This is the eighth 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: the monthly community call, and what it surfaced on Injective USDC, IBC to Solana and L2s, the Gauntlet tokenomics report, the growth-phase roadmap, and the hackathon winners. Plus a governance close-out.
We hosted the monthly community call yesterday as a Twitter Space, co-hosted by Zerk from Mad Scientists. The full recap is on the forum, and the Space was recorded for anyone who would rather listen. Below we expand on the threads from that call.
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Injective USDC: a two-click interim flow is on the table to start moving value before Injective’s September upgrade
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IBC to Solana and L2s: we missed a previously shared timeline on purpose, to sharpen the developer experience first
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ATOM tokenomics: Gauntlet’s Phase 1 report is complete, and the early read points to exchanges, not stakers
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The Cosmos Hub and ATOM roadmap: we are entering the growth phase, with RWAs and interoperability as the leading candidates
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Mad Easy on Cosmos: all five hackathon winners are in, and the top projects are heading to mainnet
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Proposal 1043 passed: the Cosmos Hub public testnet is funded through 2027
Injective USDC: A Two-Click Interim Flow Is Being Explored
Work on migrating Cosmos’s canonical USDC to Injective is progressing, in collaboration with the Injective and dYdX teams. The goal is to give Injective USDC the same experience people have with Noble USDC today: the one-click Skip Go flow that moves USDC from any chain to any other.
Delivering that same one-click flow requires an Injective chain upgrade, which is currently scheduled for September. To avoid waiting on that upgrade before any of the benefits start accruing, one option we are exploring is an interim two-click flow during the July to September window. It would not match the current one-click experience via Noble, and it would be temporary, but it would let Injective USDC start moving into Cosmos chains sooner, which begins driving TVL and, in turn, fees for ATOM. Once the September upgrade arrives, that flow would migrate to the full one-click experience as quickly as possible. More detail will follow as soon as we know more.
IBC to Solana and L2s: Sharpening the Developer Experience
A previously shared timeline for IBC connections to Solana and L2s, posted a couple of months ago, was not met. In yesterday’s call, we clarified why.
A working production IBC-to-L2 solution exists and is live today. When we shared it with some of the initial teams lined up to use it, we received important feedback on the developer experience that we thought should be addressed before going live. One of those teams is a large CBDC initiative built on the Cosmos stack and IBC that we expect to be a significant go-to-market partner. Rather than ship publicly before the product is perfect, we chose to hold back and sharpen the developer experience first. The same applies to the Solana solution.
There is not a concrete new timeline to share yet, but we expect one shortly. Getting both live is the top priority for the IBC team right now, because it matters not only for IBC Eureka on the Hub but also for the CBDC partners waiting to build on their own IBC v2 solution.
The importance of IBC for these partners comes back to having no trusted counterparty. In the institutional bridging space today, integrating something like CCIP can cost several hundred thousand dollars and runs on an external development timeline, which is not scalable for business-to-business use cases. Open, trustless interop standards are the ones that will win over the long term, and IBC is really the only relevant option in that category. Beyond the technology itself, the aim is to get SOL into the Cosmos ecosystem and, ideally, to push ATOM out into Solana, where a number of former Cosmos builders are now active and could have a fresh reason to re-engage with ATOM.
ATOM Tokenomics: Gauntlet’s Phase 1 Report Is Complete
As a reminder from our tokenomics forum post, the research with Gauntlet is structured in two phases. The first focuses on understanding how ATOM moves, why, and when: what ATOM looks like today, how concentrated the supply is, and where buy and sell pressure come from. The second uses those findings to adjust ATOM’s design to lean into its strengths and address its weaknesses.
Phase 1 is now complete. The report is under review, and we plan to share it with the community next week.
A few early findings pending the published report:
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ATOM-denominated sell pressure is overwhelmingly skewed toward centralized exchanges.
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The sales impact of staking rewards, by contrast, turned out to be smaller than many had assumed, though still higher than on comparable networks.
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There’s room to address inflation, but carefully: staking rewards are a big part of why people participate in ATOM in the first place, and any reduction has to be weighed against that, possibly supplemented by revenue coming in from other sources.
The centralized-exchange picture goes beyond retail buying and selling. A large share of the validator commissions being sold traces back to just a few sources, with Coinbase currently around 20% of ATOM stake, Upbit around 7%, and Binance around 4%. There are several possible ways to address that concentration, it is an area under close review, and it is one that most of you have told us you care about.
Inflation is not the only lever. On the demand side, the recent Robinhood listing makes staking the obvious next step, and there are many similarly situated exchanges, brokerages, and wallets with large customer bases that do not yet support ATOM or ATOM staking. Pursuing staking partnerships while momentum is strong works both the supply and demand sides at once, and is one of the clearer near-term ways to improve the tokenomic picture. We are keeping all of this in mind for the Phase 2 design work, which will build on the Phase 1 findings to propose concrete changes.
