Cosmos’ biggest problem is the lack of a strong application chain to drive ecosystem growth. The solution is for the Cosmos team to develop an official application chain to boost the ecosystem, rather than merely serving as cross-chain infrastructure.
Without a powerful application chain as the core, the development of other chains will also be lackluster.
The best solution is for Cosmos to build an official application chain as the central hub.
The Cosmos team can continuously develop this application chain and host hackathons to solve the problem of Cosmos having no central focus.
I think @sdgggs is touching on a vital nerve here. The need for a central utility to anchor the ecosystem. Yes, and… while we explore the long-term vision of an official application chain, we should also be looking at the Hub as a space to plant different kinds of seeds that might sprout as well.
The ‘Dilemma’ often feels like a choice between being a relay or being an app-chain, but there is an alternate focus worth exploring: the Hub as a host for High-Traffic Anchor Tokens.
Instead of waiting for a new chain to gain traction, we could leverage the Hub’s existing ‘military-grade’ security to host native projects with authentic, high-density demand (potentially 10M+ monthly transactions).
Exploring both paths in parallel, the official app-chain and the Hub-native anchor, allows us to see which ‘seed’ sprouts first. A high-density anchor project would provide:
Immediate ‘Validator UBI’: Generating non-inflationary fee revenue to keep our 180 validators profitable during the 2026 tokenomics transition.
Real Yield for ATOM: Turning the Hub into a destination that captures value directly, solving the ‘Free Bridge Syndrome’ without the overhead of a new chain.
Proof of Concept: A successful anchor project on the Hub would prove the demand for a ‘central focus,’ making any future official app-chain even more likely to succeed.
tell me about it. devs need endpoints to develop. at this stage, for example, you can barely find any for parts of the history. we are one of the few, if not only, entity running them
Would be a good start to stick with basic fundamentals first.
As i’m disappointed in general lack of development coordination for the stack, i created my own Frontend to work with at cosmowarp.vercel.app
Use it or leave it, most plebs won’t understand its features anyway
It needs serious DAO’s on the Hub first…
So far everything is still a concept that needs to be evaluated
But taking down chain functions to a level where casual “non-dev” users can operate with, is a good start nevertheless…
Thinking beyond the current status quo is always the start of new economic models
You’re right that serious DAOs need to come first — and there’s a concept from the Moonkitt team (which I’m part of with @arlai-mk) called MkUltra that might be one way to get there. It’s still just an idea at this stage, not an active project.
MkUltra is a permissionless LST factory on the Cosmos Hub. Anyone can create their own ATOM LST by selecting a set of validators — any staker delegating to those validators can then mint the LST. The creator sets their own commission on staking rewards.
Now imagine a DAO using this: it spins up its own LST (let’s call it daoAtom), taking a commission on staking rewards to fund itself — no token launch, no fundraise needed. Governance power comes from staking daoAtom back into the DAO. Projects funded by the DAO don’t need to launch their own token either — they build on daoAtom instead.
Here’s the key mechanic: every time daoAtom gets adopted — used in DeFi, integrated by a project, held by a new user — more of it gets minted. And every newly minted daoAtom generates staking rewards, a share of which flows directly back to the DAO. The more useful daoAtom becomes, the larger the supply, and the larger the DAO’s revenue stream. Growth in utility translates directly and automatically into funding.
I had planned on announcing later on toward the end of the week but I’ll go ahead and get a general release together, hopefully for today though it could be on into tomorrow morning. The Atom Registry has created the infrastructure to help Cosmos Hub with that point of focus.
to expand on what i said about endpoints earlier -
everyone in this thread talks about DAOs, LSTs, anchor tokens. all good ideas. but who actually builds against broken infrastructure? devs need working archive nodes, RPC endpoints, snapshots, relayers. the boring stuff that every appchain depends on.
we run bare-metal for cosmos and 20+ networks from a self-hosted setup in the atlantic ocean. no AWS, no google cloud. solar-powered where possible. public endpoints, archives, snapshots, relaying - full list here: staking.citizenweb3.com
the real problem imo is that most infra sits behind cloud providers. thats a single point of failure for the whole ecosystem. if cosmos wants serious appchains - whether its high-traffic anchor tokens or permissionless LST factories - you need geographically distributed, independently operated infrastructure. not more stuff on the same 3 data centers.
hackathons help. dev coordination helps. but devs leave when they cant find a working archive endpoint at 2am. incentivizing independent infra operators would do more for growth than another SDK feature imo.
Tokenizing projects for infrastructure funding with a promise and a prayer has resulted in disaster so many times for investors it’s past time for self funded projects to get the spotlight. Atom Registry is self funded by me and I’m financing a revolution. If a project can’t self fund AND bring mad value to the table the real question becomes why bother supporting them, especially with almost every project falling well short on promises and deliverability? The infrastructure isn’t free and casual tokenization is doing more to harm the ecosystem than what all of these failing projects contribute.
No offense, the promise of value isn’t even remotely as useful as actual value.
nice concept…
The DAO Token itself carries the intrinsic value of the underlying core Asset within, which makes it a valuable Token out-of-the-box, but there are still some risks that need to be considered.
Let me show the core differences between those two concepts:
DAO Staking
Supply is distributed to Stakers over a comparatively long period of time- Time that accumulates Core Asset rewards in the treasury. The Distribution is independent from absolute staking numbers, its just the share among all stakers that is the key.
Users can unstake their core asset and are still holders of the governance Token
DAO LST
Every Mint increases the Supply, independet from a time schedule, Rewards are only accumulated as long as the LST “exists”. Distribution mirrors the absolute amount of staked core Asset Tokens. The system is prone to flash attacks: A single malicious entity could mint enough tokens to reach 51% voting power out of a sudden, rob the treasury and unstake immediately to get back its core asset
Users can burn their LST and get redeem their core asset, but also loose all governance power this way too
Both systems have their benefits i guess, actually it should be up to the DAO operators which to prefer.
Lets plan some DAO Launchpad to bootstrap daodao DAO’ s better…
Short update on this one:
My approach would be to let the DAO Staking contract mint and burn its DAO-LSD with the tokenfactory module, but requires the DAO Token too. So easily said, it melts for example 1 DAO Token and 1 ATOM together, locks it in the contract, but mints back the DAO-LSD. The rate should be adapted to the number of staked ATOMs within the contract, so early minters may get more DAO Tokens back if they redeem their LSD after more core asset Tokens have been locked. Everyone will be able to redeem his 1 ATOM per LSD, but the redeemed DAO Token varies along that curve.
Difficult to explain, i’ll reach out some graphics later some day.
For now it seems daodao is hibernation mode, no discord activity (besides the support ticket scam bots;) and i guess no one in the space cares about boring DAO’ s anyway, as the lack of staking makes them unattractive for fast extraction projects.
I’ll catch up on this thing in may/june again, for now colosseum hackathon takes all my spare-time left beside my 9/5… Hope everyone is keeping up fine and stays for the long run!
