Happy New Year everyone! We’re kicking off the new year with another Hub Unit Update. With a number of our outstanding projects expected to come to fruition this coming month (as well as the start of a few new secret projects), we’re excited to see what February brings to the ecosystem. In the meantime, let’s dive in.
Background and Context
The Hub Unit is composed of team members from Cosmos Labs (handling community and ecosystem growth initiatives related to the Hub) and Hypha Co-operative (handling technical operations for the Hub).
These monthly reports are intended to act as a primary source of information and updates on the Hub Unit’s progress to help increase transparency between the team and the community on timelines and broader ecosystem initiative progress. If you feel anything is missing from these reports, please let us know! The report for December can be found here.
ICF Delegation Program
The collection of all data related to the program is complete and is awaiting ICF signoff. Subject to further refinements, we expect over 70 validators to qualify for the new program, with each validator receiving over 150,000 ATOM in delegations. Stay tuned for more details in an upcoming blog post.
Expectations:
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The program is now expected to be implemented near the end of February. We understand that this represents a significant delay relative to what was promised in the previous update, and apologize for the uncertainty this is likely causing to validators. The program is designed such that it can be adjusted with minimal operation overhead each quarter. Unfortunately, that means that solidifying the process and getting the initial adjustment in place is taking a bit more time than anticipated. Once it is executed, the program will operate much more smoothly moving forward.
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More detail on the selected validation and the new process will be shared in an upcoming blog post.
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Small reminder for validators to join the Cosmos Hub Validator Channel on Telegram, DM @Totalspud for an invite.
Stargaze
The Stargaze marketplace and NFT collection remains on track and is still scheduled for February. In addition, the STARS token is expected to be migrated at a later date with the timeline of this happening around Q2 2026.
Both Stargaze and Cosmos Labs continue to meet bi-weekly to ensure a smooth transition migration. Latest meetings have centered around coordinating marketing and community efforts around the launch of the marketplace in February. Side note, if any NFT collections that plan to migrate to the Hub want to collaborate, please reach out to @RoboMcGobo on telegram.
Community members are also encouraged to keep an eye on Stargaze’s twitter account.
Cosmos Hub Technical Work (Hypha)
January was a packed month for the Hypha team, as they continued rolling out tokenfactory to testnet, coordinated a significant incident on the Cosmos Hub, and prepared to begin exploring what deprecation of ICS on the Hub might look like.
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Upgrades
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Incidents
- Gaia v25.3.1 incident response and upgrade (retrospective to follow)
Maintenance tasks completed
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Bug fixes to address a bug bounty submission for Wasm (ICA fix to follow)
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Release building, testing, and upgrade work for January releases (v25.3.0, v25.3.1, v25.3.2) linked above
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Tokenfactory week 7 (audit)
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Tokenfactory week 8 (devnet)
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https://github.com/cosmos/gaia/pull/3941/changes/936d2b3542e45d01063aa73bdf920a3e5577b04c
- Add param validation, remove legacy params (in response to internal audit)
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https://github.com/cosmos/gaia/pull/3941/changes/6738bd7871945cb33618476732bd7de12dfcbfbdF
- Fix unauthorized wasm operations (in response to internal audit)
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Tokenfactory week 9 (testnet)
Research and exploratory work
- ICS removal design
Tokenomics
Cosmos Labs has published an RFP for tokenomics research firms to support a data-driven redesign of ATOM’s economic model. The RFP has been closed, and 9 teams submitted proposals. The Hub Unit is currently reviewing all proposals, and plans to take the following next steps:
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Review of all proposals to be completed by mid Feb
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Vendor selection and kickoff no later than last week of February
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The estimated timeline for completion of research is now likely late April or early May
We do not yet have clarity on whether we can share the various proposal text publicly, but we plan to do so to the extent that we can secure permission from the vendors. It’s possible that we may release an aggregated table summarizing the proposals instead, with the names of all listed vendors.
Secret Project
The Hub Unit has also kicked off a new, exciting project meant to significantly improve the everyday utility of the Cosmos Hub. We hope to be able to share more about this project soon.