The full Phase 1 report is still under review and headed to the community next week. Treat the numbers here as the direction the research points, and look to the published report for the complete picture and methodology.
The Cosmos Hub and ATOM Roadmap: Entering the Growth Phase, with RWAs and Interoperability Opportunities Being Researched
The roadmap continues to follow the chaos-to-stability-to-growth path laid out in public a couple of months ago. The most notable recent step was the acquisition of Mintscan and the onboarding of its team into Cosmos Labs, which marks the kickoff of the stability phase. That team is onboarding now, and infrastructure is being consolidated to ensure stability of the ecosystem. With that underway, attention is turning to growth and to defining the next chapter of the Cosmos Hub and ATOM roadmap.
Several problem areas are under research as candidates the Hub is well positioned to solve. RWAs and interoperability are among the most promising directions. Approximately 95% of the real-world assets issued today sit unused outside the chain they were issued on. Large issuance initiatives from the likes of BlackRock, Securitize, and Franklin Templeton have driven impressive TVL, but the assets themselves largely just sit there, held back by both regulatory and interoperability barriers. The Hub looks uniquely positioned to help unlock actual usage of those assets.
A related and particularly interesting problem is the lack of a reliable price oracle for tokenized stocks outside market hours, which matters for perpetuals. Different chains handle this differently. On highly liquid venues like Hyperliquid the exchange effectively becomes the after-hours oracle, as seen with SpaceX shares, where after-hours trading concentrated there set a price that spot markets snapped to at the next open. There is an opportunity to build a more reliable after-hours oracle drawing on futures and other more liquid markets, an area that would fit well with the Skip team’s experience deploying the Slinky oracle.
Another example is squaring DeFi access with traditional shareholder protections. On-chain tokenized stocks today generally force a choice between capitalizing on DeFi opportunities and retaining shareholder rights like voting and dividends, largely because of transfer-agent restrictions and jurisdictional KYC requirements. Working with a transfer agent that has IBC capability could offer the best of both worlds: access to DeFi opportunities across IBC while preserving the same regulatory protections a traditional shareholder would have. That could unlock a significant amount of institutional capital, and it is in the middle of legal research right now. Agentic commerce is another area we have flagged as an unexplored strength worth a closer look.
The Cosmos ecosystem already has real strengths to build on here. Figure was the first to issue genuine share-class-based tokenized stocks on a blockchain rather than a wrapper, and Ondo is taking its own approach to RWA trading.
To be clear, this is early-stage exploration, not a committed roadmap.
We are looking at multiple opportunities at once, and none of this should be read as final. We are sharing the direction now so the roadmap continues to take shape in public as promised, through the monthly calls and these weekly updates.
Mad Easy on Cosmos: All Five Hackathon Winners Were Selected, and the Top Projects Are Heading to Mainnet
The Mad Scientists hackathon has wrapped, with all five winners now announced, and it produced a strong and varied set of submissions. A striking number of the projects were built with AI coding tools and arrived fully working, with live websites, wired-up wallet connections, and playable builds end to end. Many of the teams have since reached out about continuing on Hub mainnet, which is exactly the outcome the hackathon was aiming for.
The first-place project, from Kaku, is Mad Votes, a Cosmos Hub governance predictions market that lets people take positions on governance outcomes. It is a natural fit for a chain whose governance generates as much discussion as the Hub’s, and beyond the entertainment it opens up genuine financial use cases, such as hedging a position that depends on how a proposal resolves. The team plans to bring it to mainnet.
The second-place project, from SubZero, is an IBC-02 game in which players move a platform to catch IBC packets moving between chains. The third-place project, from Tony, is Cosmos Arcade, a set of multiplayer PvP games played for ATOM stakes, including a competitive Pac-Man-style game and a 3D shooter called Void Arena.
The full set of submissions can be browsed on the Mad Scientists hackathon showcase page. There may be another hackathon down the line, potentially themed around building tooling for the Hub roadmap once it is more solidified.
If you want to follow along, how you can help:
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Browse the showcase and see what builders shipped on the Hub
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Follow Mad Scientists on X for the recap and any next round
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Tell us what you would like to see from a future build sprint on the Hub
Proposal 1043 Passed: The Cosmos Hub Public Testnet Is Funded
Following the push in last week’s update, Proposal 1043 has passed. Turnout cleared quorum ahead of the June 29 close, and with support running around 98% in favor, the proposal carried.
This funds Hypha’s operation of the Cosmos Hub public testnet for one year. That testnet is where every Hub software upgrade is exercised before it reaches mainnet, and it is the same testnet now tied to the Q3 delegation program’s participation requirement, so keeping it funded is fundamental to shipping upgrades safely. Thanks to everyone who voted and helped turnout clear the line in the final days.
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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