This is the first of Hub Weekly Thursday recaps, straight from the Hub Unit team, per the cadence we committed to in the From Chaos to Stability to Growth post.
Every Thursday, we will call out significant Cosmos Hub updates on the forum, with a short companion thread on X, recapping announcements, live events like validator or community calls, and ecosystem updates!
For more info, see the linked posts, and contact @RoboMcGobo on telegram to submit news for the weekly.
This week: tokenomics, USDC, and the first validator call.
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A substantive first look at the tokenomics research workstream by Cosmos Labs and Gauntlet
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Follow-up detail on the Injective USDC arrangement (including how revenue accrues to ATOM and what it means for teams currently on Noble),
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And two threads from yesterdayâs validator call worth discussing in more detail in future calls.
Tokenomics Update: Early Findings from Gauntletâs Research
We kicked off ATOM tokenomics research alongside Gauntlet in early April with the goal of figuring out how ATOM moves, why, and when.
Before recommending any change to ATOMâs economic parameters, we need a reliable way to attribute every flow of ATOM to a specific kind of holder and a specific kind of behavior. By understanding ATOM flows, sell pressure origins, and emissions, we can answer questions like: is lowering inflation safe, and a good solution? How much pressure does it generate, or where does it come from?
Today we will go through how that attribution works and share the first empirical output of it. This is early data and includes preliminary findings. While we will produce a full report once phase 1 concludes, we decided to share data proactively as we explore it.
The Stakeholder Cohort Methodology Framework
The framework is built on a historical wallet-level dataset. For every ATOM-holding address, we record what it holds, what flowed in and out of it, what rewards it earned, and what category of holder it falls into. Five interlocking analyses then run on top of that shared dataset.
1. Cohort definitions: Types of Holders That Exist in Cosmos
ATOM holders are segmented into categories by explicit rules.
A âclaim-and-sellâ wallet, for example, is one that withdraws at least half of its accrued rewards and moves at least half of what it withdrew to a centralized exchange or DeFi venue (e.g., Osmosis) within seven days. An âauto-compounderâ is one that re-stakes nearly everything it earns. Validators, ICO participants, liquid staking providers, market makers, exchange deposit addresses, arbitrageurs, MEV bots, airdrop farmers, and more each carry their own rule set.
Every outbound transfer from a tagged wallet is then classified into one of ten exhaustive behavior labels (restake, claim-and-hold, claim-and-sell, bridge-to-DEX, sell-direct, and so on). In total, 16 stakeholder cohorts are tracked across 10 different possible activity types.
2. Sell-pressure attribution: How Does Value Move Out?
Once we know which wallets belong to which cohort, we can attribute observed daily sell flow back to specific cohorts: validators, exchange-deposit clusters, claim-and-sell stakers, and so on. Within each cohortâs contribution we further split between sell flow funded by recently received rewards (emission-driven liquidation) and sell flow drawn from pre-existing holdings (balance-sheet liquidation).
That split is the central empirical input to the inflation question, because it determines whether reducing inflation would actually reduce sell pressure, or whether it would mostly just reduce validator revenue.
3. Buyer-motivation inference: How Does Value Move In?
The same framework runs in reverse on inbound flows. For ATOM moving into a tagged wallet, the walletâs subsequent behavior over the following 30 days is used to classify the motivation of that purchase: accumulation, rotation into a yield position, airdrop-farming, arbitrage, market-maker rebalance, or custody migration. Two wallets buying the same amount of ATOM on the same day can have very different motivations. We want to better understand which are the primary motivations that drive purchase activity.
4. Post-purchase survival: How Long Is ATOM Held?
For each inbound flow we measure how long the received ATOM stays in the wallet before being sold or redeployed. The output is a survival curve per cohort: of the ATOM that came into a given cohort, what fraction is still there 30, 90, or 365 days later? Claim-and-sell wallets liquidate fast. Auto-compounders hold for years. Quantifying that gap is what lets us model how shifts in cohort composition would change the macro picture.
5. Event studies: What Causes Big Movements?
We also look at past micro/macroeconomic events to understand the impact on the stakeholder cohorts identified above: Prop 848, the Terra collapse, the ATOM 2.0 vote, 10/10, Replicated Security activation, the LSM upgrade, major airdrops, and so on. For each event we measure how each cohortâs flow deviated from its pre-event baseline, and for how long.
That produces an empirical record of what previous interventions actually did, rather than what we assumed they did. The same approach surfaces individual addresses whose movements consistently coincide with abnormal price action or governance votes.
What one day of ATOM emissions tells us
We also have our first data-driven update from the tokenomics workstream!
The first applied output of the framework traces a rolling average 24-hour window of staking rewards through the following seven days. The goal: put a ceiling on how much of daily inflation realistically reaches the market.
A few findings worth considering from this preliminary data:
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The protocol distributes roughly 197,000 ATOM per day in staking rewards (validator commission plus delegator rewards).
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Within seven days, only 58% of that is actually claimed. The remaining 42% sits unclaimed. This shows that a large portion of stakers do not claim weekly.
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Of the portion that is claimed: 32% is restaked, 4% sits idle, and 21% is moved out of the wallet (transfers, IBC, swaps).
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The âmovedâ share works out to roughly 21% of total daily emissions, or about 28,600 ATOM per day, which would be treated as the ceiling on daily sell-pressure from emissions.
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In context, that ceiling is less than 1% of ATOMâs average daily trading volume. At first glance, this would seem to indicate that emissions are not the dominant price driver of ATOM.
