This is the eleventh of the 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: the special edition community call Q&A ran for two hours on Wednesday and worked through the vast majority of the questions the community submitted, so most of this issue is a written recap of what was asked, what was answered, and what we committed to. Also this week: Gauntlet responded directly on the forum to the community’s entity-attribution review, and the Hydro-unblocking Hub upgrade heads to governance.
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Community call Q&A: a full recap of Wednesday’s two-hour session, including the commitments we made on the call
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ATOM tokenomics: Gauntlet posted a direct response to the entity-attribution review on the Phase 1 thread
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Hub software: the Hydro-unblocking upgrade is through testnet, with the governance proposal targeted for next week
Special Edition Community Call: Two Hours of Q&A
Wednesday’s community call was the Q&A session we previewed in the last two issues: hosted on X, built entirely from questions the community submitted on the Cosmos Hub forums, Telegram, and via DMs. It ran about two hours and worked through the vast majority of the submitted questions. The ICF-specific questions were deliberately punted to a future dedicated ICF session (details below), and the handful of questions still pending will get written answers on the forum. The full recording is on X, and the transcript and notes are archived on our side.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. Special mention to @Guinch_Roze and @agent.kwosh for helping to coordinate the question lists, and to @bradva and @Anzus_GemWallet for some great questions. This recap walks through the major segments.
How we got here: three theses in two years
The most common question we received was some version of “why has the Hub’s roadmap taken two years?” on the call we clarified that it was not one roadmap moving slowly. It was three separate theses tested in sequence.
After the Skip acquisition and ICF consolidation in December 2024, the first thesis was the EVM platform play on the Hub, shipped alongside Eureka in April 2025. It was cut not because the activity was not there, but because bootstrapping a smart contract app ecosystem from scratch is enormously expensive, and it was not buying the Hub anything unique that others weren’t already doing better. Competing for retail attention with Solana, Hyperliquid, and (now) Robinhood was likely to be a losing battle. The second thesis, the stack as an open source resource, was not cut; it matured into a standing pillar. The third, enterprise applications, caught real traction with financial institutions, and the company restructured around that thesis by mid-2025. The lesson stated plainly on the call: do not stay attached to ideas the data says will not win, and move on to the next opportunity. Near is a great example of success in this area. They ran through dozens of ideas before Near Intents took off, and their willingness to pivot through those ideas made them a category leader in the cross-chain liquidity space.
However, focusing on enterprise and the stack strained resources for everything else, including the Hub. An enterprise opportunity or stack-level incident would divert engineering and marketing resources away from the Hub and the ecosystem, leading to delays in pushing forward Hub initiatives. That is the problem the restructure below was built to fix.
The three pillars: the ecosystem team now exists solely for the Hub
Cosmos Labs restructured in April into three pillars, each with its own dedicated team, budget, and priorities: Ecosystem, Open Source, and Enterprise. On the ecosystem team specifically, the Mintscan acquisition brought a team of more than 15 engineers, customer success engineers, and strategic partnership managers whose entire focus is ecosystem work.
As for the other two pillars, not everything they do is for the Hub all the time. But every pillar feeds the hub in one way or another. The ecosystem pillar exists solely for the Hub, and part of its job is routing the other pillars’ wins back to the Hub. Their wins (new customers, new revenue, stack improvements, etc) become our resources and we help choose how the Hub benefits from them.
What each pillar is shipping: Ecosystem carries tokenomics, the USDC integration (the two-click migration targeted for August, one-click in September), and the Hub’s roadmap process. Open Source carries post-quantum keys, IBC Link (cutting integrations from eight or nine steps to one), and the performance line that took networks from roughly 200 TPS to well over 1,000 in production on the 2026.1 release, with stack targets of 500ms blocks and 5,000 TPS. Enterprise carries the tokenized deposit product, Cosmos Tokenization Suite, and core banking integrations, on multi-year sales cycles.
Roadmap status: the audit is done, three directions are on the table, and product work has begun
The roadmap process runs through three working phases. As a refresher:
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The audit phase. Map every resource, strength, and weakness in the ecosystem: what products and resources the Hub owns, and what can be done with them.
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The problems phase. Understand what problems actually exist within those resource overlaps, and deeply understand why they happen, so we can find real opportunities for products.
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The solutions phase. Design the solution: come up with two or three visions, share them in public, and battle-test them as part of the new roadmap. Once a vision and solution are designed, we move forward with it as part of the product and technical roadmap.
We’re currently on step 3. The ecosystem audit is complete, the problem phase just wrapped, and the solutions phase is now. Three focus areas came out of the audit: real-world assets, interoperability, and payments, with payments the youngest of the three.
