I’m going to start this post by stating the obvious. Cosmos Labs hasn’t communicated enough.
For months, the lack of communication around a clear Hub roadmap left a vacuum; a vacuum that, on many occasions, the community has attempted to fill on its own. The most recent example of this is the Osmosis acquisition proposal, which came far too close to passing despite the current state of the protocol and the high cost. It admittedly felt like a bit of a wake-up call when voters told us directly that they voted to nuke the community pool for this because “something felt better than nothing.”
That’s fair, and while I personally view this as a destructive way of thinking, the reason people are thinking this way in the first place is because of us. It’s on us to change that, and that’s what this post is about.
To give some context on how we’ve been operating over the last several months, Cosmos Labs has been running two parallel missions:
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Advancing an enterprise roadmap, and;
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Developing the Hub and ecosystem
For a while we treated these as overlapping goals, with Hub success effectively contingent on enterprise alignment. While we still believe this is the case, the truth is that any enterprise alignment with the Cosmos Hub is going to operate on enterprise sales timelines, which means it’s going to take a really long time.
That timeline has pushed us toward a more honest assessment of the Hub’s role in the ecosystem. Enterprise alignment is one of the paths the Hub will pursue. It is not the only one, and it is not a prerequisite. The Hub will have its own roadmap, pursued on its own timelines and in service of the broader Cosmos ecosystem along the way. Built well, Hub roadmap items compound into the enterprise opportunity rather than waiting on it. Some of these items include:
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Growth of liquidity on the Hub
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Aggressive expansion of IBC Eureka
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Stabilizing and improving critical ecosystem infrastructure like Skip:Go
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Lifting up builders in the community and giving them a platform to succeed
Starting now, we’re going to take a much more aggressive stance toward building out these additional concepts (and many others), but there are significant open questions surrounding all of them that make it hard to promise that we’ll implement them right now. Rather than exploring these privately and falling back into the same silence loops that got us here in the first place, we’ve decided to build toward these items in public, sharing the challenges we’re seeing with each of them and collecting feedback from the community on the best path forward.
This post is not a roadmap. It is an explanation of the opportunity we’re exploring, where we are today, and how we’re going to build the roadmap in public, as we answer key questions and test ideas with the community.
The Opportunity We’re Exploring
The last year has shown pretty definitively that crypto has entered its enterprise era. Banks and Fintechs have begun tokenizing deposits, payment flows, bonds, and other RWAs. Now they’re facing a similar problem that the early DeFi-focused blockchains faced back in 2018-2020. They want to move value between blockchains and lack a strong solution to do so.
The bridge landscape has changed significantly in recent months, with strong contenders like LayerZero, Wormhole, or Axelar seeing declining relevance or falling victim to exploits. Feedback we’ve seen from a number of financial services firms indicates that they can’t rely on these third-party bridge providers due to security dependencies, reliance on their development timelines, or requirements around using their brand. These are exactly the problems that IBC was built to solve.
By expanding IBC connectivity to the Cosmos Hub and hosting an ecosystem of critical primitives and tooling, the Hub can become an economic coordination layer for retail and enterprise flows alike across IBC. Fungibility of tokenized deposits with traditional stablecoins, forex exchange, and cash<>crypto on/offramping (use cases which are currently fragmented across multiple chains) can all find a path of least resistance via the Hub over IBC.
That is one of the opportunities we are most excited about. It is not the only one, and there are still a lot of questions around exactly how the Hub takes advantage of this opportunity.
What we like about this direction:
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IBC is the only interoperability protocol built around sovereignty and open standards. Somewhat ironically, the enterprises that operate from within a black box value the benefits of open source software the most
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Many enterprise and non-enterprise blockchain applications do not want to run their own infrastructure and want a plug-and-play solution for interoperability. We want to offer this to them via the Cosmos Hub
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Huge demand. Tokenized deposits are growing fast, with estimates suggesting annual orderflow of up to $100 trillion by 2030
What we still need to learn:
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Which specific use cases will help the hub capture the benefits of all of that orderflow?
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How does liquidity play a role in this broader landscape?
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Which of these use-cases benefit the most from a neutral venue like the Hub, and which don’t?
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What are the various ways available to make this framework benefit ATOM?
In reality, not all IBC use-cases involving the Hub are a fit for all types of financial institutions or businesses. Of the multiple use cases I described above, some will undoubtedly be targeted more at end-user applications like Solana and L2s, while some will be exciting new products for enterprises. We plan to pursue both, but discovering which use cases are most viable will require building out some of the core infrastructure and talking to customers to see what interop use cases they are most excited about.
One area I’m particularly excited to explore further involves using the Hub to coordinate onramp and offramp flows across IBC for various stablecoin issuers by allowing the issuers to compete for on/offramp orderflow to be filled through their own stablecoin (e.g., pyUSD, wfUSD, USDC, JPM USD, etc). There’s massive growth in the stablecoin sector and almost no solution to facilitate cross-chain on/offramping transactions. I’ll share more about this in some of the upcoming calls.
How We Get There
To answer these questions, we’ve been looking at the next steps from three different verticals.
Vertical 1 - Chaos: We’re here now, and frankly, it sucks to be here. I hate it here. Chains that failed to find PMF in the space are winding down. Liquidity is thinning, and even the future of USDC in the ecosystem is reliant on a team that has largely checked out. We need to get out of this phase as soon as possible.
At the same time, this means there’s an opportunity for the Hub to reinvent itself as the economic and cultural center of the ecosystem, to be the Hub that it was always meant to be. There are a few things we can and are doing right now to put the chaos behind us and realize that opportunity:
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Improving communications between Cosmos Labs and the community to help ensure the community plays an active role in developing the roadmap and answering key, outstanding questions on a liquidity layer for the Hub, EVM, USDC, and more.
