current Priorities:
CTS.
The Cosmos Tokenization Suite demo is in development. CTS provides tokenized deposit capabilities for banks. It is deeply integrated into existing core banking systems. The team is working on integrations to banking core software and designing different configurations for different use cases.
Payments and settlement.
The playbook for payments and settlement networks powered with the Cosmos Stack is in development. A dedicated EVM ledger, their own stablecoin or tokenized assets, atomic PvP and DvP settlement so there’s no principal risk, among other functionalities. Interoperable with public chains and with private frameworks like Canton and Besu.
First enterprise modules.
Proof-of-authority and a group module shipped as v1.0.0 under a source-available evaluation license. These are aimed at institutions that need permissioned validator sets and on-chain approval workflows. Proof of Authority allows for the easy setup of permissioned validator set chains, while the groups module enables on-chain multisig and collective decision-making for any set of accounts, a fairly flexible feature that’s in demand with enterprise use-cases.
Partnerships.
One integration and delivery partner came online publicly this quarter, Peersyst. The complete partnership program and initial joiners will be announced shortly.
Events and conferences.
When it comes to getting the product to market, this team spends less time at crypto conferences. Tokenized deposits are the topic of rooms where payments and banking people already are, so that’s where the team has been this quarter: Nacha’s Smarter Faster Payments in San Diego, Consensus Miami, Digital Asset Week in New York, the Point Zero Forum in Zurich, TokenizeThis in New York, Stablecoins Unblocked in London, among some smaller summits.
CBWeb3: central bank money, cross-border, on IBC
One final piece of news stands out across all pillars, and was achieved with the effort of all:
In July we signed an MOU with LNET and Peersyst to join the CBWeb3 Project, an initiative funded by the Inter-American Development Bank that brings central banks and financial institutions across Latin America and the Caribbean together around one question: how can digital central bank money operate across borders while preserving monetary sovereignty?
These tests and the playbook to come will answer it directly. Each participating central bank issues and operates its own digital currency, keeps issuance control, its own monetary policy, and legal tender status, and IBC is the interoperability layer connecting those networks, point-to-point connections that each party runs on its own infrastructure. The program focuses on wholesale cross-border settlement between participating networks, with payments, settlement systems, and asset tokenization as the broader use cases it evaluates. Peersyst leads the IBC integration in the pilot environment.
I want to underline why this matters for everyone reading. IBC, the interop protocol our Open Source pillar maintains as a public good, is the same one being evaluated as a blueprint for regional monetary infrastructure for dozens of central banks! CBWeb3 is an active program, and there’s more to share as it progresses, but we are greatly excited for this work. It will put IBC in the center of the next financial infrastructure design of Latin America. Moreover, it proves why, at scale, sovereign and non-opinionated interoperability matters: each country wants to make their own technical choices, and IBC is the only interoperability solution that allows that.
PART THREE — WRAPPING UP, THE COMMUNITY CALL, AND HOW TO PLUG IN
The July community call
Everything in Part One got a fuller airing on this month’s community call, along with a lot of questions that are not in this post: the trade-offs between a multi-VM Hub and a Hub-secured sidechain, Gauntlet’s methodology for the research, questions around when a DEX makes sense, among many other topics!
This Quarterly is the summary. If a section here raises a question, the answer is probably in the call or the recap. Here are the commitments we made on that call:
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Launching this Quarterly series.
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Covering questions aimed at the ICF in a community call where they join us.
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Building a Cosmos Hub ecosystem page.
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Building a public tokenomics dashboard.
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Launching a community sandbox/testnet.
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Sharing a real intake path for builders and domain experts.
Thank you to everyone who sent questions. Special mention to @Guinch_Roze and @agent.kwosh for coordinating the lists, and to @Quentin and @Anzus_GemWallet for some excellent ones. The handful of questions still pending will get written answers on the forum.
How to plug in and support:
Last but not least, for those looking to help from the community, here’s how you can:
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Argue with the roadmap. The EVM and sidechain discussions on the validator calls have been genuinely useful, and community design suggestions have already changed how we think about optionality on the Hub.
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Builders: submit your news for the Thursday Hub Weekly. Contact @RoboMcGobo. This path is badly underused.
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Need an intro or a connection to custodians, auditors, service providers? Reach out to us.
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Running a validator as a builder? The ecosystem growth delegation program is open.
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Have real professional expertise- finance, supply chain, tokenization- and want to help? Reach out. We take those calls where there’s a genuine fit.
That’s all for today, folks! Thanks for sticking around. Follow the weekly for recurrent updates, and reach out to us anytime. Remember, in the next Cosmos Quarterly, you will only get the Quarterly update, and no more history essays 
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