From Chaos to Stability to Growth: the Plan to Build the Cosmos Hub Roadmap in Public

[RoboMcGobo]

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:

• Advancing an enterprise roadmap, and;

• 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:

• Growth of liquidity on the Hub

• Aggressive expansion of IBC Eureka

• Stabilizing and improving critical ecosystem infrastructure like Skip:Go

• 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.

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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:

• 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

• 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

• 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:

• Which specific use cases will help the hub capture the benefits of all of that orderflow?

• How does liquidity play a role in this broader landscape?

• Which of these use-cases benefit the most from a neutral venue like the Hub, and which don’t?

• 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.

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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:

• 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.

• Grow the size of the team that is dedicated solely to the Cosmos Hub so we can move faster

• Rekindle builder and validator communities to make it easier for the community to contribute and have multiple shots on goal

• Deeply investigating ATOM’s tokenomics, so that we can understand buy and sell pressures, and modify the economic model to a more sustainable one

• 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:

• 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.

• Finding solutions to keep other ecosystem primitives (wallets, explorers, liquidity) sustainable and benefit the Hub/Atom

• 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:

• 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

• 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

• We lock in on a VM framework to host the Hub’s primitives

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

• USDC News: Expect an update on USDC next week, with some exciting implications for ATOM

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

[trevormil]

“Lifting up builders in the community and giving them a platform to succeed”

@RoboMcGobo Could you share more plans / ideas on this?

This is, in my opinion, the #1 area that needs to be fixed in Cosmos. Communication alone won’t solve much. If community is a direction that Cosmos Labs wants to pursue in addition to enterprise, we need builders building new products in Cosmos.

Where are builders supposed to build? And how? And why do they choose Cosmos over other frameworks? And who are their customers - retail or enterprise? There is zero direction on this at the moment. Doesn’t need financial support, but for builders who have ideas, where do they go?

• App chains haven’t found PMF. Any builder today launching an app chain is fighting headwinds, and they are largely seen as a failed experiment for anyone new to Cosmos. For app chains without a token, builders have to license PoA. This prices out 90% of builders who just want to build cool weekend projects.
• Enterprise chains are walled garden - both customer and chain development wise.
• Hub has CosmWASM, but that is largely deprecated, clunky, and not compatible with modern stacks.
• There is no path for SDK module development for builders. I think this has the most untapped potential, but there is no clear playbook to success - monetization and customer wise.

[RoboMcGobo]

Great question.

From my perspective at least as the Hub lead, I’d like to push additional development to the Cosmos Hub and chains that have strong synergy with it over IBC (to answer your question on where to build). In the short term, there are a few things we can do here:

• Builder-specific events focused on Hub application development. The hackathon we are sponsoring by Mad Scientists will be one of these events, but ideally we do something like this on a regular cadence
• Public, sandbox-style devnets. We want to start testing some possible futures for the Cosmos Hub or potential sidechain mentioned above. We think the best way to do this is to launch sandbox forks of the Hub with various features added (EVM, privacy, POA, etc) and seeing what people choose to build on that architecture. This also helps us figure out some of the outstanding questions mentioned above
• Giving builders a platform with the Hub account and our other audiences to showcase their projects and help them attract users

Longer term, we’ll have EVM pathways for developers. It’s one of the key items we’re going to be discussing in some of our community and validator calls. There are a lot of open questions about how best to deploy this to benefit the hub, and builders will be a big help in surfacing some of the tradeoffs of the various approaches there. But it’s now extremely likely that we’ll see some version of the EVM in the Hub’s direct orbit (whether via direct deploy or sidechain is one of the questions that needs to be answered).

I also need to say that this is meant to be a two-way street. It’s not just me saying “here’s what we’re gonna do.” That’s the old way of communicating . If there are suggestions you have on what kind of support would be most helpful to you as a builder, happy to discuss!

[trevormil]

Appreciated! @RoboMcGobo

Couple follow-up questions / ideas (thinking out loud, sorry for the length):

1. One of my biggest concerns with going EVM-first is that Cosmos loses its moat. Cosmos-exclusive features (IBC, x/bank, modules, even CosmWASM) are what differentiate us from other ecosystems. Yes, agreed EVM is needed for feature parity, but I just want to voice that I think if Cosmos Labs wants to prioritize community building. I think it in our best interest to at least try and direct to Cosmos-exclusive building (modules, core SDK improvements, IBC, etc) however that may look.