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Grow the size of the team that is dedicated solely to the Cosmos Hub so we can move faster
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Rekindle builder and validator communities to make it easier for the community to contribute and have multiple shots on goal
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Deeply investigating ATOM’s tokenomics, so that we can understand buy and sell pressures, and modify the economic model to a more sustainable one
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Leveraging the ICF’s delegation program to help fund community and validator-driven builder initiatives, content, and events
Vertical 2 - Stability: Immediate next steps are focused on getting the ecosystem into a state of stability. We can’t focus on growth until some of the pressing issues that are making the ecosystem nervous get resolved. This means:
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Ensuring long-term support for critical infrastructure like USDC, IBC Eureka, and Skip:Go for years to come, and doing so in a way that unlike now also benefits the Hub and ATOM.
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Finding solutions to keep other ecosystem primitives (wallets, explorers, liquidity) sustainable and benefit the Hub/Atom
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Sharing progress on the tokenomics work with the community.
Vertical 3 - Growth: Several of these items are already in progress as part of the earlier phases, the growth phase is where they mature into scalable value-drivers for the Hub and ATOM where:
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We ship brand-new products on the Hub that will capitalize on existing activity and allow us to expand the market aligned with our roadmap
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We aggressively expand IBC Eureka to new public and private markets (Solana, L2s, etc) and make it as permissionless to deploy as IBCv1 so long as the connection occurs via the Hub
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We lock in on a VM framework to host the Hub’s primitives
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ATOM tokenomics are locked in to align with this growth phase
These things won’t happen sequentially. We’re actively working on growth initiatives now. For example, IBC to Solana and L2s is just weeks away. At the end of this phase we’ll have a concrete roadmap that the community can look to as a source of truth for where we envision the Hub going into the future.
How we’re communicating from here
Over the last week, we’ve gotten feedback from over 80 different voices from within the community, collected via feedback forms and structured calls with selected members of the community.
We received a ton of great feedback from people on how they want us to communicate and the types of topics they want us to discuss. Some of the most frequently mentioned items:
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45 people said the most important thing to them was to have a predictable communication cadence between them and Cosmos Labs.
- As a result, we’re setting a weekly communication rule with live calls occurring on a biweekly basis at minimum.
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30 people mentioned that they wanted to see more clarity on a Cosmos Hub roadmap, even if independent from the enterprise direction.
- To facilitate this, we’re going to build specific components of the roadmap in public on calls and through content, speaking honestly about the challenges we see with various approaches and how we might solve them.
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15 people were worried about DeFi continuity with Osmosis’s future uncertain.
- Heard. We have some ideas about how to bring liquidity to the Cosmos Hub at a sustainable cost. This is one of the first issues we’ll take up on the calls described above
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10 people asked for structured ways for builders to contribute, and don’t feel the path to contribute content is clear either.
- We’re going to allocate specific time slots on public calls to spotlight hub and ecosystem builders, chat with builders directly in the community-led ATOM builders telegram group, and hold a regular community office hours to share ideas.
What this looks like in practice
Here’s how we plan to keep folks updated over the coming months:
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Validator calls monthly on Wednesdays. One open topic per call, likely one call for EU/US and one for APAC (depending on interest). Notes go up on the forum within 24 hours. The first call is the week of May 11.
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Community office hours monthly on alternate Wednesdays. Same topic as the validator call, opened up to anyone for discussion in the forum. In conjunction with the validator call, this means public calls once every 2 weeks. This will occur via a twitter space on the Cosmos Hub twitter account.
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Mini-updates Every Thursday Highlighting Progress. Every Thursday we will recap all news around these phases. Gauntlet shares an update? A new Eureka connection is confirmed? These will be posted on the forum every Thursday, with a short recap on the Cosmos Hub twitter account.
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Monthly community spaces on Cosmos Hub twitter. This will be more informal and will likely be where we spotlight builders in Cosmos and their products, pull up hosts from the community, and just chat about what’s going on in the crypto space. Any time we see a good opportunity to have a space, we’ll organize one.
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Giving new life to the Cosmos Hub twitter account. We’ll host community content on the Cosmos Hub twitter, elevate builders via builder showcases, and amplify content from community creators.
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New Community Calendar: We’ve created a shared community calendar to allow the community to track all upcoming community events. Spaces, townhalls, hackathons, builder showcases, etc. If the community is involved, you can track it here. Subscribe to the calendar with this link to stay up to date. We will begin adding items to the calendar over the next week.
When do we start?
There are some initial next steps and updates that I can commit to here:
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USDC News: Expect an update on USDC next week, with some exciting implications for ATOM
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Tokenomics Updates: I will provide an update on the progress of the tokenomics workstream with Gauntlet in the forums next week! We’ve already gotten some great insights from them about how ATOM moves.
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Community Hackathon with Mad Scientists: Cosmos Labs is co-sponsoring a community-run hackathon by the Mad Scientists in the next 2-3 weeks. More details to come soon. Keep an eye on the Mad Scientists Twitter Account for news on this
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Ecosystem Growth Delegations: Applications for the program will open next week on the forums. The initial program will be an open RFP, with more targeted RFPs to follow as they come up.
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Initial validator and community calls: As part of the initial public calls for the coming month, our initial focus area will be on expanding access to USDC in the ecosystem and preserving USDC as a dominant stablecoin following Noble’s departure for Cosmos.
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First Validator Call: Week of May 11 (next week). The signup process will be announced in the validators telegram channel. Reach out to @Totalspud or @RoboMcGobo on telegram if you’re an active set validator on the Hub and have not been added to this channel yet
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First Community Call: Week of May 18. The timing of the twitter space will be announced on the Cosmos Hub twitter and shared on the community calendar.
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