Hub Weekly Update #4: June 05 2026

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This is the fourth of the Hub Weekly Thursday recaps (Delayed by one day due to yesterday’s big announcement :atom_symbol:), straight from the Hub Unit team, per the cadence we committed to in the From Chaos to Stability to Growth post. You can read weeks one, two, and three if you missed them.

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: Mintscan joins Cosmos Labs, the first complete tokenomics cohort report is live, and the Validator Call is this Monday:

  • Yesterday, Cosmos Labs announced the acquisition of Mintscan, the ecosystem’s primary block explorer, with select team members joining a new Korean subsidiary to expand Hub and ecosystem engineering.

  • Big update on the Gauntlet tokenomics workstream: a significant breakdown of ATOM sell pressure by cohort, covering January through April, was delivered today.

  • The Validator Call is Wednesday, June 10, on the Hub’s native liquidity venue, with the Community Call following on June 22. Come with questions.

  • Quick updates on the USDC migration working group, Ecosystem Growth Delegations, and the testnet program ahead of the June 15 deadlines.

Mintscan Acquisition: A Bigger Team for the Hub

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Yesterday, Cosmos Labs announced the acquisition of the Mintscan product suite, welcoming select Mintscan personnel to the Cosmos Labs Ecosystem Team.

Mintscan is the de facto block explorer for the Cosmos ecosystem: the dashboard hundreds of thousands of users rely on every day to track transactions, validators, and activity across more than 80 Cosmos-based chains. Together with Skip:Go and IBC Eureka, it forms the connective tissue the ecosystem depends on to move assets and navigate the network. Bringing these under one accountable team means shared relayer fleets, indexing pipelines, APIs, and monitoring become a single supportable platform rather than infrastructure duplicated across separate operators.

One clarification worth making directly, since several community members have asked: this transaction covers the Mintscan platform specifically and the team that built it. The Cosmostation validator and wallet are not part of the acquisition and will remain with the Stamper (Cosmostation) team.

What this means for the Hub: the expanded team takes on three areas of work in parallel with the existing Cosmos Labs team:

  • Accelerating the Cosmos Hub product roadmap

  • Ensuring ongoing reliability and expansion of Skip:Go and IBC Eureka

  • Supporting other ecosystem-critical infrastructure and tools, including Mintscan

The public roadmap process laid out in the Chaos to Stability to Growth post does not change: same channels, same cadence, more hands. The team’s presence in Korea also puts the Hub closer to APAC, the fastest growing region for crypto adoption and the market where the Cosmos story first achieved network effects.

The full announcement is here, and questions are welcome in this thread.

ATOM Tokenomics: Update on Cohort-Specific Sell Pressures

In last week’s update we said we’d have a significant update on tokenomics. We do. Gauntlet shared an initial report covering sixteen consecutive weekly windows from January through April 2026 and attributing likelihood-weighted sell pressure across the holders controlling the top 95% of tracked ATOM over that period.

The headline findings:

  • Sell pressure is concentrated. The top six cohorts account for 92% of all weighted selling across the period, and whale holders alone carry roughly 30%, the closest thing to a persistent baseline in the data.

  • But it is not steady. Aggregate spikes are usually one cohort acting in one week, not a broad shift. The most extreme case: a single mid-tier retail cluster put 85% of its entire sixteen-week total through in one week in April.

  • The swings are large. The busiest week saw 4.7 times the sell pressure of the quietest, driven by episodic large-actor behavior from exchange, mega-whale, and fund-sized clusters rather than a steady drumbeat.

As always, this is preliminary data: the likelihood weights are conservative estimates rather than ground truth, and exchange-attributed flow measures deposits, not confirmed fills. The caveats section of the report is worth reading in full. We will walk through the community-facing highlights in a follow-up.

Next steps with Gauntlet are as follows:

  • Pull data around major historical events (prop 848, 10/10, Luna collapse, etc) to see impact on cohort sales at those times

  • Final data QA and full report release to complete phase 1 of the research.

Validator Call Monday: The Hub’s Native Liquidity Venue

A reminder that our live roadmapping sessions return this Wednesday, June 10, with the Validator Call on the options for a native liquidity venue for the Hub.

As shared in last week’s update, one area we’re exploring is an enterprise-grade order book rather than an AMM, given the institutional and legal use cases the Hub is aligning against, alongside early ideas for an open plugin architecture that would let community DEXes plug in as market makers and share in institutional order flow fees. Nothing is finalized, and these calls are where the paths and tradeoffs get discussed before the discussion comes back to the forums.

  • Validator Call: Wednesday, June 10. Validators can find the link in all official validator channels.

  • Community Call: June 24.

Add the community calendar to follow along, and stay tuned to @cosmoshub on X for registration links and updates.

Quick Updates: USDC Working Group, Delegations, and Testnet

USDC migration working group. The Cosmos Labs Korea team has kicked off with an initial design for USDC support on Skip:Go, and initial meetings to discuss outstanding issues with Injective and dYdX begin next week. As before: no urgency, Noble USDC keeps working exactly as it does today, and nothing changes on your side until migration tooling is ready. If your team uses Noble USDC and has not flagged it yet, reach out to @RoboMcGobo or @totalspud on Telegram.

Ecosystem Growth Delegations. Review of the IBC transfer-volume data RFP submissions continues, with first responses going out to teams. The broader timing from last week still holds: the Q3 delegation selection opens June 15, with a July 1 redelegation.

Testnet program. The testnet participation requirement activates with the next delegation cycle, so any validator that wants to remain eligible for ICF default delegations needs to be onboarded to the Cosmos Hub testnet program by June 15. Details at Hypha’s program page. Hypha’s 2026 testnet funding proposal is also being finalized for the community pool, so keep an eye on the forum for that discussion.

That’s all for this week - thanks to everyone engaging across the forum, validator channels, and Telegram. Looking forward to next week’s update!

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Hi @RoboMcGobo

Thanks for the update! Excited to see the news about mintscan and CL expanding operations, and looking forward to any public updates regarding the gauntlet tokenomics research.

On the topic of mintscan, it’s great to see a (mostly) one stop shop for the major cosmos sdk chains. Are there plans to implement more features to it or will it be mostly maintained as is? If the former, I believe there are a few things that would really help it compete with currently existing chain explorers.

(Assuming these aren’t already planned / implemented)

One thing that comes to mind is when looking at Injective explorer, the interface not only provides the user with the inj…xxx address, but also the associated 0x address. Currently this doesn’t seem to be shown on mintscan and would be a nice quality of life feature.

Another thing is something I see on etherscan, where certain wallets can be labeled with name tags to show the entity/person that owns the wallet. Also wallets that are known to be associated with scams are also marked.

It seems these features would be useful in the institutional pivot, in cases were it’s important to quickly identify / verify wallet ownership between parties, find the associated eth/0x address, etc.

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Thanks the Hub Unit for these updates. Excited too about the news. Some idea you could bring to mintscan :

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Great question! The CLK team is still onboarding, so we can’t say for certain what Mintscan will look like until we’ve had a chance to integrate their team fully, but I do think there’s a lot of merit in these ideas.

Improving EVM exploration is likely to be pretty important moving forward, especially if we put CosmosEVM on the Hub.

On the address labeling, this is already done to an extent (with exchange addresses etc) but could be improved. Individual address labeling would probably require some kind of name service (maybe stargaze could help here).

One other idea we’ve been thinking through is adding a map-of-zones style IBC explorer into mintscan, so we can have all of that in one place.

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