2. Really like the subnet / devnet ideas. Are there pathways to standalone builders like myself or existing app chains to launch these devnets with eventual plans to merge into the Hub if they do well? We’ve seen plenty of great app chains over the years in Cosmos just fail due to unsustainability. I feel like this could become a great pipeline for The Hub / Cosmos and even a fully built out incentivized program (at zero cost to Cosmos labs). Launch an app chain via the program (zero cost, full enterprise module licensed suite for free, PoA, no token, but split revenue 50/50 with ATOM). If it does well, it becomes a candidate for main Hub merge. Just thinking out loud with requirements, but something like this could be a really cool way to encourage experimentation in Cosmos along different niches while limiting downside for builders and ATOM accrual. Or even a new pipeline for enterprise licensed modules. It is a win-win for both sides and has ATOM accrual built in.

3. If the bullet above isn’t fully possible, is it possible to maybe have like a free tier for enterprise licensing. I think Uniswap had this back in the day that is open-license for anyone under 10k users or something. I think this could be a cool way to just let builders launch PoA chains with zero-risk attached. If it does well and exceeds user threshold, they’d have the PMF to pay for licensing.

As for roadmap ideas and rebuilding the community, I think there are a few trends that Cosmos really needs to lean in on:

1. AI and Agentic Usage - Yes, Cosmos is lacking users now, but we are at the beginning of the biggest trend of onboarding users of blockchains (agents). I think this needs to be a priority in any roadmap consideration. And the best part about it is that I think that Cosmos is already the best stack for agents - CLI, customizable on chain-level, modular, no smart contracts. We just need to lean in on this. Ship x402 in every CLI for ATOM. Ship custom agent-to-agent protocols in the CLI. What better way to get builders than lean into AI?
2. Safety and Security - I think that Cosmos is in such a prime position to capitalize due to its agility. We are seeing these $200m hacks left and right, but Ethereum will never do anything about it on the chain level. Why is Cosmos not investing a ton into chain-level vaults, rate limits, circuit breakers customizable per chain? The marketing and sentiment around Cosmos writes itself “Cosmos is the safest and most secure stack”. Cosmos is nimble like this with the SDK. Solana / Ethereum are not going to make these changes any time soon (even though they are completely necessary).

Just my opinions. Happy to discuss!

I have plenty of other ideas too that I need to put into writing, but they are all scattered at the moment.

[EDIT] - Reworded a little differently for bullets 1-3, from personal experience, the coolest stuff to build in Cosmos is modules or SDK features. It is not EVM contracts or CosmWASM contracts. If I wanted to deploy a contract, I think 9 out of 10 builders today would choose a traditional EVM stack (hopefully will change). Liquidity and users are the main drivers. The main issue today for builders in Cosmos is that is all lost. I can’t build modules or SDK-level stuff for The Hub. I can’t build modules for my own app chain (not sustainable anymore and largely ignored). I can’t build modules for enterprise chains.

[TRAVE]

@RoboMcGobo / @trevormil I intended to be the first to reply to this, but seeing the high-level discussion that has already unfolded between you two just proves how hungry this community is for real direction and leadership.

Regarding your main post, @RoboMcGobo: This is exactly the kind of honesty, accountability, and clarity the Hub has been begging for. Admitting we are in a “Chaos” phase due to a vacuum in communication is the first step to fixing it. As a large-scale investor, seeing a shift from vague promises to a structured three-phase plan (Chaos → Stability → Growth) with hard deadlines is highly reassuring. I am incredibly eager to see the Gauntlet tokenomics update and the USDC news next week. Those are the tangible catalysts that will get this network moving again.

Secondly, touching on the builder discussion: @trevormil hit the nail on the head. From an investment and tokenomics standpoint, his idea of a 50/50 revenue split with ATOM for successful devnets/subnets graduating to the main Hub is brilliant. That is exactly the kind of built-in value accrual and economic sink we need to stop ATOM from bleeding in this sideways market.

Another crucial point here is that our developers shouldn’t have to go through an absolute ordeal to develop their ideas, stuck waiting for community validation without knowing their project’s true potential. Having a dedicated place (like a devnet) to program, verify the value of their code, and bring pre-validated projects to the table would save the community a massive amount of bureaucracy. I am not saying we should skip governance votes—absolutely not. But imagine a developer coming to the community saying: “I have tested this system, it yields X, our projected profit is Y based on the testnet, and here are the verified data metrics.” That approach would instantly weed out opaque, shady proposals and elevate the truly great developers and projects.

