This is the thirteenth of Hub Weekly recaps, straight from the Hub Unit team, per the cadence we committed to in the From Chaos to Stability to Growth post.
Every week, 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: Injective USDC on Skip Go mainnet, tokenomics Phase 2, Gaia v28 testing, and the August validator call.
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Injective USDC: A developer-focused bridging flow is live on Skip Go, letting teams set up pools, start testing, and prepare for migration
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ATOM tokenomics: Phase 2 mechanism evaluation is underway with Gauntlet, with community-proposed designs in the initial evaluation set
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ICS deprecation: the Gaia v28 testing process is in its final stretch, with the mainnet proposal to follow
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Validator call: the August 12 recap covers validator set health, governance quorum, and the tooling survey results
Injective USDC: A Developer-Focused Bridging Flow Is Live, So Teams Can Prepare for Migration
The first piece of the Injective USDC rollout shipped this week: a manual, developer-focused bridging flow on Skip Go that routes Injective USDC over CCTP v2.
This is not a user migration flow: every step of the route is executed manually, with a signature and gas required on each chain, and there are no guardrails built specifically for the Noble to Injective case. This is a preparation tool for teams, not a user-facing launch, and we do not recommend regular users attempt their migration through it.
What teams can do with it now:
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Set up Injective USDC pools, so liquidity is in place before user migration begins
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Start testing routes and integrations against live Injective USDC
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Begin preparing their own liquidity for mainnet migration, working directly with us where that helps
Mass migration of user balances is what the dedicated migration flow is for: a single guided experience inside the Skip Go app, purpose-built to take Noble USDC to Injective USDC without users constructing routes themselves. This will be live soon, and it is the point where migration actually begins for everyday holders. Until it ships, there is nothing users need to do.
A note on timelines: the migration flow target is a working target, not a commitment. As with every stage of this rollout, we will confirm each piece publicly once it is live, and we are not naming dates for the stages after the migration flow until they are confirmed.
If your team holds Noble USDC, runs infrastructure that supports it, or builds a frontend that displays it, how you can help:
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Reach out to @RoboMcGobo on Telegram if you’re a Cosmos chain or infra team that uses USDC and are not already in touch with us
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Join the USDC migration working group if you have not already
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AMM protocols: use the developer flow to deploy your Injective USDC pools now, so liquidity is ready before the migration flow opens the user wave
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Wallets and frontends: the migration API is the piece built for you; reach out early to get on the integration list
ATOM Tokenomics: Phase 2 Mechanism Evaluation Is Underway, Including Community-Proposed Designs
The biweekly working session with Gauntlet ran on Tuesday, and Phase 2 is now fully in evaluation mode.
A refresher on the scope: Phase 2 is where the Phase 1 analysis becomes design. The work models how candidate issuance and reward mechanisms would actually behave against the behavioral data from Phase 1, rather than reasoning about them in the abstract. Several mechanism families are under evaluation, and we are deliberately treating this as an open exploration: no shortlist has been settled, and design directions can still change as the modeling comes back.
That evaluation set includes the community’s ideas. We packaged three mechanisms that came up through community feedback, validator conversations, and discussion on the Phase 1 outcomes thread into a brief for Gauntlet: not as replacements for the framework, but as ways to address issuance that could plug into or supplement it.
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Usage-linked issuance via empty-block throttling. Proposed by Crosnest. Today the Hub produces a block roughly every six seconds whether or not there are transactions to include, and new ATOM is minted with every block. This proposal configures the chain to stop producing blocks when there are no transactions waiting, so issuance naturally tracks actual network usage: full emissions during high activity, lower emissions when the network is quiet.
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Duration-tiered staking rewards. Raised in several community proposals. Reward multipliers or step-up incentives that favor longer commitments and consistent re-stakers over reward extractors. Rather than changing how much ATOM is issued, this changes who receives yield, not just when it becomes liquid.
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Vote power tax. From EffortCapital’s CHIPs signaling proposal. A progressive tax on the staking rewards of validators whose vote power exceeds the median of the active set, with the taxed rewards redistributed across the set as a subsidy to smaller operators. It resurfaced in community feedback as a complement to any inflation reduction.
Gauntlet is evaluating how each of these might fit into the Phase 2 workstream, and where one does not fit, we will relay the reasoning back to the community.
The research is also producing early findings on how the Hub’s issuance parameters are calibrated against actual network performance. This is preliminary and still being validated, so we are not putting numbers on it this week. Once validation completes, the findings and any resulting recommendations will get a dedicated forum post of their own, with the full methodology, rather than a paragraph in the Weekly.
ICS Deprecation: The Gaia v28 Testing Process Is in Its Final Stretch
The public testnet upgraded to v28.0.0-rc0 on August 11, and the two-week testing process covering a full unbonding period wraps early next week.
If testing surfaces nothing blocking, the next step is the mainnet software upgrade proposal. Validators will get direct notice at each step, as usual, and there is a new channel for that: on the August validator call, operators asked for email as an additional upgrade-notification channel, and the validator mailing list is now live, sending notices within a day of a mainnet proposal going on-chain.
Feedback from validators, node operators, and Hub users is still welcome on the v28 advance notice thread while testing is running.
From the August Validator Call: Validator Set Health, Quorum, and Tooling
The recap of the August 12 validator call is up: Cosmos Hub Validator Call August 12, 2026: Recap. Last week’s issue was published the morning after the call, so we are catching up on it properly this week.
The topic of the month was validator set health, and the core of it is a set of measurable desired states for the validator set. Today, three entities could collectively reach the one-third voting-power threshold that can halt the chain; the working desired state is at least seven. The safety coefficient, the number of entities required to control consensus, sits at 16 against a desired state of at least 20. These thresholds are working targets, and they can be recalibrated through further analysis and ecosystem input.
On governance quorum, the analysis presented on the call estimated that around 38% of current active-set voting power has historically not participated in governance, leaving limited margin above the Hub’s 40% quorum. Validators discussed notification improvements and possible governance levers without endorsing a specific change, and that discussion is continuing on the forum.
The validator tooling survey results also came back: upgrade notifications and PebbleDB snapshots were supported by every respondent, and the call demonstrated three tools being considered for open-source release: configurable upgrade notifications, PebbleDB snapshots with upgrade-height support, and a self-hostable CosmWasm explorer.
How you can help:
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Read the recap and weigh in on the quorum discussion on the forum
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If you’re an operator willing to run a public-good service, reach out; several respondents already have
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Join the next validator call on September 9 at 9:00 AM ET; active-set validators not yet in the channel can message @totalspud or @robomcgobo on Telegram for an invite
Hub Roadmap: Validation Continues, and the Full Update Is in Last Week’s Issue
A quick reminder for anyone who missed it: last week’s issue carried the big roadmap update, covering the product direction we are most excited about (the Hub as a gateway between TradFi and DeFi), why we favored it over the other hypotheses, and what happens between now and the roadmap.
That work continues: the product ideas in that direction are moving through legal and technical validation before anything is named or committed. The plan we shared stands: a public-facing roadmap is being worked on, with updates along the way as validation progresses.
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