Hypha Quarterly Report: 2025-Q3

Conversation Proposal updates
1

Hypha’s role on the Hub

Announced at Cosmoverse this year, Hypha will be taking on the role of Cosmos Labs’ implementation partner on the Hub through the end of 2025 and into 2026. This means that we will be taking on additional incident response, integration and deprecation, and dev maintenance work on the Hub, all under the direction of the Cosmos Labs team.

Context

Since the start of 2025, Hypha has held a mandate as the Hub’s testnet and mainnet operations team, ratified by [Proposal 985]( Mintscan ) with a budget of 650k from the community pool. Our mandate is to steward the Hub’s testnet, train validators, coordinate mainnet upgrades, provide ICS support for new and existing consumer chains, and work closely with the Cosmos Labs team (formerly Interchain Labs).

This report summarizes our work throughout 2025-Q3 and plans for the coming quarter, per our commitment to transparency reporting on work performed with community-disbursed funds.

You can give us feedback on our work via our form [here]( Feedback ).

:star: Highlights

Permissionless CosmWasm goes live on the Hub

  • Proposal 1007 passed on August 20, switching CosmWasm from governance-gated upload to permissionless upload

  • Provider testnet followed suit shortly afterwards

  • Still in-progress working on getting contract explorer support

  • A signalling proposal (1010) to integrate the tokenfactory module has also passed

Smart contract pixel game day on the testnet

  • Making use of permissionless CosmWasm on the testnet

  • Hypha wrote a contract and created a game where users could compete to change the colours on a pixel map

  • The pixel map looked like this at the end of the event.

Mainnet transaction emulation routine

  • A new tool, the chain mimicker, was built and deployed to generate baseline traffic in the testnet that mimics the messages going through the Hub. These transactions exercise the authz, staking, distribution, wasm, and IBC functionality of the testnet.

  • This tool will work with any Cosmos SDK chain and can be extended to support additional messages.

  • The repo for the chain mimicker can be found here.

:boxing_glove: Challenges

Delayed August TIP payouts

  • Due to operational delays, payouts for the August TIP period took place quite late (end of September)

  • This issue should not reoccur in monthly payouts, though there may be delays for giving newer validators time to complete KYC

Operational Report

Mainnet coordination

Testnet events

  • Sep 07: CosmWasm Pixel Battle

  • Aug 12: IBC demonstration - transfer ATOM, register ICA, transfer tokens with PFM

  • Jul 22: Gaia transactions - crafting and submitting transactions using the CLI

  • Jul 15: Gaia queries - fetching block data using the CLI

  • Jul 10: Provider upgrade to gaia v25.1.0

  • Jun 24: Gaia queries for x/liquid module - tokenize, transfer, redeem

Financial updates

Our cashflow report is very simple this year as we are billing a consistent amount each month and not processing any returns.

For transparency, we hadn’t linked our withdrawal tx for Jun 2025 as it hadn’t happened yet at the time we posted our last update. For Jun 2025, we billed 54,166.67 USDC withdrawn on Aug 3 (tx here).

  • Jul 2025: Billed 54,166.67 USDC, withdrawn on Aug 3 (tx here).

  • Aug 2025: Billed 54,166.67 USDC, no withdrawal yet.

  • Sep 2025: Billed 54,166.67 USDC, no withdrawal yet.

  • Remaining USDC: 160173.0436

Please note - this ‘remaining USDC’ balance is an accounting representation of what remains, not what is physically present in the wallet. Additionally, due to our ATOM-USDC conversion in the last quarter, this balance is not quite enough to add up to our budget, so there will be one smaller bill in our final quarter of work.

Plans for Next Quarter

Our plans for the coming quarter include all of our usual work funded by our proposal (release testing, scheduling and coordinating mainnet upgrades, managing the provider testnet, stewarding the Testnet Incentives Program).

While not within the scope of this proposal, we feel the community deserves a light update on our work plan in our new role as Cosmos Labs’ implementation partner on the Hub. We will be:

  • Developing incident response plans with Hypha as the first responder

  • Designing a tokenfactory implementation plan for community approval

  • Scoping the technical deprecation of Interchain Security

Feedback and Responses

So far we have received one piece of feedback!

Forms response chart. Question title: Hypha's testnet program is valuable in improving Hub mainnet operations (e.g., smooth upgrades, validator familiarity with new features, useful tooling).. Number of responses: 1 response.
Hypha's testnet program is valuable in improving Hub mainnet operations (e.g., smooth upgrades, validator familiarity with new features, useful tooling).1600×813 76.8 KB

Forms response chart. Question title: Hypha provides value to mainnet operations (both Hub and consumer chains) through their coordination and support work.. Number of responses: 1 response.
Hypha provides value to mainnet operations (both Hub and consumer chains) through their coordination and support work.1600×813 83 KB

What would you like to tell us about our testnet work, including the Testnet Incentives Program, validator education, upgrade smoke testing, and being a platform for development?

  • Best organised and implemented program in Cosmos. Extremely useful for validator education and testing out new features before Mainnet. We also found the performance testing valuable and insightful.

What would you like to tell us about our mainnet coordination and support work, such as Hub upgrades and supporting new and existing consumer chains?

  • Best organised upgrades in Cosmos, especially useful with the added intricacies of consumer chains.

In our final quarter of work on the Hub, we would greatly appreciate any additional feedback from the community. You can offer us feedback via our form here.

As a reminder, our mandate on the Cosmos Hub is to:

  1. Steward the Hub’s testnet as a platform for validator education, final runway for Hub upgrades, and stable development platform. The provider testnet’s purpose is to serve the Hub’s direct needs.

  2. Provide mainnet and Interchain Security coordination support for validators and consumer chains.

  3. Provide development support for the Hub team at Cosmos Labs.

2 Likes
2

Can you bring the community precisions about “ deprecation of ICS “ ?

TOP N will end ? Opt in End ?

What about Forge, and consumer chains ?

1 Like
3

Eventually, yes! But we are only in the first month of actively working with Cosmos Labs and we (Hypha) have signed on only as implementation partners so we are still collaborating with Cosmos Labs about what the exact road ahead looks like.

ICS deprecation has been a point of conversation already, especially with Neutron offboarding and Stride moving to a proof-of-authority model using Partial Set Security.

We no longer have any Top N chains, and there are remaining consumer chains who we will work with to offboard when the time comes. We have not yet begun reaching out to these teams or sharing detailed plans because we don’t have clarity on the process or timeline yet.

Forge is not part of the Gaia codebase so that’s not something my team would be responsible for formally deprecating it, but since it is a front-end built to look at Interchain Security data, I assume it will be retired as well.

1 Like
4

Thank you for the detailed Q3 2025 report.

It’s great to see the progress, particularly with permissionless CosmWasm going live on the Hub and the development of the “chain mimicker” tool. I appreciate the clear communication regarding the Mainnet upgrades and security events.

I’m also looking forward to the plans for incident response, the tokenfactory implementation, and the scoping of Interchain Security deprecation.

Keep up the excellent work.

1 Like