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The ceiling is also genuinely a ceiling. It counts IBC transfers to other Cosmos chains, liquid staking deposits, and on-chain payments as âmovedâ even when no sale occurred. A reasonable working estimate of actual sell pressure from emissions, once you strip out the non-sale activity, sits between 9,000 and 18,000 ATOM per day.
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Validator commission is heavily concentrated. Roughly 80% of all daily commission accrues to two exchange-operated validators (Upbit Staking and Coinbase). That makes those two flows an outsized input to any sell-pressure attached to validators, and a place where the commission economics differ from independent validators. Weâre keeping this in mind for when we get to the phase 2 design work.
Early takeways, to be confirmed with longer term data:
The âlive float from emissionsâ that hits the market within a week is materially smaller than what the high inflation rate for ATOM would otherwise suggest. Roughly four out of every five ATOM minted each day either sits unclaimed in the protocol or rolls back into bonded stake.
That does not erase the inflation question, but it does tell us that any meaningful intervention on ATOMâs economics has to engage with cohort behavior and commission concentration, not just the headline inflation rate.
Once again: This is just preliminary data.
We need to run the same analysis against longer windows of time (30/60/90 days) to validate the takeaways in this post. This preliminary update is just meant to show the general direction the research is heading.
More detailed numbers will follow as the remaining addresses get labeled (CEX deposit clusters, LST contracts, ICF wallets), which will let us split the âmovedâ bucket into genuine on-exchange sells versus cross-chain activity that is not selling. More updates to come soon!
Injective USDC: How Revenue Accrues to ATOM, and What It Means for Noble
Last weekâs joint announcement confirmed Injective USDC as the long-term canonical USDC for the Cosmos ecosystem, with Skip Go routing it as the primary USDC over time. Native USDC and Circle CCTP v2 went live on Injective on May 7, enabling one-signature transfers between Injective and Ethereum, Base, Solana, and other supported chains.
Two points worth surfacing more directly this week.
Revenue share and ATOM value accrual
The arrangement includes a revenue-share component we did not lead with last week. The Cosmos Hub will receive 50% of the issuance incentives Circle pays out on Injective USDC for all USDC transferred out to Cosmos chains via IBC (except to dYdX, which will be 33%). Those proceeds will be used to buy back ATOM to be sent to the Cosmos Hub community pool. The mechanism scales directly with Injective USDC supply growth. The commitment is for four years.
A note on why we routed through Injective rather than standing up canonical USDC directly on the Hub:
A native integration would have cost on the order of several million dollars per year in maintenance, which we would have had to fund from ATOM sales (either community pool or ICF). That would have meant operating a flagship integration at a structural loss. The Injective arrangement is profitable from day one, requires no ATOM sale, and routes the same buyback flywheel to the Hub that a native integration would have.
This is the first piece of recurring revenue committed to ATOM at scale. It is meaningful at current supply levels and grows mechanically alongside the ecosystem.
For teams currently on Noble USDC: no urgency to migrate, an ecosystem working group is forming shortly
Since the announcement, we have heard from a number of ecosystem teams asking whether Noble USDC is being wound down or whether they are expected to migrate immediately. To address that directly:
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There is no urgency. Noble USDC continues to function as it does today. No deadline is being imposed on teams currently using it.
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A technical migration path is being designed over the next few months. This work has not started yet. We expect to begin in June
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A USDC migration working group will form shortly for ecosystem teams, infrastructure providers, and applications that want to coordinate the move to Injective USDC. The working group will share migration tooling, timing, and updates as they come, so teams can plan accordingly.
If your team wants in, reply to this thread or reach out on Telegram (@RoboMcGobo), and we will add you to the initial coordination channel as soon as it is up.
Twitter Space Tomorrow
Weâll be hosting a twitter space on the Cosmos Hub twitter account alongside the Injective and Cybernetics teams. Set a reminder, and join the space to ask any questions.
https://x.com/cosmoshub/status/2054259031854789090?s=20
From Yesterdayâs Validator Call: DEX and Agentic Commerce as Future Topics
The first monthly Hub validator call ran yesterday. The full recap was posted this morning. You can read it here: Cosmos Hub Validator Call May 13, 2026: Recap .
Two discussions are worth flagging that we plan to act on and discuss more broadly with the community:
Liquidity venue: Prioritizing A DEX on the Hub.
We discussed prioritizing an orderbook-based DEX as the next foundational primitive on the Hub. The reasoning, briefly: a credible institutional-grade venue for USDC and ATOM trading is the closest single piece of infrastructure to the Hubâs enterprise alignment thesis, and it is the most direct way to compound the value the Injective USDC arrangement begins to surface.
An upcoming validator session will walk through the architectural choices and trade-offs, including a path to additional revenue for ATOM. If you have a strong view on what that venue should look like, the forum is the right place to weigh in early.
X402 and agentic commerce.
@Sachin (Vitwit) and @Antropocosmist (Posthuman) raised X402 and AI-agent payment standards on the call as a credible near-term direction for the Hub. Cosmos chains can support EVM-compatible AI and agent standards, and developer interest in the area has been growing.
Weâre interested in hearing more about potential use cases for agentic payments from the community and may seek to fund strong ideas via the delegation program.
If you have a proposal, reply to this thread or reach out directly, how you can help:
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Create a working group with builders to explore this on the Hub
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Propose an RFP in the delegation program that builds on this
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Support with information or research on how x402/agents could come to Cosmos
Thatâs all for this week - thanks to everyone engaging across the forum, validator channels, and Telegram. Looking forward to next weekâs update! Please let us know if you like the Weekly format, and what else youâd like to hear from us.
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Join the biweekly validator calls
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Join the next community call: Register for the community calendar * here