This is the tenth Hub Weekly Thursday recap, 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:
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ATOM tokenomics: the community is reviewing the Gauntlet Phase 1 report and we answer some of the best questions so far
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Community call: a special edition Q&A session is set for Wednesday, July 22
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Hub software: the Hydro-unblocking upgrade is headed to testnet, with mainnet targeted in two to three weeks
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Chain registry: provider manifest support is live, automating endpoint updates for multi-chain operators
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Bedrock: Silk Nodes launched a free, ATOM-only analytics dashboard, live now in beta
ATOM Tokenomics: The Community Is Pressure-Testing Phase 1
Last week we published the Phase 1 outcomes post alongside Gauntlet’s full report. When we shipped it, we asked the community to pressure-test the findings. The thread now includes design suggestions and methodology questions. Some examples of questions:
“Should there be a maximum validator commission threshold?”
A commission cap is a Phase 2 question rather than a Phase 1 finding, but it is not a bad idea, and it would address a meaningful chunk of the CEX-related commission dynamics that Phase 1 surfaced. It is on the evaluation list.
“Was the Prop 848 reaction really 10.25% of supply?”
A fair clarification: that figure is measured against the analyzed liquid cohort, not total circulating supply, and it measures exchange-bound routing in the event window rather than confirmed executed sales (as was stated in the report). The difference is mostly definitional: tokens that are actually circulating and liquid (~95% of it anyway), vs the circulating supply as defined by venues like coingecko and coinmarketcap (which includes staked tokens).
The conclusion stands regardless: binding governance outcomes are the largest sell catalyst in the dataset, and holders reacted to vote finality, not to forum discussion.
One caveat. The entity-attribution review is in flight, and cohort-level attribution should be treated as preliminary while we work through it.
We welcome more questions in next week’s Q&A and will fold all feedback into how Phase 2 gets designed.
How you can help:
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Keep replying on the Phase 1 thread with anything that looks off or under-explored
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Bring methodology and attribution questions to next week’s community call Q&A
Special Edition Community Call: A Q&A Session Is Set for Wednesday, July 22
Next week’s community call is a special edition: a dedicated Q&A session, hosted on X, where the team takes community questions directly. Both myself and @qxnico will be taking questions, as well as answering many of the questions already aggregated in this thread.
Tokenomics has been the most consistently raised topic across recent calls, so expect it to feature heavily, but the format is open: workstream status, USDC migration, the Hub roadmap process, and anything else on your mind.
The community call twitter space link will be posted on the Cosmos Hub X account on Monday.
How to participate:
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Post your questions in the forum here. We will review all questions in advance of the call and answer as many as we can.
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Join the Space live on @cosmoshub on Wednesday, July 22, and ask directly
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Register for the community calendar here to get the invite
Hub Software: The Hydro-Unblocking Upgrade Is Headed to Testnet, With Mainnet Targeted in Two to Three Weeks
The small Hub upgrade we previewed last week is moving. The devnet build with the updated configuration is done, and the upgrade now heads to the public testnet, followed by a governance proposal, with mainnet targeted in the next two to three weeks.
As a recap of the scope: two contained CosmWasm changes, raising the maximum contract size cap and allow-listing a narrow set of queries Hydro’s contracts need, bundled with a pending CosmWasm dependency update. The full technical detail will land in a dedicated forum post as part of the governance process, and validators will get direct notice at each step.
As always, the mainnet target is a working estimate that depends on testnet results and the governance timeline.
Chain Registry: Provider Manifest Support Is Live, Automating Endpoint Updates for Multi-Chain Operators
A community-suggested improvement to the cosmos/chain-registry shipped this week: provider manifest support (Shoutout to the IT Rocket validator team for the suggestion).
The short version: infrastructure providers can now host a single JSON manifest on their own domain listing the endpoints, peers, and snapshots they want to publish, grouped by chain ID. Once a provider is allowlisted, a scheduled GitHub Action fetches the manifest, validates it against the existing registry schemas, health-checks every endpoint, and opens an automated PR whenever the data changes. Maintainers still review and merge every PR, so nothing is merged without human eyes.
This is most useful for operators maintaining endpoints across many chains. If you only run a handful, the existing manual PR workflow is unchanged and works exactly as before.
Overall, the benefit of this change is that public endpoints and chain snapshots will be far more easily accessible and less fragmented, improving developer experience across the interchain!
Thanks to Polkachu for volunteering as the first pilot and testing the flow end to end: their live manifest covers 87 chains and is a complete working example for anyone setting up their own. The onboarding guide and schema are in the repo.
Bedrock: Silk Nodes Shipped a Public Analytics Layer for ATOM, Live Now in Beta
Silk Nodes launched Bedrock this week: a free, public analytics dashboard dedicated entirely to ATOM. No login, no paywall, and the source code is on GitHub.
Every Cosmos explorer answers the same question well: what happened. Bedrock aims at the next question: what the data means. Some of what it covers that no explorer does today:
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accumulation versus distribution by wallet tier, netted per wallet so router churn cancels out instead of reading as selling;
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what stakers actually do with rewards in the 48 hours after claiming, split by stake tier;
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exchange custody and net flow per venue, verified wallets only;
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IBC outflow by destination chain; and supply attribution that shows the unattributed remainder.
A few design choices that match the standards used for the wider tokenomics conversation:
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Only verified addresses carry labels, each with a documented source and a confidence tier. Everything else stays unattributed
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Where a number is a proxy, the page says so. Where history is still backfilling, the charts show the gap instead of drawing a line through it. Bedrock is in beta and part of the chain’s history is still being indexed, so read it with that in mind. In several weeks, we expect that the chain will be fully synced and Bedrock to have a full dataset.
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Every card exports as a post-ready PNG carrying the chart, the headline number, the source, and the block height it was true at. Claims about ATOM can now travel with their receipts.
The timing is fitting. Independent, methodology-first tooling is exactly what makes the kind of community pressure-testing described in the tokenomics section above possible, and some of the analysis on the Phase 1 thread already draws on it. It runs on Silk Nodes’ own indexer rather than a resold API, and the methodology and labels pages document every definition and classification. If something is missing, the feedback board is public and doubles as the roadmap.
Major shoutout to Silk Nodes for creating this great tool for the ecosystem! Silk Nodes is a Cosmos Hub validator, and if you want to learn more about Silk Nodes or support them, here’s how:
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Follow them on Twitter: Silk Nodes (@silk_nodes) / X
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Visit their website: https://silknodes.io/
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View their validator here
That’s all for this week - thanks to everyone engaging across the forum, validator channels, and Telegram. Looking forward to next week’s update! Please let us know if you like the Weekly format, and what else you’d like to hear from us.
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Validators - join the biweekly validator calls
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Join the special edition community call Q&A on Wednesday, July 22: register for the community calendar here