And this brings me to expand on the architectural debate. I’ll admit this slightly exceeds my technical knowledge, but I want to give my most sincere opinion because the point @trevormil raised about EVM worries me, which I will explain now. I often feel we lose the macro-business perspective in the middle of these technical discussions. I completely agree that we shouldn’t lose our unique competitive moat (unmatched security, IBC, modularity) or change our core policy just to chase EVM parity to make it “easy” for developers.

Building on Cosmos might seem harder from the outside, but we can fix that simply by shifting our approach. Think of the Cosmos SDK as the “WordPress” of Web3. Instead of programming an entire website from scratch in Python, you use pre-designed packages and plugins. We already have the modules; we just need to package them better so that any developer can apply these “templates” to quickly and easily build their sovereign tokens or “cities.”

But here is the absolute pure gold that we are failing to aggressively market: Absolute Independence and Isolation.

If we adopt a shared EVM model and one project gets congested or suffers an exploit, the entire building suffers. With our sovereign architecture, we don’t depend on anyone to keep running. If a token project built with our SDK gets hacked, that exploit does not splash onto the Hub. If one of our “client” chains crashes due to bad management, it does not affect us at all. We are entirely independent of the chaos around us and will continue operating flawlessly regardless of what happens to our clients.

That isolation is priceless for institutional adoption. We offer them the easy WordPress-style templates, we rent them our top-tier validators for security (Interchain Security), and in return, we take a cut of their revenue as Trevor suggested. That is a bulletproof business model. Let’s stop trying to be Ethereum and start fiercely selling the unmatched advantages we already have.

You have my full support on this new roadmap. Now, let’s execute and bring real value back to the ATOM token.

[trevormil]

@TRAVE Thanks for this. Agreed on almost all points.

I just wanted to clear up. I think pursuing some sort of EVM entrypoint is necessary. However, The Hub needs to be realistic, and I do not want to see it fall into the trap that we have seen over and over again in Cosmos. This is the bare minimum. XYZ (such as EVM) on Cosmos sounds cool to us, but we need to make XYZ appeal to builders and Cosmos as their deployment destination. “on Cosmos” is not convincing enough. There are 1000s of EVM chains out there. Most builders don’t have the same sentiment around Cosmos as we do.

I foresee (could be wrong) that The Hub will have a hard time trying to appeal to EVM developers:

1. EVM is ultra-competitive now and the minimum bar is a ton of funding. Builders will choose chains that literally pay upwards of $150k in grants just for them to choose their chain. That is what we are competing with.
2. With trying to onboard EVM users to the main Hub (or even a EVM Hub sidechain), you lose all the value-add about Cosmos for builders. Cosmos was built for launching your own chain (SDK, IBC, modules). If I am just deploying a Solidity contract to The Hub via EVM and not launching my chain, I don’t get any of the benefits of the SDK or modules for my application.

So my question is: what else? What will the Hub provide to EVM developers that make it a clear destination when I am choosing my stack / ecosystem? Yes, growth is not linear. New apps, new users, new liquidity all make it more appealing over time, but I think it needs a clear playbook.

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My advice to @RoboMcGobo and others when planning out The Hub roadmap playbook is to keep two things in mind:

1. Appeal to builders first and foremost. Without products, there is no community.

2. Realize the difference for Cosmos builders between launching on a chain (the Hub or a sidechain) vs launching their own chain. Cosmos’ entire existence is built on the latter and is much more appealing to builders from a stack and technology perspective.

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My personal opinion: I think the devnet / appchain pipeline approach with PoA is the right approach. Imagine I wanted to launch my own EVM dApp in Cosmos. It is hugely appealing to me as a builder if I have control of the chain itself. I get access to all SDK modules. I can launch it PoA for free. I can still leverage anything EVM I want. This is not found in any other ecosystem, and it is a real selling point for builders. We’ve been doing app chains for years. It just has a few missing pieces.

