Hi everyone, I’m Alice. I’ve been in Cosmos since 2019, I’ve worked with a bunch of teams across the ecosystem over the years, and I just want to say something plainly for once instead of dressing it up. I think something’s broken here, and we’re all just quietly stepping around it.
Part of it is governance itself. The vote happens on-chain, permanent, transparent, no argument there. But everything that actually shapes that vote lives across the forum, Telegram, private DM;s, Reddit, Twitter, (I refuse to call it X) Discord, scattered everywhere, none of it built to last. Go back and try to understand why a proposal from a year or two ago actually passed, and half the time the reasoning behind it is just gone. The outcome is preserved forever. The thinking that got us there isn’t.
But honestly, the governance mechanics are only half of what’s been sitting with me lately. The other half is us. The community. What we’ve become versus what we used to be.
What it used to feel like…
Five, six years ago, proposals used to bring people out swinging. Threads ran for days, People argued, actually argued. It wasn’t clear or polite half the time, but it was alive. You could feel that people cared, sometimes too much, and there’s something honest about that. Governance was messy because the community was full of people who felt like they had skin in this, like the outcome actually mattered to them personally.
Now it’s quiet. A proposal goes up, the same handful of names weight in, it passes or fails, and that’s it. A lot of the people who used to be in those threads just aren’t here anymore. That’s not a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s unrelated to everything else going on right now either.
I don’t want to pretend that the wider picture is fine, and it’s just governance that’s sick. ATOM’s down something like 90% from its 2021 high, there’s been a real wave of teams and developers leaving or scaling back, and a multiple high level voice’s in this space outright stating that the ecosystem is “pretty much dead”. I’ve seen so many “Goodbye Cosmos” posts online over the last 2 years. people finally deciding to step away after holding onto hope for so many years.
There’s overhauls, and ongoing attempts to pivot towards something else, and that’s fine!. So it’s not that nobody is trying. People are trying. and those are all good things. But trying to pivot and ignoring history, while the human core of this place has hollowed out feels like rearranging furniture in a house that’s slowly emptying out.
The market’s gone up, down, and round and round more times that I can count at this point. That part is almost the least interesting thing to me anymore. Markets do that, they always have, they always will. What’s different this time isn’t the price chart, it’s how many people have just quietly stopped showing up in between the cycles.
As a wider thought, I think some of this is genuinely just life, Communities age. The people who show up loudest in the early days of something aren’t always the people who stick around for the boring middle part, and that’s true of every project, every scene, every community that’s ever existed, not just crypto, not just Cosmos. People move on, priorities change, life happens, and that’s not a tragedy on its own. I don’t want to pretend that part is unique to us or that it’s some kind of betrayal. It isn’t.
But I don’t think that fully explains what’s happened here either. Because it’s not just that people quietly drifted off the way people naturally do. It’s that the place they left behind got quieter in a way that feels less like maturity and more like exhaustion. Poking a dead horse, basically. There’s still a process. Things still technically happen. But nothing’s really responding anymore, and I think we’ve all just gotten used to that being normal, which might be the saddest part of it all.
So why am I actually writing all of this.. Well I want to be really clear about something, because I know how these posts sometimes get read. I’m not looking for funding, I’m not asking for a grant, I’m not trying to get any kind of monetary anything out of this. I don’t want ATOM. I don’t want a bounty, I’m not building a proposal off the back of this post. I just needed to say it out loud somewhere that isn’t a private DM, because I think if the real conversations keep happening in private and everything public stays this quiet, we’re going to keep mistaking silence for stability.
So this isn’t a pitch, and it isn’t a complaint dressed up as one either. It’s me, someone who’s actually been here since 2019, watched this place when it was loud and messy, and full of people who cared too much, looking at what is is now and just going: come on. We can see this happening. Fix the governance stuff, sure, archive the discussions, bring the debate back into the open, all of that matters. But underneath all of that, I think we need to actually wake the fuck up and note that the room is a lot emptier that it used to be, before we lose whatever’s left of the people who are still standing in it.
So tell me who you are. Tell me what this place looked like when you first showed up, and whether its the same place now, and what’s been sitting quietly in the back of your mind that you haven’t said out loud yet, because I want the thread to get messy, I want someone to disagree with me and mean it, the way people used to. Because the alternative is a network of networks where none of the networks actually talk anymore, or leave.., a chain that still runs and a vote that still passes with nobody left who remembers why any of it started, or what it was supposed to feel like when it worked. I’d rather have the noise back. I think we were always meant to be loud together, so let’s be loud again. 