The problems identified are concrete: tokenized assets get stranded on their issuance chains, compliance frameworks do not travel with assets, the buy side cannot reach everything from one place, cross-chain privacy is close to nonexistent, and cross-chain trust is broken in ways the industry keeps paying for (e.g., multimillion dollar bridge hacks). The Hub’s position in that problem set is the thesis: no ecosystem handles these problems better than Cosmos.
A large part of the ecosystem team meets in Korea the first week of August to push the solutions phase forward, with updates to follow shortly after. Some work is not waiting for the direction to be picked, because it is needed in every version of the roadmap: the EVM question, the liquidity layer, privacy, and expanding ATOM staking access through institutional custodians. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months exploring these concepts with the community in parallel.
One interesting community question in this area: why the IBC attestation service is not run on the Hub as a decentralized neutral notary. The direct answer: there has been no customer demand for that yet, because enterprises currently want a contractual counterparty running self-hosted infrastructure, and we are not interested in launching things on the Hub that are solutions in search of a problem. But that does not mean that demand doesn’t exist. If we can validate the underlying idea, subsets of Hub validators opting in to provide attestations for additional rewards, it can bring real optionality under the interop direction. It is exactly the kind of design suggestion we want more of.
Liquidity layer and EVM: the design space is open, and this is where community input matters most
Two technical questions of the month got extended airtime.
On the DEX: there is no date, deliberately. The roadmap ships first so the venue is designed around it. It will not be a continuation of Stride Swap; any DEX will be a bespoke product designed around the new roadmap. As said on the call, there are a lot of dead DEXes that launched without a plan, and we do not want this to be one of them. The working idea discussed, with the explicit caveat that none of it is finalized, is an orderbook built for serious flow, with open plugins, so community DEXes can plug in, make markets on the book with their AMM liquidity, and earn an increased share of swap fees.
On the EVM: the call untangled three things that have been conflated. The 2025 EVM-platform-on-Hub thesis is no longer under consideration. Cosmos EVM, the framework for building EVM chains with the SDK, shipped separately and is now the primary driver of new SDK chain adoption. The open question is the new one: finance integrations increasingly require an EVM layer, so what is the right way to bring one to the Hub? This is not about driving toward a general-purpose public ecosystem, or trying to be Ethereum or Solana. The direction discussed is the Hub as an application-specific chain, with an EVM layer tailored to what the Hub’s product roadmap is for.
The call walked through the trade-off space between a multi-VM Hub and a Hub-secured sidechain. A multi-VM Hub gives a native EVM and a clean single-chain story, but requires an account migration with real user friction. A sidechain avoids the migration, uses ATOM as gas, and keeps tech debt off the Hub, but means maintaining two chains and accepting cross-chain UX seams. Both paths are viable, both have been public since early July, and no decision has been made. This is a genuine design exploration, and it will be decided in public. If you have architectural views, experience with either path on other chains, or user-migration ideas that would change the trade-off math, the forum is the place to put them. The validator call discussions on this topic were called out on the call as tremendously helpful, and we want more of that.
ATOM utility: present and future
The value-capture questions were some of the most in-demand of the call, and we tried to answer as many as we could. First, how does ATOM capture fees from Cosmos products today? Outside of the USDC fee arrangement, there is no formal mechanism today by which ATOM captures fees from the broader product surface. Eureka generates transaction fees to the Hub. The USDC integration will have a programmatic mechanism that accrues to ATOM once it is turned on. Skip Go has a fee option that would be simple to enable, and the stated inclination on the call is to turn it on if the roadmap produces a product thesis that uses it. The fee has stayed off until now because bridging is largely commoditized, and adding a fee that drives volume away from IBC would be self-defeating. Now that Skip Go is a product of the ecosystem team, aligning it with the roadmap is the ecosystem team’s job.
Beyond that, connecting enterprise activity to ATOM utility is real work on multi-year cycles, and the ecosystem team exists precisely so the Hub does not sit idle while those cycles run. Questions about buybacks and ICF treasury policy were explicitly deferred to the ICF session described below, so we do not speak for commitments that are not ours to make. Questions about Cosmos Labs’ own financials got a more direct answer: Labs is a private company, wholly owned by the ICF, and company books are not something that gets published, here or anywhere in the industry. What does continue is the ICF’s existing reporting: treasury statements, use of delegations, and how funds are deployed for grants.
Tokenomics Q&A
The Gauntlet segment addressed the methodology questions the community has been raising on the Phase 1 thread. Highlights:
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We were asked how much the six largest selling cohorts actually hold, the answer given live: the top wallets in the analysis hold roughly 80 million ATOM, most of it staked, which works out to roughly 16% of supply and 19% of staked supply. Sell pressure from these cohorts arrives in spikes rather than as a steady drip.