The missing pieces:

1. PoA licensing free tier under a certain amount of users (or some way for builders to get started with PoA without licensing at first)

2. streamlining SDK development and the support around launching these PoA app chains seamlessly (less boilerplate, better tooling, developer experience)

3. a pipeline program in tandem with The Hub - these app chains get discoverability, marketing support, and paths to success in exchange for revenue splits, other ATOM accrual methods, and potentially even financial support (covering audit costs, etc)

4. more modules / more toys for builders to play with. The SDK is our product, not EVM alone. Investing into more modules, more ideas, more frameworks for the core SDK makes building on Cosmos a better destination for builders.

[AtlasStaking]

IBC everywhere, yes please. I never hold bridged derivatives. Learned that lesson the hard way.

Allowing the issuers to compete for on/offramp orderflow to be filled through their own stablecoin sounds super interesting.

Love hearing the coming improved communication with the community and validators. I look forward to the validator calls for sure. Love hearing that CL is growing the team. We are always happy to help and volunteer our time.

Regarding tokenomics, money goes where it’s treated best and if junk bonds pay 13% yield and they can be bought at a discount, that’s our competition. I’m much happier holding a distressed asset that pays 15% staking APR than I am holding one that pays sub 5%. I think across crypto the thought that slashing inflation will stop price bleeding is misguided. Inflation serves a purpose short term.

This post was great to see. I’m excited.

[serejandmyself]

Appreciate you writing this. The honesty about the communication vacuum is more valuable than it might seem. That vacuum has cost this ecosystem real contributors who interpreted the silence as abandonment and left. Worth naming that directly.

A few thoughts from someone who’s been here since 2019…

On rekindling validator communities: the framing matters a lot here. “Rekindle” implies people drifted away. Some did. But a meaningful number of independent operators are still here, running real infrastructure, and simply aren’t visible because they never built a marketing operation. The question isn’t just how to bring people back, it’s whether the criteria for recognising contribution will evolve beyond uptime and governance participation (both play major importance btw) toward the things that actually differentiate independent operators: sovereign hardware, public infrastructure, geographic distribution (most long term committed builders in my experience come from independent teams, not VC contributions).

On the stability phase: “finding solutions to keep explorers sustainable” is directly relevant to something we’ve been building. ValidatorInfo runs on our own archive nodes and indexer, has skip:go integrated, and is live for Cosmos Hub. If Cosmos Labs is thinking about what explorer sustainability looks like in practice, happy to share what we’ve learned about what that requires.

Will try my best to join the validator call this week

[Guinch_Roze]

Guinch’s Wishlist for the Cosmos Hub

Guinch’s Wishlist for the Cosmos Hub Transforming the Cosmos Hub into the Economic Center of Cosmos TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction TLDR Existing Products Native Liquid Staking Infrastructure + LST Factory A Native DEX A Perp DEX A Lending / Borrowing Market A Native Hub Stablecoin Privacy & Financial Confidentiality Tokenomics Performance Improvements and Gaia Decentralization Strategic Alignment, Branding & Communication Strengthening Teams Dedicated to th…

Some points to care about in this topic.

[TeragoneFactory]

Really appreciate the decision to build the roadmap more publicly and iteratively.

As interchain ecosystems continue to expand in scale and complexity, operational clarity and long-term infrastructure coordination will probably become just as important as feature velocity itself.

It also feels increasingly important to think several years ahead regarding:

• cross-chain verification models,

• synchronization costs,

• relayer and validator operational complexity,

• and the growing number of autonomous services and machine interactions that modular ecosystems may eventually need to support.

Looking forward to seeing how the Hub evolves around these long-term infrastructure challenges.

[atomregistry]

How does one join the TG group? I’m @atomicdawg on Telegram. Thanks!

[TRAVE]

Subject: The “Yield + Scarcity” Flywheel: A Unified Business Model for the Hub

@AtlasStaking hit the nail on the head regarding yield. Capital seeks returns, and lowering inflation from 15% to 4% (following the Gauntlet-related discussions) risks turning ATOM into “just another coin” without a competitive edge. We need to keep investors incentivized to stay and lock their capital.

However, the solution isn’t cutting rewards; it’s aggressive, utility-driven burning.

Think about the economics: if we maintain a 15% yield to attract and retain investors like myself, but our utility engines burn the equivalent of 30% of the supply (as an aggressive target), we create massive, real scarcity. A rising price floor combined with a highly attractive 15% yield is the ultimate magnet for massive new capital and long-term staking. We shouldn’t fear inflation if we build a “Black Hole” for supply.

