Both Neutron and Stride are higher on the IBC transaction list than Cosmos. Yes, if ATOM had the IBC transactions of Neutron and Stride, it probably trade 2x higher (around $10), but again these aren’t Solana like gains. Solana is running a shitcoin casino very well and there is a lot of speculative capital in it betting that it will be the 3rd coin to be institutionalized (ie get futures product and ETF) after BTC and ETH. At some point these guys will dump and for the most part after that you have head-to-head competition between ETH and SOL for the big bucks in which SOL is favored because it is faster but ETH is more reliable. I don’t see any other monolithic chain being able to dislodge these “first mover” advantages.
The unique benefit of Cosmos tech is being able to create custom validators that make certain things better. That is why big apps like DYDX and AKT abandon ETH, its L2s and don’t pick Solana - because they can’t customize what validators do. Using Cosmos SDK they can do that. But ultimately to benefit from those apps you have to invest in the apps themselves - ATOM can’t benefit from that. These apps can’t use the Cosmos Hub validators in a ICS scenario.
Ultimately Cosmos ecosystem is a stock pickers market, not an index investment like ETH or SOL. I have always viewed ATOM more of an income investment than a growth opportunity and I perfectly ok with its inflation design but sometimes the Fed throws curveballs and if you don’t react, ATOM price goes down a lot and negates the income benefits.
I don’t think there is much that you can do to change these dynamics.
Many people have proposed before to make IBC transactions payable in ATOM by default and making ATOM the currency of the interchain (of IBC transactions). Most people investing in ATOM thought that a few years ago only to find out that this is not the case. ATOM can also require the ICS chains to pay for transactions in ATOM. At least the Atom Economic Zone to make its transactions in ATOM. I think there is quite a few changes that can be made to benefit ATOM. But even if they are made success might not come.
Polkadot is a chain that has shared security with DOT, all cross chain transactions are paid in DOT and yet DOT is in the same muddle as ATOM.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there are easy answers here. One thing folks need to realize is that it is not 2019 anymore, L1 thesis isn’t new kid on the block and VCs and big investors aren’t blindly throwing money at it in search of solution of the Ethereum’s high fee problem. It is 5 years later, all the technology approaches to lower smart contract fees have been tried out and the landscape is pretty clear. The Solana 10x after the FTX fiasco over the past year was probably the last obvious 10x in the L1 space. Sorry to be a party pooper but that’s my view right now. There is a ton of L1 infra out there now (Polkadot, Cardano, Algorand, Near, Aptos, Sui, Binance, Avalanche, Dfinity, Sei) and a lot of it is sitting unused. If you are a smart contract developer, you have 10 empty chains to pick from.