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Buying on an exchange does not count as exchange selling. The model nets directional flow, and buys register as accumulation signals against outflows. Deposits to exchanges are scored at roughly 95% sell likelihood, IBC transfers with a swap instruction at 100%, and plain transfers at roughly 5%.
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The most consistent net-selling cohort is centralized exchanges, by far. The myth that independent validator commissions and staking rewards drive sell pressure did not survive the data.
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Exchange-operated validator commission flow versus user flow is currently aggregated, and Gauntlet flagged in the report that Phase 2 monitoring will break these out.
On scope: Phase 1 was analysis. Phase 2 is where mechanisms get designed and actionable recommendations land, and it is where community and validator feedback will matter most. Some directional suggestions already exist from the analysis, like making inflation reactive to sales and evaluating mechanisms that address the outsized rewards accruing to exchange-operated validators, and anything that becomes a proposal routes through governance. Some recommendations will likely be implemented, some may not.
Partnerships and user protection: a four-label taxonomy for what official means
Asked directly whether a third-party lending protocol in the ecosystem is safe to use, the answer on the call was that no one can promise that, and nobody in the industry underwrites third-party DeFi. What we can do is be precise about labels, and the call laid out a four-category taxonomy: official protocol integrations that we build and run, where we own our part of the risk; commercial and ecosystem partnerships where the product and the risk belong to the partner; protocols that are technically reviewed but not guaranteed; and wholly independent, unreviewed protocols.
The point that applies across all four categories is that whatever the label, you own your own risk, and do-your-own-research applies in full. On promotion specifically, we explained that risk is always the protocol’s own responsibility, and if a previously promoted project turns out to be a bad actor, the promotion gets removed.
What we committed to on the call
Across the call, we made a number of commitments that we want to reiterate here. The list:
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A quarterly update series, starting with a first big edition targeted for next week, covering progress and goals across all three pillars.
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An ICF session at an upcoming community call. ICF board members are being invited to answer the ICF, treasury, and buyback questions directly. The date will be announced on the forum once confirmed.
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A Cosmos Hub ecosystem page is in the works: a central home for community projects, content, and public goods.
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A public tokenomics dashboard is being built on the Phase 1 data as part of the ongoing monitoring work.
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A community sandbox, most likely shaped as the public testnet. The Hypha-managed public testnet mirroring the Hub is the most likely home for an in-production sandbox, with testing needs growing as the roadmap lands.
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An intake path for builders and experts: community members with real domain expertis e who want working sessions with the team can reach out directly to Robo, Nico, Dan, Neil, or Grace, and where there is a genuine fit, those calls happen. Builders can also submit news and announcements for this weekly, exactly like the Bedrock feature last week. Few people seem to know this path exists. Please use it.
ATOM Tokenomics: Gauntlet Responded Directly to the Community’s Entity-Attribution Review
Last week we flagged that the community’s tracing of large net-outflow addresses to exchange-operated infrastructure was being treated as a real input, and that Gauntlet was reviewing entity attribution against it. That response is now live: Gauntlet posted a direct reply on the Phase 1 thread, addressing each component of the critique, including how exchange-to-exchange movement is handled in the model.
The reply comes from Maria, one of the researchers working on the analysis. We would rather have the people doing the work answer methodology questions directly than have every answer routed through official channels, and this thread has been a good proof of that working.
The pattern from the last two weeks holds: publish everything, invite the scrutiny, and fold what survives into the next phase. How you can help:
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Read the response and push back if it does not hold up
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Keep bringing attribution and methodology findings to the thread
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If you run address-labeling or tracing infrastructure and want to contribute labels, reach out on the thread or on Telegram
Hub Software: The Hydro-Unblocking Upgrade Is Through Testnet, With the Governance Proposal Targeted for Next Week
The small Hub upgrade we have been tracking to bring Hydro to the Hub is on schedule against the timeline we published. The upgrade is on the public testnet, the governance proposal is targeted for next week, and with a roughly one-week voting window, mainnet remains in the two-to-three-week range shared on Wednesday’s call.
Scope is unchanged: two contained CosmWasm changes (a contract size cap increase and a narrow query allowlist) plus a dependency update. A forum post regarding these changes is live now and can be found here. As always, the mainnet target is a working estimate that depends on the governance timeline.
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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Join the biweekly validator calls
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Join the next community call, featuring a dedicated ICF Q&A session: date to be announced on the forum. Register for the community calendar here