In fact, we can take this a step further: If the burn rate is exceptionally high during certain periods, we could temporarily increase the yield percentage even more. This would act as a strategic marketing event to capture a massive new wave of investors. Even if some of them are just temporary yield-farmers, a good portion will inevitably stay once they experience the ecosystem and the consistent returns.

To achieve this, I want to build upon the brilliant ideas shared in this forum:

1. The Identity & Service Engine (@Guinch_Roze): The Atom Registry is a fundamental pillar. Turning identity and asset registration into a sovereign service with recurring fees that directly burn ATOM is the definition of “Value Capture.”

2. The USDC Liquidity Station (@Guinch_Roze & @trevormil): Guinch’s vision of a native stablecoin protocol, refined by trevormil’s concept of a USDC Liquidity Station, is the missing link. By being the primary router for stablecoins and capturing tolls in USDC, we stabilize the treasury and fund the buy-back-and-burn machine.

3. The “WordPress” Pipeline (@trevormil): Making it easy to launch apps via PoA pipelines, but ensuring they share revenue back to the Hub, turns us into a “Venture Studio” rather than just a research project.

4. The Fiat Funnel (@Patrick): We must prioritize the wallet-less, fiat-to-crypto gateway. Frictionless onboarding is what brings fresh world-capital into our “Highways.”

Let’s stop focusing on cutting rewards to “save” the token. Let’s focus on monetizing the infrastructure. If we build the revenue engines to burn more than we print, that 15% APR becomes our greatest asset, not a liability.

Note: My apologies if I have misattributed any specific idea to the wrong person while linking them; I am pulling from memory across several deep threads, and I hope the core message of unity remains clear.

[TRAVE]

Subject: Adding a Massive Revenue Pillar: Enterprise Compliance & RWAs

Following up on the revenue models and the “Value Capture Machine” we are discussing here, I want to inject a critical point that @serejandmyself just highlighted over in the Tokenfactory/CosmWasm technical thread.

If we are building a true ‘Revenue Roadmap’, our biggest untapped market isn’t just retail crypto users; it is TradFi and RWAs (Real World Assets).

Through the latest technical upgrades, the Hub now possesses the exact primitives required by corporate compliance and OFAC regulations (such as force-transfers, account freezes, and controlled admin burns). These aren’t just minor technical features—they are the absolute legal prerequisites for any bank or institution to issue assets on a blockchain.

As we build out our “Highways” and “USDC Liquidity Station”, we need to explicitly market the Hub as the sovereign, regulatory-compliant settlement layer for institutional capital.

We have the technology to host regulated real-world money. If we attract institutional volume, the fee generation (and subsequent ATOM burning) will dwarf anything we’ve seen from retail. This “Enterprise Readiness” must be a core pillar of our growth strategy moving forward.

[Gumby1]

More communication is definitely a good thing for everyone. In my opinion the only thing that is required is to reduce the dynamic inflation of ATOM to an acceptable level. I personally think it is fine now but a more reasonable 2 - 7 percent would be more acceptable as a currency and with the on chain revenue also going to stakers the yeild would still be decent. Other than that we keep the original purpose of ATOM as is as the governance coin of the Cosmos Hub. The Hub continues as it does with facilitating the ecosystem. I hold OSMO and ATOM and I voted against the merger because I do not think it is needed. What we need it new incentive programs from the Hub community fund and time. I suggest we have some kind of incentive kickback to chains that integrate ATOM into their platforms that allow direct access windows to ATOM staking and or allow fees to be paid in ATOM. Let the new chains come with the next bull run and include voluntarily participation with ATOM and help drive revenue. We could liquid stake 10% or so more of the community pool with the various LST providers to create a steady stream of ATOM for incentive programs.

[TRAVE]

@Gumby1 "I appreciate the open communication and I completely agree that building a more sustainable and ‘sufficiently dignified’ ecosystem is a net positive for everyone. I fully share that vision of mutual trust.

However, in financial markets, capital providers need balance. Proposing a drastic inflation reduction to 2-7% requires a structural counterweight to reduce the associated risk. If we truly believe that this new economic alignment framework is solid, beneficial, and will create a healthier Hub, then investors will happily commit to staking because of the network’s intrinsic value, not because they are forced to.

