This is the ninth 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 Gauntlet Phase 1 tokenomics report is complete and headed to the forum, the monthly validator call covered a tighter Q3 delegation cycle and validator set health, the EVM design conversation continued in the open, and the Injective USDC migration moved on both of its tracks. Plus a small Hub upgrade shaping up to unblock Hydro.
We hosted the monthly validator call yesterday. The full recap is on the forum, and several of the sections below expand on what was covered there.
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ATOM tokenomics: Gauntlet’s Phase 1 report is complete and lands on the forum and X this week
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Validator call: the Q3 delegation cycle concentrates delegations across fewer, testnet-active validators, and set health is getting sustained attention
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Injective USDC: the one-click precompile PR is submitted upstream, and the two-click flow has a working milestone timeline
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Hub software: a small upgrade is shaping up to unblock Hydro
ATOM Tokenomics: Gauntlet’s Phase 1 Report Is Complete and Lands on the Forum This Week
The Phase 1 report from our tokenomics research with Gauntlet is complete, reviewed, and being packaged for the community. It will be published on the forum and X this week.
As a reminder of the structure from the tokenomics research post, Phase 1 set out to understand how ATOM moves, why, and when: cohort definitions, sell-pressure attribution, buyer-motivation inference, post-purchase survival, and event studies around ATOM’s biggest price movements.
The directional read we previewed last week holds in the final report. ATOM-denominated sell pressure concentrates overwhelmingly on centralized exchanges, and the sales impact of staking rewards, while real and higher than on comparable networks, is smaller than many in the community had assumed. The report also digs into what happened around major governance events, including the market response to Prop 848’s inflation cut, which turns out to be one of the most instructive event studies in the dataset.
The full numbers land with the published report, not this post.
The methodology and the numbers go live this week. The Phase 2 work will build directly on these findings, and the more eyes on the data, the better the design conversation gets.
How you can help once the report is live:
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Read the report and reply on the forum thread with anything that looks off or under-explored
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Flag questions about methodology, cohort definitions, or attribution you want addressed before Phase 2
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Tell us which findings you think should most shape the Phase 2 design work
From Yesterday’s Validator Call: A Tighter Q3 Delegation Cycle, and Sustained Attention on Set Health
We hosted the monthly validator call yesterday. Two items are worth carrying to the wider community.
The Q3 delegation cycle concentrates delegations across fewer, testnet-active validators. With testnet participation now a hard requirement, the number of qualified validators moved from around 78 to 52 this cycle. The delegation pool itself is unchanged at 13.5M ATOM, which means each qualifying validator receives roughly 50% more delegation than last cycle. The eligible validator list is being finalized and will be published shortly. For next quarter, eligibility will require six testnet participation points via Hypha; sign up for the program here: Registration
Validator set health is getting sustained attention. Citadel One is winding down its validator, the latest sign of the squeeze on operators as infrastructure costs continue to rise. Native validator key rotation support, a long-standing operator request, is coming to the Cosmos SDK shortly. The team is also beginning to look at the shape and size of the validator set itself: nothing is decided, any conversation there will start on the forum and move gradually, and initial discussions are not expected before late summer.
Injective USDC: The Precompile PR Is Submitted, and the Two-Click Flow Has a Working Timeline
The USDC migration moved on both of its tracks this week.
The IBC-send precompile PR was submitted upstream to Injective this week. This is the piece that eventually enables the full one-click Skip Go experience for Injective USDC, matching what people have with Noble USDC today. It still depends on Injective’s chain upgrade, currently expected in September, but the code being upstream is a concrete step.
On the interim track, the two-click flow we described last week is being actively stood up, with the goal of letting Injective USDC start moving into Cosmos chains well before the September upgrade. It is temporary by design: two signatures instead of one, migrating to the one-click flow as soon as the upgrade lands.
Here is where the milestones currently stand:
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Outbound one-click flow on testnet (Cosmos to Injective to EVM and Solana): targeting the week of July 20
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Inbound two-click flow on testnet (EVM and Solana to Injective to Cosmos): targeting early August
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Two-click flow on mainnet: targeting mid August, following QA against the testnet build
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One-click migration via the Injective precompile: targeting late September, gated on Injective’s chain upgrade rather than our own development pace
These are working estimates, not commitments. Dates can move as QA and external dependencies play out, and we will keep updating them here each week.
When the two-click flow goes live on testnet, and again at mainnet, we will reach out directly to the teams that have expressed interest in testing the migration. If your team wants to be on that list, reply here or reach out on Telegram (@RoboMcGobo).
Hub Software: A Small Upgrade Is Shaping Up to Unblock Hydro on the Hub
A minor Hub software upgrade is taking shape to unblock Hydro’s deployment. It involves two contained CosmWasm changes: raising the maximum contract size cap, and allow-listing a narrow set of queries that Hydro’s contracts need, alongside a pending CosmWasm dependency update bundled into the same release.
The path follows the usual discipline: devnet first, then a governance proposal before anything reaches mainnet. A dedicated forum post with the full technical detail will go up as part of that process, so this note is a heads-up rather than the announcement. We will share the proposed timeline there once the devnet build is validated.
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 next community call: Register for the community calendar here