Therefore, let’s establish a fair and sincere quid pro quo based on that very trust. If governance wants to seriously implement this inflation reduction and revenue-sharing model, it should be strictly paired with the complete removal of the 21-day unbonding period (reducing it to less than 11 hours to match industry liquid standards).

If we are confident that this reduction is the right path to strengthen the network, there is no need to maintain artificial barriers or lock up capital by force for three weeks. Let capital be free. By removing the unbonding period, you show true confidence in the ecosystem’s strength: if the conditions and the new yields are genuinely good, investors will choose to stay and support the Hub voluntarily. That is a fair trade-off that benefits both the network’s sustainability and the investors’ trust."

[Gumby1]

It is safe to say that anyone still holding ATOM is a genuine Cosmos ecosystem enthusiast. Therefore they should be informed about the current market sentiment about ATOM tokenomics and ATOM’s lack of value capture from the ecosystem. It is clear that inflation is considered to high. It creates a need to stake as to not lose value due to inflation. Therefore no one wants to hold and trade liquid ATOM. During the 10-10 low liquidity event the price action on Osmosis was fine no low liquidity spikes. The spike on Binance was do to thin order books and market manipulation. A lower inflation rate reduces the need to stake and allows for more traders and fuller order books. Reducing liquidity problems. The real issue isn’t lack of liquidity. It is negative sentiment towards the current high inflation. We do not need extensive tokenomic research to tell us this. What we need is a proposal to pass with a date for the change to take place in the near future to allow everyone to come to terms with the change. I also don’t see how 11 hours is an industry standard to for an unlocking period. What PoS chains have 11 hour unstaking windows? The 14 - 21 day lockup period is standard and is the price you pay to participate in onchain governance proposals. Each individual investor must make their own decisions what percentage of their ATOM they want to stake or keep liquid. Why do these institutional investors need their PoS assets to be so liquid. They should be buying and holding for the most part and if they decide to sell they can wait like everyone else. I am sure the unlocking period is there for a reason as part of the function of a PoS network.

[TRAVE]

"I respect the passion for the ecosystem, but global markets are not driven by enthusiasm; they are driven by risk-adjusted returns and capital efficiency. Assuming that institutional investors or large capital providers will simply ‘buy, hold, and wait like everyone else’ out of ideology is a fundamental misunderstanding of how liquidity and risk management work.

Let’s address the core misconceptions here:

1. The 21-Day Standard is Outdated: You ask what PoS chains have fast unstaking windows. Look at the largest networks in the world: Ethereum, Solana, and even TON (which offers up to a 20% APR). Post-Shapella, Ethereum’s exit queue is frequently processed in a matter of hours or a few days, depending on network load. Solana takes roughly 2-3 days (one epoch). A guaranteed 21-day lockup is a relic of 2019 architecture. Capital flows to where it is treated best, not where it is held hostage the longest.

2. The Risk Premium: The 21-day unbonding period is an immense financial risk. It means being completely paralyzed while the market could crash 50%. The current high APR (inflation) is precisely the ‘risk premium’ investors are paid to accept that 21-day blind spot.

3. The Quid Pro Quo: If the proposal is to slash that inflation (the reward), then the 21-day lockup (the risk) must logically be slashed as well. You cannot reduce the compensation while demanding the exact same level of risk and illiquidity.

If we want ‘fuller order books’ and real liquidity, we need to invite market makers and institutional capital. We don’t do that by forcing them to lock their assets for three weeks for a mere 5% yield. Less inflation requires maximum liquidity.

Furthermore, Gauntlet’s latest research explicitly confirms this: this is not a utopia, but a market reality backed by verified studies. Their recent update even outlines a native institutional DEX where the 21-day lockup effectively becomes obsolete. That is how you truly attract and retain investors—with concrete financial infrastructure, not with meaningless proposals driven purely by ‘enthusiasm’.

Regardless, all of this will ultimately be settled through on-chain governance, a topic I will step away from for now as to not reiterate the same points in circles. Thank you for your input."

[Tristian_Tapfield]

I would like to know more about what retail can do to help? I use the ecosystem strictly, auto compounding, trading on osmosis and dydx, voting on governance, Keplr walIet etc. but I definitely want to contribute more to the causes.

I am a firm believer in Cosmos Hub as a whole and its potential to change the game, it is exciting to see discussions like these as I only ever get/see negativity a majority of the time. This is probably way off topic

Apologies and Thanks in advance